Part Two: Andrew Wakefield: The Worst Doctor Alive

a Southern gentleman. I don't know. I feel like you went from Southern farmer to uh, Southern lawyer in a white linen suit. Well, now that one was not my honor. There's no there's nothing classy about my background. H yeah. Now Anna Selina's back comics by Anna Comics artist Uh. Uh street fighter uh. President of the Anti Vaccination Society of America. Unfortunately, that is why you brought me on here, not because of my comics or Twitter hot takes, but

because I am the president of the anti vaxers. That was me to me and you're not. But we are talking about the anti vaccine movement still we are, and I feel weirdly conflicted about it so far because we spent an episode talking about how both sides had points and we're also racist. Yeah, I mean everybody's racist. In the nineties, you're not going to find a lot of not racist people. Even like the not racist people still use terms that are like, oh, guys, you are. Yeah.

It's like watching Blazing Saddles where it's like, oh my god, yeah, yeah, I could see like revolutionary for its time, but also like my old bosses were like, it's the best movie. That's your that's your homework. You need to go watch that movie. It's so funny. And I watched it and look, that movie is racist and sexist. And the first time

it was a huge step forward. I understand nobody and say you'll never like it was everything that's great on a scale when we talk about history, yes, for itst time it was, but watching it now, it's just like, this is not least. You go to a lot of abolitionists, like people who are like fighting to end slavery in the eighteen fifties, and they would be like, well, of course, you know, black people earned as intelligent as white people, but they shouldn't be slaves. And it's like, okay, well

you're racist, but you're not in favorite slavery. So I guess we're greating on a curve here. That's true. Yeah, it's it's just it's complicated. I can't wait for twenty years from now when people look over at my tweets, because you know, Twitter will be here in twenty years. Oh. Absolutely, this one all collapsed like the house of cards that people look at my tweets and be like, oh problematic. Yeah, I feel like that might be just bite owning pets

and stuff. You think, No, I wonder if that's the next frontier. Who knows. I know that future generalation generations will judge me for all of the meat that I yeah, no arguments there. I hope. I hope we get there. We will, I mean, because the planet will die, that's true. That's like with these vaccines. It's like people will get it, people will get it, but tens of thousands of people will die first. The human totally nightmarish. That's what convinces people.

That's what convinces people. I love. I guess one of my favorite kinds of stories is like terrible people who we're heroes. Still, Like there's this great story of like during the Japanese invasion. I think it was not Shanghai. Um,

it might have been Shanghai. Was the Japanese invasion of this one Chinese city where like a massacred tens of thousands of civilians, and like the guy who protected a huge number of them by like creating this international quarter in the city to like protect all of these civilians from being murdered by the Japanese was a Nazi Like this literal knots are you saving thousands of women and

children from like the Japanese murder? So why did he Well because he was just like everyone was a member of the and this was like before the Holocaust really got started. So he was like racist and anti Semitic, but he wasn't pro murder. He was just like a businessman who joined the Nazi party. But like once he saw people getting killed in the streets, was like, I don't want this happening. It's a it's a mess. Like

that is a mess. That's a mess. I I'm always interested in stories like that of like people who are objectively flawed bad people. You still did a good thing. Well. I think we are all objectively flawed bad people doing what we think is right or ignoring our moral compass altogether. And those people are not always the worst people. I ignore my moral compass all the time, all the time. And uh, I'm not the worst person. And that's that's what I always shoot for, is not the worst, not

the worst, My the worst person today. Note Roger Stone is still alive. Fantastic good. I'm doing nailing it. The bar is low boy. This has been a long and meandering introduction. We're talking about Andrew Wakefield today. Yes, any Wakefield? Okay? So uh. The current ongoing measles outbreak of two thousand, nineteen, centering around Portland, Oregon, is the largest such outbreak in

twenty years. Clark County, Washington, where the outbreak began, had a measles vaccination rate of just seventy eight percent, not high enough for her community to protect the immuno compromised. Clark County just happens to be a recognized hotspot of anti vaccine sentiment. In December two thousan fourteen, a trip to Disneyland led to a hundred and forty seven confirmed

cases of measles. A hundred and ten of those people lived in California, and half of that group had not taken the MMR vaccine, so this is not purely a coastal phenomenon. Over the last five years, the number of children who go unvaccinated each year, or in Texas each year, has doubled to more than fifty seven thousand. Of course it's Texas. Of course it's Texas. The direct cause here is the existence of non medical exemptions, essentially a descendant

of the old British exemptions for conscientious objectors. But the real true cause of these outbreaks of diseases that by all right, should be long dead by now is a single man. His name is Andrew Wakefield, who's his name should be more well known. I feel like Jenny McCarthy really gets the blame for this movement, and what she's doing is bad, But this guy's why. Oh yeah, bring

it on. Andrew was born in nineteen fifty seven. We don't know an awful lot about his early life, or at least I was not able to find an awful lot. His parents were both doctors, and his father was a neurologist, which is about the doctor is kind of doctor that exists? Um. Yeah. He enrolled in St. Mary's Hospital Medical School as a young adult, focusing on gastro Inturology. He seems to have

been popular throughout this period. He was the captain of his medical school's rugby team and generally looked to be on a winning path in life when he graduated. And I'm just going to say this, I played female rugby and frougby as it's known, and male rugby players can't be a little much they can, they get a little brilli, they can. It would have been a red flag for this guy. It's basically war without guns or paths or paths, and when women do it, it's pretty cool and feminist.

