FITZPATRICK Michael
Just as the profile of antivaxxers has increased around the world in response to reports of the development of an anticovid vaccine, Andrew Wakefield, who launched the Mmr-autism scare in the Nineties, has returned to public attention with the publication of Brian Deer’s book The Doctor Who Fooled the World.
Deer, the investigative journalist who first exposed the fraudulent research at the heart of Wakefield’s research, came late to this controversy. In his comprehensive account, he explains that at the time of Wakefield’s now notorious 1998 Lancet paper, he was investigating an earlier vaccine scare – the Seventies claim that the whooping cough jab caused brain damage.
Displaying the forensic rigour he later brought to the MMR story, Deer revealed that, in a number of cases brought to courts in compensation claims, parents had misrepresented key aspects of their children’s stories. The judicial inquiry culminated in the denial of all claims on the grounds that the campaigning doctors asserting vaccine injury could not establish a scientific basis.
As the parent of a child with autism who had been following the anti-mmr campaign in the midnineties with mounting scepticism, I remember cutting out Deer’s feature from The Sunday Times Magazine and keeping it for future reference.
In the course of the General Medical Council trial of Wakefield, the case records of the 12 children included in Wakefield’s Lancet series were disclosed. Under Deer’s scrutiny, these documents revealed crucial discrepancies in Wakefield’s study, amounting, in the subsequent judgment of the editor of the BMJ, to “an elaborate fraud” as “the discrepancies all led in one direction”. The records also revealed that, as in the whooping cough case, the accounts of several parents – including those of prominent Wakefield supporters – were inconsistent and misleading.
Deer suggests an epitaph for Wakefield: “A doctor without patients, he brought us fear, guilt and disease”. He left a trail of “dented reputations and damaged careers” and revealed “the grim accountancy of the human condition”.
Striking a balance
The Unite for Freedom rally protesting against Covid-19 pandemic restrictions drew 10,000 people to Trafalgar Square last bank holiday weekend. Placards proclaimed the pandemic a “scam” and a “hoax” and speakers denounced the Government and media for promoting coercive vaccination programmes and authoritarian incursions on civil liberties.
Though these protesters are widely dismissed as an extremist fringe, a conspiratorial outlook can also be found more widely among lockdown sceptics. Such critics insist that both the scale and severity of Covid-19 are exaggerated, making comparisons with the flu pandemics of 1957 and 1968 and with seasonal flu epidemics. They argue that politicians are scaremongering and taking advantage of Covid-19 to advance repressive policies.
Some have contrasted official policy towards Covid-19 with accounts of the restrained response to the Woodstock festival in upstate New York in 1969 at the time of the flu pandemic. As it happens, the festival took place months after the flu outbreak. I’ve seen the film, and though there was little social distancing in evidence, I didn’t spot any “defy the pandemic” headbands.
The global death toll of Covid-19 is already on a scale comparable with earlier flu pandemics. Death rates in major cities worldwide are around 10 times greater than those resulting from recent outbreaks of flu.
Sceptics argue that the oppressive impact of the Covid-19 pandemic is a result of a contemporary culture of risk aversion and vulnerability. But Covid-19 dominates our lives not because it is a social construction, but a highly transmissible disease that causes a significant level of death and disability.
Threats to privacy and liberties are serious concerns. But quarantine restrictions inevitably imply coercion, so it is necessary to clarify what measures are justified and what are not. The risks of collateral damage from the lockdown are indeed considerable. But it is incumbent upon critics to indicate alternative measures to protect citizens from the effects of this virus and to avoid “scaremongering about scaremongering” – by exaggerating the adverse consequences of the lockdown.
Discrepancies in Wakefield’s MMR study amounted to ‘an elaborate fraud’