MMR: OH DEER OH DEER

From: john (nospamoridiots_at_vaccine.com)
Date: 11/27/04 

Date: Sat, 27 Nov 2004 10:02:21 +0000 (UTC)

MMR: OH DEER OH DEER

Private Eye 26 Nov, 2004

THE makers of Channel 4's MMR: What They Never Told You in the Dispatches
strand should perhaps have thought twice before engaging journalist Brian
Deer to present a hatchet job on Dr Andrew Wakefield.

According to Deer, Dr Wakefield, the gastro-enterologist at the centre of
the MMR controversy, was little more than a snake oil salesman who led a
Royal Free medical school conspiracy to discredit the MMR triple vaccine and
make money from a vaccine it was developing itself.

Deer also claimed that when Wakefield voiced his concerns about the triple
jab, he had already tested for and failed to find measles in the autistic
and gut-diseased children he was treating; and moreover that those children
were abused in the name of his flawed research. There were plenty of other
allegations thrown into the mix but those are the main ones and certainly
the ones over which m'learned friends are currently rubbing their hands.

What Deer failed to point out is that until Wakefield voiced concerns over
MMR, he was a high flyer at the forefront of advances in understanding and
treating inflammatory bowel diseases. Yet Deer made no mention of
Wakefield's previous career or credentials; no mention of the science which
preceded the controversial 1998 paper which Deer claims started the MMR
scare; no mention of the research since (including that which has found
measles virus in the guts, spinal fluid and in one case the brain of an
autistic child). Nor was there any acknowledgment that the controversial
paper in question - only partially retracted last year - did indeed identify
a new disease process in these children's guts.

Deer's personalised documentary follows his allegations earlier this year in
the Sunday Times that when Dr Wakefield's paper was published, he had not
yet declared that he had been become an expert adviser to the children in
the UK litigation against the vaccine manufacturers. Although the issue of a
conflict of interest was actually raised in the Lancet six years ago, its
resurfacing in the Sunday Times has led to Dr Wakefield and two others from
the Royal Free research team now defending the charges in an unprecedented
hearing before the general medical council.

Deer's most recent demonisation of Wakefield and his theory was based on the
fact that nine months before publication of the 1998 paper, Wakefield and
the Royal Free sought to patent a treatment, called Transfer Factor, with a
spin-off vaccine and that this had been kept secret until now. The team at
the Royal Free were indeed at one stage intending to carry out a treatment
trial of a method of boosting immune response to measles virus using cell
lymphokines, part of the body's defence mechanism.

In the event this was never pursued by the Royal Free: there was no trial,
no treatment, and no vaccine. A patent was, however, granted in 1999. But
contrary to Deer's suggestion, Wakefield did declare it. The Eye has seen a
letter he wrote to the Lancet in 1999 informing the editor of the patent.
The Lancet decided not to mention it. The patent is also mentioned on at
least three subsequent research papers.

Wakefield voiced general concerns about the combined measles vaccines as
early as 1992, many years before the Royal Free patent application was filed
in 1997.

Perhaps the most disingenuous part of Deer's programme was that viewers may
have been left with the impression that not only was there no reason to
believe measles virus present in the Royal Free children's gut at the time
the paper was published, but that that is still the case today.

This is untrue on both counts - unless one of the world's leading
pathologists, Professor John O'Leary, chair of pathology at Trinity College,
Dublin, is seriously in error. Before publication of the 1998 paper,
researchers had already found measles virus protein in the gut tissue,
although not the virus itself. Further, at the site of the inflammation in
the gut there were clusters of cells «j that are typically seen in chronic
virus infection.

On the programme, both of Wakefield's former collaborators told Brian Deer
that if the measles virus was there they would have found it. But at the
time they shared Wakefield's concerns that the method and equipment (now
obsolete) used to detect the virus DNA was not sensitive enough. They put
their names to the negative finding research paper which Wakefield himself
insisted was published even though it went against his own hypothesis. It
concluded: "These results show that either measles virus DNA was not present
in the samples or was present below the sensitivity limits known to have
been achieved."

And so it proved to be. Shortly afterwards the samples were sent to Prof
O'Leary. Using state-of-the-art viral detection methods and equipment, he
found measles virus in the guts of children with autism. It has since been
found in the spinal fluid and brain. That work does not prove a link with
autism, but it should at least raise alarms.

The response has always been that the O'Leary tests have not been
replicated; but then other methods have always been used. Only now in the US
are researchers seeking to properly replicate the work in what both sides of
the debate are looking to as a definitive study. Prof Ian Lipkin, of
Columbia University, NY, who is leading the research, is internationally
renowned for his work in immunology and viruses.

Deer's allegation that Wakefield "abused" the Royal Free children by
subjecting them to invasive procedures might have carried more weight if it
had come from parents. But they consented to their children's treatments as
part of the ongoing clinical investigation. Those children were being
treated for appalling and painful gut disease - many had impacted bowels or
persistent diarrhoea. Doctors at the Royal Free were diagnosing and
treating, and in many cases alleviating, symptoms. They were not merely
using the children for research.

Deer focused exclusively on Wakefield's past and did not consider any of the
other relevant science. For example, in the week of his Channel 4 attack, a
team from the John Hopkins University School of Medicine in Baltimore,
looking at brain tissue of autistic patients, found chronic inflammation
triggered by an abnormal immune response. Although it was a small study of
11 autistic people who had died, they also found similarly high levels of
inflammatory cytokines (messengers that run between cells) in the spinal
fluid from six autistic children. The researchers found an immune reaction
similar to that found in dementia associated with HIV virus.

These sort of studies suggest Dr Wakefield is not the lone lunatic that Deer
would have us believe. Despite allegations to the contrary, Private Eye is
not anti-vaccine and has never said Dr Wakefield hypothesis is right. We
have merely maintained that his work deserves proper investigation and that
single jabs, used long before MMR, should be made available as a
precautionary measure to keep up herd immunity. That proper investigation is
finally taking place in the US; but until Prof Lipkin and others report, the
jury is still out.

Interestingly, in Lancet editor Richard Norton's book on the MMR
controversy, he disclosed how "one of the protagonists in the affair had
said openly and publicly that his intention was to 'rub out' Wakefield". The
"protagonist" in question? Step forward Brian Deer.

Relevant Pages

  • Re: OH DEER OH DEER
    ... > MMR: OH DEER OH DEER ... > THE makers of Channel 4's MMR: What They Never Told You in the Dispatches ... > Deer to present a hatchet job on Dr Andrew Wakefield. ... > trial of a method of boosting immune response to measles virus using cell ...
    (sci.med)
  • Re: The LYING Wakefield and Thimerosal!
    ... Andrew Wakefield, a Canadian trained surgeon, was employed as a reader ... that the cause of autism was possibly MMR ... MMR vaccine and the children concerned were children of some of those ... He had also patented a "safer" single measles virus vaccine ...
    (misc.health.alternative)
  • Re: The LYING Wakefield and Thimerosal!
    ... Andrew Wakefield, a Canadian trained surgeon, was employed as a reader ... presence of measles virus in a selected sample of twelve vaccinated ... and individual vaccines rather than MMR should be given. ... MMR vaccine and the children concerned were children of some of those ...
    (misc.health.alternative)
  • Re: MMR: OH DEER OH DEER
    ... >MMR: OH DEER OH DEER ... >found measles virus in the guts of children with autism. ... Is measles virus found in the gut and spinal fluid of non-autistic ...
    (sci.med)