But women do it, they get fraddy. Yeah well yeah, well, are making a blanket statement. I hope male rugby players. There's only one sport that I'm going to attack blanket all of the players of on this podcast, and that's high ally. Yes. Yeah, well that's a correct take. Yeah yeah, funk that sport. Fuck you for doing it. Yes, strong stance. Now. For more than a decade, Andrew Wakefield seems to have

been a perfectly fine doctor and medical researcher. From nine to nineteen and nine, he worked at the University of Toronto as part of a team studying tissue rejection from transplanted intestines. From the early nineteen nineties. Back in the UK, he started doing research at the Royal Free College of London. In nineteen three, he published an article suggesting that the

measles virus might cause Crone's disease. This drew a lot of ice his wife, and two years later, when he published research suggesting that the measles vaccine might cause Crone's disease, even more people's started talking about this brash young doctor who was turning the system on his head. Now a lot of evidence suggests that there is a link between measles exposure and childhood and Crown's disease. There is, however, no evidence of a link between vaccination and Crown's disease.

At the time when he started the research and made sense to look into, made sense to look into. But did he have any bias pushing him toward. That's going to be a big focus of the episodes. So, and one thing I should point out is that if you know a lot of people with autism, kids with autism in particular, a lot of them have weird bowel issues,

gastrointestinal issues and stuff like that. It's very common. So this is something that like people and trying to explain for a while, and why why do these kids with autism also have all of these weird like gastrointestinal issues. So that's why he sort of gets into the study of autism as a gastroenturologist because there's some stuff there that that needs explaining. Okay, So it seems like maybe

Andrew Wakefield was starting from an honest place. It's not clear at what point that changed, but the evidence suggests that Andrew Wakefield instantly saw financial opportunity in this purported connection between the MEAs vaccine and Crown's disease. In March, Wakefield filed for a patent for a test that would detect Crown's disease or ulcerative colitis by finding measles virus

in the battel tissue product or fluids. Two years later, Andrew Wakefield drew up a business scheme to present to investors. In it, he suggested using his patented tests to create a company that would make enormous profits from running these tests. The anticipated annual income top seventy two million pounds per year.

The perspectives he put together trying to Interact investors noted in view of the unique services offered by the company and its technology, particularly for the molecular diagnostic the essays can command premium prices. It sounds like he's just a scammer. It sounds like he's just a scam artist already. You don't even so it's so scammy like there's like so many levels that a scam artist could be a scammer. And Andrew Wakefield is a scammer on twice as many

levels as that. But it's going to take some unpacking to get through. So during all this time, Wakefield was conducting a study at the Royal Free College. This study of tw children suggested that the MMR vaccine, which bundled measles, mumps, and rubella vaccinations together, could cause the measles virus to infect a child's intestines. Now, this study was an attempt to explain something that yeah parents with autistic children reported

for years. Wigfield's research, published in nine seemed to suggest that the MMR vaccine harmed not just the child's intestines, but the neurons and its brain. So this is the beginning of the idea that like, maybe this vaccine is what's causing the auticis and what year is this? This is when he publishes his research. Okay, so this is pretty recent, pretty recent, and again twelve kids, so not a huge study, not what you would want to make

sweeping claims about a vaccine. I feel like technically that would be rejected, right, that's the smallest sample. Flight Well, that is how you start, you know, you would be an anecdotal at that point. It seems like it would be anecdotal. It is almost It's one of those things where if if he had immediately gone from that to doing a two and fifty person study or something like that, that would be how a normal scientists have preceded. But

that was not what Wakefield did. Wakefield did not immediately start telling people to not vaccinate, like he wasn't starting from anti vaccine, but he did start by saying, like, because of this research, I found we should stop bundling all these vaccinations together, and right at that same time, eight months before releasing his paper, actually he patented a single measles vaccine, which is what he claimed after releasing his paper was the safest way to vaccinate your kids.

Separate all the vaccinations so when they released this study in nineteen ninety eight. Andrew Wakefield in the Royal Free Medical School released the paper via a twenty three minute long video news conference, which is not how scientific studies involving twelve people are usually. You wanted people to see his face. Wanted people to see his face. In this press conference. He made a very direct plea for people to start using the exact kind of single use vaccine

he just patented eight months before. Oh god, quote, this is Wakefield. There is fishent anxiety in my own mind for the long term safety of the polyvalent vaccine that is the MMR vaccination and combination that I think it should be suspended in favor of the single vaccines. Now. The journal he published in The Lancet is an old and extremely authoritative publication. They and his hospital, the Royal Free Hospital, knew about Wakefield's ambitions to profit off of

this work. They threw resources into helping him launch his study with the press conference, which you know, again is not the norm. They knew he was trying to raise money to start a company, and they knew he'd patented a form of medicine that he was advising everyone to take. So both institutions took steps to protect themselves. The Lancet published a critique of wakefield study and the same issue

in which it was released. This critique pointed out that the sample group was too small to draw big conclusions from and that it had not been randomly determined. The Lancet did not make any mention of this critical article in the press release, though. The Royal Free Hospital convened a panel of five doctors to present to follow up press conference, where their panel would all agree that people should keep using the MMR vaccine until more research had

