What are you up to today? Just procrastinating as usual, you know, all the 101 things that one puts on oneself and doesn't do. Look, to be honest, Berger is getting a little bit self-conscious about all these questions and talking about himself. And he keeps asking me, when are we going to interview some other people and not just have me interrogating him. But see, I have the benefit of knowing Berger pretty well after a couple of years.
I understand his values and I've come to understand some of his background and what it is that's made him a fearless humanitarian advocate and someone who I think is the exemplar actually of a pretty good doctor. And I admire those people, I admire him, and I want to see those values and those ideas widely promulgated.
And I think if we have a good basis of understanding where it is he comes from, what it is that he stands for, you'll appreciate why I think he's a special voice and ironically those are the reasons why he's been attacked. He's been attacked quite ferociously by some critics and I think that that says more about them than it does about him. But it also says something about his discomfort with compromise. And it's really important to understand what feeds into that.
I assure you all we'll move on to using the knowledge that he has, the values that he has and the mind that he has to also talk to other people and find out a lot more stuff that should be helpful for all of us if we're interested in being humanitarian advocates, particularly in healthcare. Where are you from? So I'm the child of Jewish refugees. My mother left Berlin in 1938 at the age of 14. My father was born of Polish Jewish parents in London. He was the last of their children.
He was the only one to be born in Britain. They fled the pogroms in 1905, actually came to England, didn't like it, went to Belgium. Then fled Belgium in 1914 when the Germans invaded that time and then came to England. So he was very much of refugee stock. My mother was the daughter of a doctor. He was a celebrity. He was actually a celebrity doctor in Berlin. He was a doctor to the Ufa film studios. So he was your grandfather. Your grandfather was a celebrity doctor in Berlin.
He was in the 1930s. He was a medical orderly in the First World War in the German Army on the Russian front. And on the Western Front, he won the Iron Cross for saving wounded in No Man's Land. And after the end of the First World War, he went to medical school, qualified as a doctor, became a he was a GP and gynaecologist.
He was the doctor to the Ufa film studios, like I said, which was, you know, all the Marlena Dietrich, Lottie Lentz, Kurt Juergens, all the all the kind of really big stars in the 1920s. He and his wife used to have lots of parties. He was also a member of the Institute of Sexology in Berlin, which was which was and he wrote a very a kind of a history of sexuality was extremely graphic. It was called it was called Sex and Sin. And it was a history of human sexuality through the ages.
Extremely graphic. Is this available? It's still in existence. It was on the back. It was on the burned list. The Nazis burned it. And he was he was also he was also a crime writer had a crime serial in the Berlin Evening Paper and wrote a number a couple of crime novels, detective novels, one of which is actually in your in your in your famous book case. So these. Yes, I do. Actually, I have gotten. I'm sure - I'll show you - not that I don't believe you.
The. Yeah. And just one sexology connection. Yeah, yeah. Well, I've got in all places. So this is this is sex and sin. And it's a it couldn't have been published in Britain until pretty much after the Lady Chatterley trial in 1961 because it is so graphic. So, yeah, so he was he was a very interesting character, very larger than life. He got on with everybody. He was very non-ideological. He was a bit of a hedonist. He loved the Bohemian Berlin of the 20s and the early 30s.
Right. And one of his friends was actually a guy called von Heldorf, who was the police chief in Berlin. And von Heldorf said to him Listen Heinz, you can stay. But when I tell you, you have to go you have to go. So one day my mother, and it's a it's a bit of a chilling story my mother. He was divorced, my mother lived with her grandparents, she was 12 in 1936. He used to go every day to his GP surgery and she would sit in the waiting room and when he finished surgery in the afternoon.
He would take her downstairs to the cafe Krantzler, which was the society Cafe of the day it still exists. It's on the corner of the court first and down and the yachins tala stress in Germany. They would go for an ice cream. And she's sitting there one day 1936 waiting for him to finish phone rings receptionist takes the phone goes and gets him out of his surgery. He's wearing his white coat that they did at the time. He comes out, takes the call.
