particles were causing the problem in these children, and I was surprised that O’Leary withdrew
his assertions.
I then called O’Leary on the phone and asked him why he was doing this. There was a very long
pregnant pause. He then said that it had taken him many years to get to the place where he was
in the scientific community, and after another pause, he said he had four small children at
home. I had small children at home myself at the time and I understood what he was saying. If
he didn’t do it, he was going to be fired. He was going to be ruined.
British officials were not satisfied with just getting the journal to withdraw the article and
getting Dr. O’Leary to withdraw his claims. They then decided to begin proceedings to take away
Dr. Wakefield’s medical license and one of his lead co-authors. Wakefield by this time had
moved to the United States and to defend himself in court would have cost him hundreds of
thousands of dollars so he let them take his license away. But his lead co-author Dr. Simon
Murch was still practicing medicine in England and decided to defend himself in court, and the
government lost and they were not able to take his license away. If Wakefield had the money to
defend himself, he would never have lost his license. The court documents clearly show that
Wakefield and his co-authors had not done anything unethical or inappropriate and their work
was possibly valid.
But that was all big Pharma needed. They could go around, saying it and feeding it to the media
that the research had been withdrawn and Wakefield lost his license. But I looked at the
micrographs and it sure looked to me like there was vaccine strain measles particles infecting
the bowels of these kids.
The CDC was charged with the responsibility of repeating to Wakefield research and showing
that the measles vaccine was safe, but they never did it the right way. They decided to de
epidemiologic studies instead of a clinical study. Again, as in the mercury study there were
claims made that indicators that there was a problem with MMR were there. CDC was accused
again of changing the protocol and data analysis until the association went away.
Ironically, I talked with Wakefield after all of this was over. He agreed with me that we have to
vaccinate our kids for measles. He thought the solution was to give the vaccine at a slightly
older age, like they do in many European countries. Or we might be able to do research and
figure out why some kids have a bad reaction to the MMR. Clearly, big Pharma didn’t want me
in the CDC investigating any of this.
There are a lot of additional ironies in all of this. I believe the CDC is mostly made up of really
good people who really care about public health for our nation, though its credibility has been
seriously tarnished because of the failures in the way the COVID-19 crisis was managed. 40% of
Democrats and 80% of Republicans, don’t trust the CDC. Many don’t trust Pharma as well. I
really wanted to try to make the CDC a better more respected agency and killing my nomination
may have the opposite effect. Distrust may worsen.
Source: Elections - nytimes.com