been done. Now, that was the plan for the press conference, but it didn't work out that way. The press conference wound up turning into a ship show. I found a recollection of it from a journalist who attended. Quote the five of them the panel that the hospital had convened. We're sitting behind a table with Andrew Wakefield on the

extreme left in Ari Zuckerman on the right. The tension rose as the event progressed, and by the end Wakefield was coolly urging patients to give their children single vaccines at annual intervals, while Zuckerman was on his feet banging the lectern and frustration as he insisted that the MMR vaccine had been given to millions of children around the

world and was safe. So within a year of this press conference, Andrew Wakefield had become the director of two businesses, both Carmel and Unigenetics Ltd, who were registered in early nine Right after this press conference came out, Andrew Wakefield submitted a confidential report on behalf of Unigenetics to the British Legal Aid Board and secured eight hundred thousand dollars in public funding to perform his tests on children in

a public hospital. Ward Wakefield sought an additional two point one million pounds to get his venture off the ground. In a quote private and confidential prospectus that later wound up in the hands of a journalist for the British Medical Journal, Andrew Wakefield stated that he believed that within three years of launching his diagnostic testing business, it would be worth twenty eight million pounds. He's so transparent. If you're listening, I can see. I mean, it's just how

people get scammed. It's just yet another grifter or era of grifters. Now Wakefield still needed that investment money and one study of twelve kids no matter how publicized, was not going to draw the kind of funding that he needed, especially since other members of the medical community had started

loudly pointing out the flaws in Wakefield's research. In order to secure that extra cash, Andrew Wakefield and a pathologist he had hired for Unigenetics, prepared to present new research at a London meeting of the Pathological Society in March

of two thousand. According to the British Medical Journal quote, based on alleged gut biopsy samples from Walker Smith's patients tend with autism and three with Crohn's disease tested at a Dublin laboratory, it claimed a possible causal link and given a Wakefield presentation, promised a storm like the press conference two years before. So he's done more research, but he's not doing another study. He's just going straight to

press conference without actually publishing a peer of you'd study. Yeah, and did you say ten people? Ten thirteen total patients? This is not how you do research. This is not how you do research. And it's it's such bad science that I don't even have a good way to segue into this Dorito's plug. But I'm gonna I'm gonna that's a good Derito Dorito's if you're listening, sponsor this podcast now. And in deference to the fans who don't like the

sound of crunching Dorito's. Really it's like the anti vaccine pro vaccine argument in the eighteen hundreds, were like, there's two sides here. There's a lot of people who say more Dorito's crunching, and a lot of people who say less. I'm gonna lean on the side of not doing as much Dorito's crunching. But every now and then, you gotta right now and then I got, you know, fifteen minute fast for our fifteen seconds past forward. That's the thing. Yeah,

that will be the only crunch in this episode. But I just needed it. I needed to. I want to believe everyone who listens to podcast has a little love of a s mr. Oh yeah, I mean you would hope. Some people don't like the sound of eating, which is why I wolf found like a third of a bag of Derrisos like a fucking monster. Yeah, I was eating my cookies, so I was trying to be so sneaky about it. Sophie's eating dog treats right now. Yeah, I mean, while they're next to her bag of fritos. There's no

way to know which one she's eating, and she did reach. Yeah, that's what I thought. Now. Wakefield started talking with pharmaceutical companies right before this planned like press release um. One of them even flew him to Canada to talk. He was negotiating with Johnson and Johnson, Merk and Smith Klent Beach him. So it looked like he was about to get the funding. He wanted a couple of million dollars to start producing this single shot vaccine. Where was the

oversight of this guy? Why did he lose his license? That's coming up. Thankfully he did not get to carry out all of his plans. Another doctor, Mark Peppi's, would find to put a stop to wakefield scheme. Peppies had recently been made the head of medicine at the Royal Free College and he did not like Wakefield or his research.

Peppi's convinced the college to send Wakefield a letter finally admitting their concern about his involvement with these new companies he'd created in his financial interest in producing the single use measles vaccine quote. This concern arose originally because the company's business plan appears to depend on premature, scientifically unjustified publication of results which do not conform to the rigorous

academic and scientific standards that are generally expected. So first study, fine, it's okay to do if you're trying to prove something new and put out a study with a small sample size. But the fact that your second press release isn't even a study and involves one more person this seems shady to us. So the college did not immediately cut his funding or fire him. They offered him a continuation of his funding if he would conduct new research and test

his theories about the MMR vaccine. He was promised help with the study of a hundred and fifty children to see if his research for the lance that could be replicated with a larger group was what real scientists do. But mon, how did they not get it by this point? Well,

so what might have been wishful thinking? Um, some of it might have been legitimately being like, okay, well, maybe you know, there's clearly something going on between like bow disorders and autism, so maybe something's happening here it's worth looking into. So they offered to pay him to do a study with a hundred and fifty children uh and Wakefield initially agreed to conduct the study, but he never actually did because the nine lands that study had been

a total scam. None of this came out until two thousand eleven, when a journalist named Brian Deer published an investigation for the British Journal of Medicine. It was revealed for the first time that Andrew Wakefield had actually been running a second secret scam alongside his other more obvious scams.

Rather than being a legitimate study motivated by sheer interest in the truth, his Lancet paper had essentially been commissioned by a lawyer named Richard Barr, who represented a bunch of families who believed their kids had gotten sick through the MMR vaccine. Wakefield's research started as paid work for a lawyer trying to justify a lawsuit. He made something like four hundred fifty thou dollars for this work alone. None of this was known until Brian Deer's report came out.