Looks serious puts the call down puts the phone down and says, I'm afraid I won't see you for a long while in her and fun held off had sent a car to take him to the airport that hour to get on a flight to London. So the, so the police chief of Berlin. Yes, sending a car to pick up your grandfather. Yes, out of the country. Yes, because he could see that he was about to be arrested. But the daughter was not. Yes. So, so they, so she stayed with her grandparents, his parents.
And they, they thought at the time that the Nazis wouldn't do anything to the children and the old people. So, to be a, which turned out to be incorrect. So they actually stayed another two years. By this time, Heinz had, he was only allowed to stay in Britain for two weeks, because they want any more German Jewish doctors the BMA didn't want. So he went to South America.
Hang on, he, he, you're saying that at the time, the British Medical Association was resistant to two lots more German Jewish doctors turning up had this had been a real phenomenon for them in, yes, in Britain. They didn't want any more, and they were very explicit about it.
There's an interesting article actually published in the BMJ in 2014, at which time, I was a director of the BMJ which is kind of ironic, talking about the BMA failure to challenge what was happening in Nazi Germany in the 1930s, despite acknowledging that it was happening.
And that was quite interesting. But anyway, he went, he went to, and I just still drill down on that for a second so as a director of the BMJ that's published article in 2014 did you have any involvement, editorially, no, no I didn't. No coincidentally, yes, director, a, a grandson of a former German Jewish doctor who had sought refuge in Britain, that's correct, and was rejected and was rejected, presumably he would have rather stayed close to his family and then gone. Where did he go to.
So he went, he wanted to stay in Britain he couldn't see couldn't get a visa. So he went to Argentina and Brazil, and he lived in Argentina and Brazil for about two years. And then he realized he was making a living it wasn't great. By this time his ex wife was living in Santiago, in Chile. What are they talking about now. They're talking 1938. Right. So 1938, he realized that he had a connection in Egypt. Okay, he had, he had treated a man called nahas pascha.
When he had visited Berlin in the early 1930s, he was a senior Egyptian diplomat politician whatever anyway he become president or prime minister of Egypt in the meantime. So he went to the Egyptian Embassy in, I think, Buenos Aires showed nahas pascha card, and was given a visa to Egypt, where he went. You got a boat, went to Egypt. And, as you do, ended up staying there for 20 years, you gave up medicine, he became a scrap merchant.
And actually made a fortune at the end of the Second World War, dismantling British Army and Air Force camps. No shortage of scrap was there at the end of the scrabble during and at the end of the war. Yeah, absolutely. And he actually had these long RAF low loader trucks that they used to move aircraft fuselages on. And he was actually the guy that transported the statue of Ramesses II from Aswan up to Cairo, apparently after the war.
My mother visited him there 1950 14 years after she'd last seen him. She's 25, so she was born in 1924 so she was 25. So she's 25 so from the age of 12 to 25 to 26. Yeah, she's seen him at all in that time. No, she hasn't seen him at all. So she's your mother's in the care of your, your father's your grandfather's parents all that. That's right, the grandfather's parents so the story there is that 1938 September 38. My great uncle grandfather's brother. He had actually left Berlin in 1933.
When Hitler first came to power. He'd gone to London. He had a chemical factory. He was a British citizen, he was doing quite well. The grandparents said, We're in our 70s. They're not going to do anything to the old people and the children. We're not coming. He actually made a trip back to Germany on his British passport in 1938 to visit the grandparents and he said you have to come. This is your grandfather's brother.
He was living in London. Yeah. And he said you have to come, because they will kill you. And the grandparents said no Carl you're being, you know, hysterical and blah blah blah melodramatic anyway, they did eventually come and they left in September 38 just before Kristallnacht. They had a, they had a ceramic shop a crockery shop that was completely smashed in the Kristallnacht riot. So, so they really got out in by the skin of their teeth.
My mother, who was very bright left at the age of 14. By the time she did her school certificate in England. She had the marks to get into medical school. Her grandmother said, Good Jewish girls don't go to medical school and cavort with all those medical students, and anyway there's no money for you to go, which, as it turned out was not true because her father had made money available.
So, when she turned 18 she went out and joined the Royal Air Force. So she then became a mechanic in the Royal Air Force and worked on Lancaster's and mosquitoes that were bombing Germany, which was kind of odd, and she was known. She actually changed her name so she was called Inga Laura, and she changed her name to Jerry because she was known as that Jerry girl. So she became Geraldine for the rest of her life she was Geraldine, but so what that Jerry girl.