All of Wakefield's patients had been recruited by anti MMR vaccine campaigners, and even then, Deer's research showed that Wakefield had strayed up lied about many of their symptoms. Being a journalist, Brian Deer actually took Wakefield's research to the parents of the kids in the study to like be like, is this what happened to your kid? Is this what happened to your kid? Is this what happened to your kid? And it turns out that he had essentially misrepresented everybody's symptoms.

Whoa so complete fabrica, complete fabrication. Not just a guy who came up with a study, saw that there might be a connection and they decided to try to profit on it, which is what it looked like at first, but a guy whose whole study was falsified from the beginning because a lawyer was paying him to find a connection. God damn it. Yeah, now we're going to get into just how that famous Lancet study, which by the way, is still to this day the single biggest scientific underpenning

of the anti vaccine movement. Do they know it's fake? Well, everyone does, but some people don't accept it. It's like, you know, Nathan Phillips and that Sandman kid confrontation on the in d C where we all have the same hour and forty five minute video of everything we read different and we all read it differently. This one is like it was fake. Truth is dead, Anna, truth is dead,

but you know it's not dead. Doritos, Derito's and the wonderful sponsors that helped keep this show afloat with products and services. We're back, Anna, You're eating a derrito, I am, But I'm trying to avoid chewing into the mic because I know some people don't like it. Some people don't like it. You know what nobody likes falsified medical studies. People need to collapsing vaccination rates in the Western world.

So Brian Deer put together He's got a great article for the British medic Coool Journal that goes into detail on all this, but he put together a little summary that just sort of walked through how bullshit the study us. So I'm going to read from that little bullet point summary. The Lancet paper was a case series of twelve child patients.

It reported a proposed new syndrome of intero colitis and regressive autism, and associated this with MMR as an apparent precipitating event, but in fact, three of nine children reported with regressive autism did not have autism diagnosed at all. Only one child clearly had regressive autism. Despite the paper claiming that all twelve children were previously normal, five had

documented pre existing developmental concerns. Some children were reported to have experienced first behavioral symptoms within days of MMR, but the records documented these as starting some months after vaccination. In nine cases, unremarkable colonic history O pathology reports noting no or minimal fluctuations and inflammatory cell populations were changed after a medical school research review to non specific colitis. The parents of eight children were reported as blaming MMR,

but eleven families made this allegation at the hospital. The exclusion of three allegations, all giving times to onset of problems in months, helped to create the appearance of a fourteen day temporal link. Patients recruited through anti MMR campaigners, and the study was commissioned and funded for planned litigation. So it was false. It was all lies. It was

just nonsense. He just he found some people who are willing to who are saying what he wanted the study to say, and when people reported something else, he just lied and said that they said the same thing as

the other people. I mean, that's really really bad, and I understand that doctors were reporting on it, but it's almost like we need a better measure to discredit someone who is a real doctor saying lies, yeah, and that that does happen in this So there was no way Andrew Wakefield could replicate his research on a larger group of patients under the watchful eye of critical experts because his research was a sham, a cheap cash grab from

the very beginning. Wakefield refused to carry out the follow up study, which the Royal Free College would have paid for, and tried to proceed on capitalizing on the controversy stirred up. In September two, he responded to the College quote, it is clear that academic freedom is essential and cannot be traded.

It is the unanimous decision of my collaborators and co workers that it is only appropriate that we define our research objectives, we enact the studies is appropriately reviewed and approved, and we decide as and when we deem the work suitable for submission for peer review. This is how he said, I'm not going to carry out another study trying to prove my research works. This is so depressing, though, because once something is out in the public eye, it's a thing,

and this took off like wildfire. So Wakefield's career as a legitimate doctor ends at this point. He's fired. In two thousand one. Dr Peppi's later claimed quote, we paid him to go away, giving him two years salary upfront and a statement that he was innocent of any misconduct. What it looked bad for them too. They had helped publicize a wildly fallacious study. Guys, come on. They also promised not to say anything about the fact that they

knew he was a fraud. Quote. And of course one of the conditions of him going away was that I wasn't supposed to say anything critical of him to anybody forever after. Dr Peppi's is clearly kind of piste bad policy. Bad policy. In the year since, other doctors have directed

plenty of ire towards Andrew Wakefield. Two thousand three paper published in the Archives of Pediatrics and Adolescent Medicine used more than a dozen epidemiological studies and concluded that there was no evidence supporting an association between autism and the MMR vaccine. Multiple other peer reviewed studies in the fifteen years since have said the same thing. In February of two ten, the editors of the lance that retracted Wakefield study.

They told The Guardian that quote, it was utterly clear, without any ambiguity at all, that the statements in the paper were utterly false. This prompted a review by the General Medical Council, which in May of two thousand ten stripped Andrew Wakefield of his medical license, among other things. Come on, the slowness of that is like, that's white privilege, man, Yeah, and doctor prov doctor, I think protecting their own kind. And more than that, I think it's then protecting themselves.

Just like they'd hoped that this would fade away and it didn't, and so they had to do something. No, you have to deal with this ship out front now, Anna, I bet you're thinking there's nothing else we could learn about how Andrew Wakefield conducted the study. That makes it shadier.

What there's more So, he already lied about what their autism was and what they were saying it was caused by, and when it started, lied about who he was working for when he started doing the fact that he was being paid by a lawyer to prove something, the fact that he patented a medicine specifically to try to sell it. After releasing this right he'd lied about all that, but

it gets shadier. Okay. Yeah, So that investigation that stripped him of his medical license found that, among other things, Andrew Wakefield had bribed children at his son's tenth birthday party to let him use their blood for research. Do we know how heed, Oh boy, we do. Yeah. Now there's actual video of him describing this. I found a report about that video in a New York Times article.

The video showed him at a conference in telling the audience about the time he lined up kids to give blood samples at the birthday party of one of his children. He needed a control group of children who did not have autism, and this was convenient. Two children fainted, he said, another threw up over his mother. For their service, they were rewarded with five pounds. People said to me, Andrew, you know you can't do this to people. Children won't

come back, he recounted. I said, you're wrong. Listen, we live in a free market economy. Next year they'll want ten pounds. Whoa First of all, that poor kid whose birthday it was like rough birthday, rough birthday. He got bullied. After that. They were all like, I don't want to go to your birthday. You guys want to come over to my house. No, your dad's gonna take our blood again. But what's even crazier is not only did he take their blood, they fainted and threw up, Like kids don't

like blood drawn at a birthday. I mean he was taking a sizeable amount for that to happen, I have to imagine, but also at a birthday party when they were like filled with cake and excited. And I don't know, Andrew Wakefield, We've all had blood drawn as kids. There's some nurses and doctors that are really good at it, that are good at like interfacing with the kid and making it comforting. And there's some doctors that's like, no, I'm just going to do this and it sucks. I'm

gonna guess he was one of the bad. He wasn't good at Everyone is complicit. This is my lesson from all of this. The people at that birthday party, but the adults besides him should have been like, I wonder what the conversations were you just like sitting at the side of the room. Is he taking my son's blood? Should probably have some scammy argument where he was like, I'm doing a test and to advance Medical science, DOBE. That is how he sounded. That was how he sounded,

and everyone was stupid. Gotten a lot of a lot of accent play out of these episodes now uh. The General Medical Council concluded that Wakefield had acted with quote callous disregard for the distress and pain the children would suffer, which is a good summary of his career. None of this, and none of Brian Deer's fantastic reporting, has been enough to kill rumors of a correlation between vaccination and autism.

By two thousand and eight, the British national vaccination rates against MMR went from above nine to below Every measle's outbreak we've had since can be traced to Andrew Wakefield's research, and the movement had helped reignite. In the years since all this broke, Andrew Wakefield has continued to be a shady con man. In two thousand four, before his license was taken away, he fled Britain for Austin, Texas, figuring that it would be an easier place to continue to

be a greasy disease grifter. If Alex Jones has taught us anything, he was probably wise to do that. The next New York Times article on Wakefield was titled The Crash and Burn of an Autism Guru. It's author, Susan Dominus, caught up with Wakefield about a year after he was stripped of his licen The picture he paints of him is of a bitter con man quote. For Wakefield, the

attacks had become a kind of affirmation. The more he must defend his research, the more important he seems to consider it, so important that powerful forces have conspired and aligned against him. He said he believes that they public health officials pharmaceutical companies pay bloggers to plant vicious comments about him on the web because it's always the same, he says, discredited doctor Andrew Wakefield. Discredited doctor Andrew Wakefield.

He also wouldn't be surprised if public health officials were inflating the number of measles mortalities, just as he thinks they inflate the risk of the flu to increase the uptake of that vaccine. Having been rejected by mainstream medicine, Wakefield, the son of wore regarded doctors in Britain, has apparently rejected the integrity of mainstream medicine. In return, I hope he dies of a disease. Yeah, I mean to say, come on a podcast now, where we can be a

little dark, where we can wish death on people. Fine to call out doctors for inflating fear around the flu while he literally created a crisis, created a fear to sell his measles vaccine. Yeah, what you know, it's the pot calling the kettle of vaccine denialist agitator. I'm deeply lost in the metaphor. I didn't know, but yeah, he sucks.

So that article that noted that Wakefield still enjoyed a healthy fan base and was able to pack two fifty paying customers into a church near Austin to hear Wakefield talk about his research for a subset of desperate parents, most of whom were struggling with children who suffer from severe complications due to autism. Andrew has become something of a cult leader. Here's the New York Times. Many complied

with lavish thanks. We stand by you, and thank you for the many sacrifices you have made for the cause. When he finally took the podium, the audience members, mostly parents of autistic children, stood and applauded wildly. Some of Wakefield's cult status is surely because of his person charisma, and he spoke with a great rhetorical flare. He took off his glasses and put them back on, like a

gifted actor maximizing a prop. What happens to me doesn't matter, he said at one point, what happens to these children does matter. Why do all conments down the same because it works like as you're describing him, I'm like, well that sounds like Trump. Yeah. Yeah, they're they're all more

alike than they are different. They would all get together at the same sort of parties where they would probably all bribe children for their blood, pretending they're not self interested when they're literally just conning scared people out of their money. Yeah, yea, yea yeah yeah. And for some reference, actual heroic people never talk like that because they're too

busy doing good things, saving the world and such. Since moving to America in two thousand and four, Wakefield has tried repeatedly to cash in on his hero status among the AMT vaccine crowd. In two thousand and thirteen, The Guardian caught up with him at a convention for the reality TV industry. He'd paid six dollars for a chance to pitch his idea for a new TV show to executives from Discovery, National Geographic and TLC. Now. The pilot for this new business venture was a TV show called