What occurs to me through all of this is that it's like a plot for a movie, a lot of people's lives compared to the sort of suburban Australian upbringing that I've had, and the people then were living in times of disruption. Yeah, incredible existential threats. Yeah, and having to make big decisions about their future.
In uncertain times, in the midst of trying to live a happy life. Yeah, you get on with running a business or trying to get on with having a family and a relationship, and all that sort of thing. Do you think having this culture baked in as part of your family affected the way you responded to medicine and the way you responded to the onset of the, the novel Coronavirus pandemic is yeah I mean no question informed you.
No question and I think if you talk to anybody who has been a refugee or comes from refugee stock. They have a very developed awareness of living on the edge of the abyss and understanding that the world can change completely at any time, and if you, if you've grown up with stability and a history of stability in your family.
It's hard to accept that the world can flip on a six pence and and and completely change, and that all your assumptions can be turned upside down but if you come from that background. It's much easier. It's a very useful experience actually to have had that it's traumatic.
When I grew up, I used to have, I used to constantly think as a child, you know what it would have been like to be in a concentration camp standing in the line for the gas chambers as many of my relatives died of first degree, many relatives died in the line, and so that's that's that gives you a sense of insecurity, which is nevertheless quite valuable when you are reacting to events in the world.
So, and I think if you talk to any refugee or person of refugee stock they will tell you that, and it gives you this perspective, and it gives you a sympathy for other people in in in that situation. What language or languages, did you speak growing up. Yeah, so, so my mother didn't speak German for about 25 years, she spoke English without an accent.
And in fact she did her military service in the Royal Air Force with a bunch of girls from the Gourbals in Glasgow the slum in Glasgow she had quite a strong Glasgow accident of time, but she then developed a sort of middle class Oxford English accent. So she didn't speak German at all I learned German at school. And it was quite interesting. There was this. Do you speak. Yeah, yeah I speak reasonable German not not brilliant, but, but perfectly adequate.
My, my mother, my parents, it's quite funny my parents which I think many refugees would understand, they were in Switzerland in the 1960s. Looking for a campsite, and they were lost. So my father was driving the car they had a caravan on the back they stopped outside a restaurant.
And my father said look, we're in German Switzerland he said go in and ask them for a direction so she goes into the into the restaurant, guest directions for campsite comes out relays them to my father in the car, and she turns to him and she goes, you know the strangest thing she said, they thought I was German. And she had totally for 20 years, just totally dissociated herself from that identity. And she didn't really pick it up again until really towards the end of her life.
It was, it should sort of sort of cut it off. I've heard a couple of times the idea that was prevalent amongst your relatives that nothing would happen to the elderly or the children that there was a moral boundary, beyond which the genocide of the Jewish people would not step over. Do you think that that had a basis in any reality or experience, or was it a coping mechanism to believe that because, to my mind, if it's suddenly okay to start killing anyone.
Then why wouldn't it be okay to kill everyone, or was it just so disruptive for them to take radical action to prevent it that they needed a some kind of myth to believe in that they preferred to believe the, the, the myth, then the unwelcome truth. I think it's a combination and certainly, I think it's really important to be aware of how civilized Germany was in the interwar years. It was a very sophisticated place.
The Jews my parents my, my mother's family were very assimilated middle class Jews. They thought of themselves as German first and Jewish second. And that Berlin that they grew up in. It was incredibly sophisticated. You had, you know that the kind of the Weimar Republic that these kind of Bohemian nightclubs you know the whole cabaret film I mean that's that's grounded in reality.
And, you know, it was a cutting edge of psychoanalysis and it was really the happening place in the late 20s early 30s. So the notion that all of a sudden, this bunch of ignorant bugs, because they all knew that the Nazis were ignorant bugs, and particularly
in the early years where and to learn with his essay, the folks was just going around beating up everybody in the streets. The idea that these people would take over such a country, and that their friends and neighbors would acquiesce was almost impossible to accept. So, it was only relatively visionary people who really understood the possibility of what might happen. So, you know, if Uncle Carl had not gone back to get them, they wouldn't have survived.