Autism Team. Oh No, not a great title. I've watched an excerpt from this uh, and I think it would be most accurately described as sickness porn. It includes a lot of long, lingering shots of suffering children. Received a lot of criticism from autism sufferers because it doesn't really

focus at all in the humanity of these people. It's just sort of seeing a kids suffer and then a doctor will come in and diagnose the kid with autism associated indoclitis, the syndrome Andrew Wakefield invented, and then yeah, it's it feels like resistance against him and his conning has to come a little from like people without autism and people like connected to autism being like, no, don't stop praying on this, Yeah, stop making a dollar off of something that is like, really, I have a pretty

white view because the kids I worked with UM were very low functioning for the most part. UM So these were kids who their parents had to live with the knowledge that, like number one, their kid was never going to live independently, was never going to be able to

work a job or hold like normal relationships. And I was going to have to go to a home when they died um and in some cases before because like these parents would know that when I get too old to sort of like sometimes these kids could be violent. They need to be physically restrained. When I got too old to deal with that, my son or my daughter is going to live in a home without me, And

that's horrifying and to have to deal with um. And so yeah, it just it infuriates me thinking about turning that into a reality TV show to talk about how great a doctor you are. Yeah, I mean it's really gross such a certainly in nineteen I would hope like public opinion would turn against a show like that, being like no, And it didn't get picked up because it was like, I like, the reason I'm not playing it for you is that it's really not it's boring too.

It wasn't not a good preview clip or whatever. But I am going to read a summary of an episode from the Guardian. John's mother, John is one of the suffering kids, says Kriggsman's diagnosis is the answer to everything, and Krigsman is the doctor that they had to bring in cause Andrew Wakefield is not a doctor anymore. John's father tells us the subsequent change in his son has

been absolutely dramatic. Finally, the short teaser wraps. The narrator says that groundbreaking work by the Autism team means that children can be treated effectively. So join us and follow their journey. So, yeah, Wakefield did not find a buyer for that totally awesome show, but he did wind up directing a feature film a little bit later. Yeah, Vaxed is the name of the documentary. Yeah, it built itself as quote an investigation into the CDC's destruction of a

study linking autism to the MMR vaccine. Was it, of course not. I'm shaking my head there. Uh, and yes, you'd better believe he showed up on Info Wars to promote it. In this clip, he starts, he's been on inf Wars a lot. By the way, Yeah, he's a frequent guest of Alex Jones's. Okay, now starting to make sense. These terrible people are all friends. I'd be one about Andrew Wakefield's party with Steven Seagal, like they all know

each other. Oh my gosh. Yeah. So in this clip, he starts by claiming to Alex Jones that he found a CDC whistle blower who was willing on record to say that he designed a study which proved a connection between autism and the MMR vaccine and then watched the CDC cover it up. That's the claim he's making an Info Wars is the claim it's being made in the documentary. So Wakefield presents this CDC whistle blower as being overwhelmed

by his conscience and needing to come clean. Alex declares, not a doctor Andrew Wakefield to be an American hero. I'm gonna play a little clip of Andrew Wakefield talking on inf Wars. Well, you're admirable because every time I have you in here, here at the cutting edge of working with family is trying to put the truth out you name it, lawsuits. You've just been proven vindicated in the Spade's a true trailblazer. I know you don't like that,

the true hero, Andrew Weggfield. You every wanna talk about yourself being vindicated. It's always we have a top whistle blower, the head of the program. You know, hired to cover it up, did all the studies. He's now gone public. The media won't cover it. You're just still worried about the millions of kids getting brain damaged. Alex. It's not about me. It's not about me at tool. I'm just a guy trying to do a job and trying to and being prevented. So I'm really just obstinate. But I'm

not going to go away. I'm not going to duck for this issue. It's far too important. It's going to be from the estimates in the movie one and two, children born in T two are going to have autism. That is absolutely unacceptable. So whatever the media say about me, whatever the politicians, sam I mean, it doesn't matter, because I don't matter. It isn't. What matters is the future of this country, and the future of this country is

its children. So I do want to hit a little bit on the conspiracy theorist vaccine people will often say that like my twenty thirty or ever, one out of every two children will have autism, to believe that it's

something being spread by these vaccines, that's nonsense. The number of people with autism has shot up massively in the last couple of decades because they didn't used to know it was a thing, and they used to think that, like all these different syndromes that we now know are different kind of expressions of autism were totally different illnesses

and stuff of sense. And the even bigger part of it is that it used to basically just be white kids who got diagnosed with autism, because you had to have some money to be able to go to a doctor for this, and if you were a black kid or a Hispanic kid it came from a poor area, they'd just be like, oh, you're just bad at learning, like yeah or yeah, and they wouldn't get to go

to the doctor over yeah, you're you're just different. And now that medicine is less racist, we're realizing that it's more common than we thought, and we're be getting better at recognizing and we like, now they recognize that it's a spectrum, and so all these people who would never have been diagnosed as having anything everything like, well, no, you're on some level of the spectrum. Right. Spectrum has totally changed the way. It's just the fact that we

didn't get this ship and it's not new. Autisms exist as long as there's been human beings we just didn't like it just used to be that like, oh this person, Wow, the way that their mind works is really different, which they didn't have, Like fucking tons of Greek philosophers and scientists probably had some kind of autism, Like yeah, and does he acknowledge spectrum? And uh, you know, I don't.

I don't know enough about what he says about autism because it's not an autism expert and gastro and urologist who lost his medical exactly. And it feels pretty fearmongry to say one and two people will have autism, as if it evokes like low functioning autism, which is not inherently bad. I feel like there's no there's this like it's fearmongering, and I don't think it helps people see the humanity and people with autism. It's it is that

like suffering porn. It is that suffering porn. And I do want to state, you know, I just talked about working with the really low functioning kids. I also want to like my jobs when I was teaching in special ed was to work with this kid who had pretty severe aspert or cinder, but was very smart and was like he was an expert. We would go on walks and I would try to get like trying to socialize

and getting used to like having conversations. And his thing was pumps, like like fountain pumps, And anytime we walked past like a pump in an apartment complex, he would explain how the whole thing was assembled underground, just looking at the top and he would he'd like would design

them for fun. And the president of a company that designed pumps for like Las Vegas and stuff like like the Bellagio flew out to Dallas to like meet with this kid and like talking them and be like, when you graduate, send us a resume because like you're like the it's it's I don't know, like the idea, like both the making it out to be this horrible, doomed thing um and the suffering porn. Like it's all really

gross to me. It oversimplifies something that's very complicated. Absolutely, yeah, yeah, but that's just the tip of how infuriating that clip. What, Yeah, it's really bad. I I I'm glad. I hadn't even read that he'd been on info Wars. I just thought, Oh, he's in Austin. I bet he's been on aug What a good assumption. Oh, Alex Jones loves that he is a British accent. Probably sounds so legitimate anytime he can get a British person on that. Oh my god, you

better believe it. I love when he says it's not about me, it's not about me. It's it's not about me. I can't I'm not going to know that was doing his accent, but like, no, no, you scamp people. Okay, you know what it's time for and we're back. My god, those ads. I you know what I love about ads is the way it makes me aware of the products and services that I can look into purchasing for myself and my loved ones. Oh yeah, that's what I like about them. Not to pushy, just just right, just just

putting information out there. Now. Wakefield's documentary, you know, in that in that clip on info Wars, he claims that he's got this interview with this guy from the CDC, Dr Thompson, and the documentary basically claims that this guy the research proved that there was a connection between MMR and autism, and the CDC covered it up, and this guy's blowing the whistle on it. That's not what happened.

Dr William Thompson was in fact critical of a single two thousand and four study that did fail to find a link between the MMR vaccine and autism. He had issues with the way the study was conducted that he believed needed to be fixed, but he never requested that his name be removed from the paper, which would have been the first step of scientist who wanted to disavow

a piece of research would take. Wakefield's documentary includes interviews with Dr Thompson that have been carefully edited to give the impression that he is alleging to cover up rather than just angry about several very specific issues with the study. I'll put a link on our website behind the Bastard's dot com to an article that breaks down exactly what Wakefield did. But the short version is that he just chopped up a long, complex interview in order to put

lies in someone else's mouth. Actual public published transcript up the full interview painted very different picture. I checked out the website for VACT because I wanted to get an idea for how Andrew Wakefield presents himself to a sympathetic audience. But I found was pretty cringe worthy. Here's an exerpt from a section of the website called who is Andrew Wakefield? If you heard Andrew Wakefield's name, and you probably have,

you've heard two tales. You've heard that Dr Wakefield is a charlatan, an unethical researcher, and a huckster who was erased from the British Medical Registry in whose nine article on autism and gastro intestinal disease was retracted by a leading medical journal. You've also heard a very different story that Dr Wakefield is a brilliant and courageous scientist, a compassionate physician, beloved by his patients, and a champion for

families with autism and vaccine injury. What's the truth? Anyone who writes that about themselves is not courageous and brilliant. And speaking of the last episode you were on, sounds more than a little bit like Keith Renieries biography of himself. I don't understand why I get how scam artists work. I get out you listen to like Mumbo Jumbo and it's in a soothing voice, and you're like, well, maybe, but once they start bragging about themselves and how great

they are that's like the alarm sounds for me. No, especially like just as a journalist, whenever somebody starts bragging about themselves in that way, you kind of like, no, Okay, I probably shouldn't be listening to anything you have to say. You're probably a connorst trying to sell something. Yeah, well that's not how it works though, So yeah, well, okay. The truth is that thanks in large Part two no longer a Dr Andrew Wakefield, vaccination rates have fallen in

numerous Western countries. It took twenty years for rates in Great Britain to return to their pre Wakefield levels. Time Magazine claims that quote, by the end the UK families had experienced more than twelve tho cases of measles and hundreds of hospitalizations, many with serious complications, and at least three deaths. That's some careful wording, because he's saying vaccinations are falling. Vaccination rates fell and then there were disease outbreaks.

But like he's taking credit for a vaccination rates. This is Time Magazine immediately after like vaccination rate, he was bragging about making the vaccination rates. No, he thinks they're lying about how many measles cases there are because all of the evidence suggests that, oh, right after you published the study, people started getting vaccinated less, and then there were multiple daily measles outbreaks. Maybe there was two are connected,

Maybe you caused them. Now it's probably impossible to put together an accurate account of the number of deaths and hospitalizations due to Andrew Wakefield and two thousand ten, there was a whooping cough outbreak in California, the worst in fifty years. It was spread by a kid whose parents

had non medical exemptions for school vaccination requirements. Later research showed that most whooping cough cases occurred in clusters of unvaccinated children, causing nine thousand one infections and ten deaths.

Two eighteen study published by the National Institute of Health drew a direct line between Wakefield's research and a worldwide epidemic, saying that as a result of the movement he ignited quote ultiple breakouts of measles have occurred throughout different parts of the Western world, infecting dozens of the patients and

even causing deaths. In the UK and nineteen fifty six people contracted measles in two thousand six, this number increased to four hundred and forty nine in the first five months of the year, with the first death since nineteen ninety two and two thousand eight, measles was declared endemic in the UK for the first time in fourteen years, and Ireland an outbreak occurred in two thousand and fifteen

hundred cases and three deaths were reported. The outbreak was reported to have occurred as a direct result of a drop in vaccination rates following the MMR controversy. In France, more than twenty two thousand cases of measles were reported from two thousand eight to two thousand and eleven. The United States has not been an exception, with outbreaks occurring most recently in two thousand eight, two thousand eleven, and two thousand thirteen. As I write this, several dozen people

have been hospitalized with measles in the Pacific Northwest. More are likely to have fallen sick. By the time you hear this episode, every one of those people can thank Dr Andrew Wakefield for what they're about to endure and only hopefully survive. Wow, that's my episode on Andrew Wakefield. He's so bad, He's real bad. It's so crazy that that one study did so much damage It is kind of like, you know, people always talk about like you could change the world. One person can change the world.

They can't. They sure can't. They can't. That's not always a good thing. Yeah. Yeah, wow, that's why I'm always really like cag about using language like that around kids, like shoot for the Stars, you could do anything. It's like, well, you know that's true in good cases, but like Hitler believed that too. Yeah. Yeah, he was just a poor kid who wanted to achieve things. Yeah, ambition on its

own is not good. Maybe don't encourage ambition. Maybe just encourage people to be happy, yeah, or to do things for other people. Yeah, the ambition to because it's complicated because like a lot of these vacs, like the Jonah Salk, the polio vaccine guy was a guy who just grew up seeing everybody diapolio and was like, fuck polio. I'm gonna I'm gonna fuck this disease up. So that's a

good ambition. Yeah. So I guess I wonder what's our defense against this stuff, because it's like Alex Jones, some of his stuff is like whatever, people don't actually believe in gay frogs words video where he dresses like a frog and hops around. That sounds delightful, But this is so weirdly mainstream, is like you were saying, like people on the left and the right at a certain point

believe it. Yeah, and I uh, I don't know what to tell you, Like I think that the only I honestly think that, Like if we're drawing a connection all the major problems of our current era, like you know, anti vac like vaccine denial, the apologist for people like Buthar al Assad who think that he's a socialist hero who's been maligned by the media, like the rise of

Nazism in the Western world. I think this all has the same connection, which is that like our our schools are shitty and like people aren't taught critical thinking and taught how to like you wait and know when someone's lying to them and like it all it's the same reason why cut Co like got so many young people to like go out to try to trick them into believing they had a job when they were just like

joining an MLM to sell shitty knives. Like yeah, we just need to be better at teaching people to recognize when they're being scammed, better at critical thinking. We need a vaccine for scams. And that's what that's what an education should be like. People should there should be classes in every school about like here, I don't know if someone's trying to scam you, here's how to here's how

to recognize grifters. These are the words they use. It sounds like the vaccine against scamming could be this podcast. Sounds like the vaccine against scamming could be this podcast. So play this podcast to your children, play it to strange children on the street, abduct children who live near you and force them to listen to it, and then take their blood, and then take their blood, take any

kids blood you want, because that's fine. Uh, this is Sophie's even it might get us in some legal trouble, all right. If you abduct a child, tell them Joe Rogan's podcast told you to do it. Yes, yes, that's perfect. Laime it on Rogan. And if you take their blood, double down, double down on Joe Rogan. Yeah, yeah, I feel like we're safe now, all right? By a T shirt public behind the bastards, Uh, you can use the T shirts to bind the arms of a child in

order to make them listen to the show. Oh boy, I'm in some an you want to plug some stuff. Yeah, you can find me on Instagram bad comics with an x by on. I make web comics about anxiety and depression and stuff, and that's also my handle on Twitter. Hit me up if you have thoughts about anything. I feel like I said some things on this podcast that we're blanket statements, and I am afraid that I will be fact checked. All blanket statements are accurate. Um, I'm

Robert Evans. Uh. You can find me on Twitter at I right. Okay. You can find this podcast on the inner webs at behind the Bastards dot com. You can find us on Instagram and Twitter at at bastards pod. Uh. Anna, we have one more episode to get through about an even guy, just another terrible doctor. Uh. It's gonna be a fun It'll be a short one, but you can all get to listen to that. Tomorrow we're gonna be

talking about Dr Bob Sears. Strap in boys and girls and people who don't identify as either gender and whoever. I don't I don't care, Like, do you just strap in? Yeah? Anyone can strap in. Anyone can strap in, especially if you've abducted a child. All right at the end of the episode,