And yes, I think it's just too much that dislocation of reality is too much for people to accept. So you'll rationalize almost anything. So to me that that has reflection in our response to the pandemic and and in Grinor McIntyre's excellent book, Dark Winter, her first chapter is entitled Believe the Unbelievable. Yes, because when you live in a bell epoch, as we do in a golden time,
you get very quickly the human, yeah, gather a brain adapts to the idea that this is easy, and this is the way it's always going to be. Yep. And like you, my family was disrupted around the world by war, by the Second World War, and I'm here because of it. And the times between the wars, the interbellums are in fact, the unusual. Yes, they are the unusual periods. I mean, you are
free of famine free of plague times are unusual for humans. So it's this ability to balance your hyper vigilance and your understandable anxiety. How does that, I suppose, inform the decisions that you make when you were growing up, was it something that led you towards medicine, or was it something that perhaps pushed you away from it.
No, definitely led me towards it, because it was a way of connecting with with existential reality of something that was real, something that had relevance in any human situation in any era. So yeah, real compared to what you mean real compared to selling stocks and shares and moving around a piece of paper. Exactly. Yeah. Something that where whatever you were doing. It had reality to it.
And also, I was, I was inculcated that this was a portable pro it was a profession like being a carpenter, so that if I had to move. I could take it with me. And in fact grandfather, after 20 years as a stock as a scrap merchant in Cairo. He got expelled from Egypt, after Suez 1956 ended up back in Germany, penniless again and became a doctor again after 20 years. So, in a little bit. No, it's extraordinary. Really extraordinary. And so I'm in Berlin again.
Is it, is it possible to separate the experiences that you've, you've had that have informed, you know your choices in life of going to medicine and so on the way you view the world. Is it possible to separate that from Jewishness, or are the two things, completely in mesh because it seems to me the nation of Israel responded to the pandemic, you know, this is my superficial analysis of the way different countries look at it as, yep, here's
another existential threat to our nation and move very quickly. And like to take advice and take pretty proactive steps and particularly in regard to accessing vaccines and vaccine technology. Very, very on the front foot. Yeah. Now I know that nationhood and religion and culture are things that are difficult to tease out. But where do you put your, your religion in the midst of all of this if you don't mind my asking.
Sure, I mean I'm not a religious Jew, so I don't have a kind of religious faith but obviously I come from that heritage. I mean, it's been a long day that it's thought that all the Ashkenazi Jews in Europe actually descended from a couple of hundred individuals from the town of effort in Germany in in the mid 14th century.
And, and with that kind of cultural expectation of living on the edge of annihilation. So, I mean, yes, of course that will have informed the Israeli response, I mean, latterly they've gone like everybody else but it certainly informed that initial response
and it's really interesting how the island nation of Australia responded to this threat with fairly rapidly closing the borders, and that was the one that kind of led to our success and the discussion pandemic is that is another topic but it fascinates me that the, the, the culture affects a public health response every single time because as you've said before medicine is politics and politics is medicine. Yeah. What happened in between when you when you.
How did you end up in medical school and where was that. That was in in London. I didn't have any doubt that I wanted to study medicine. And, yeah, so I went to London University St George's Hospital, and did a six year medical course I did an extra year of a BFC where I did a couple of units in philosophy of science, which has really helped me actually to understand what's been happening in the
country, I think, was there a lot of people doing it or was this an unusual side branch. Yeah, it was an unusual sidebar on so I was in with the, with the philosophy and social science students at UCL University College, doing, I think was a unit and a half course on the science and social science, which is essentially a kind of foundations of knowledge, what is knowable. How can we come to know it.
You know what is truth, how do we best, how can we even approximate towards truth and a solid grounding in the scientific method. And that's really helped me understand what's happening in the pandemic. And, and I would identify the majority of our problems as stemming from a lack of adherence to scientific rigor.
And that's both through ignorance and design, I think, but it's become very apparent to me that a large body of the medical community has very little understanding of what it is to be a scientist of what scientific knowledge is. And that's been quite a shock actually the degree to which I've come to realize that is the case. And we've had a lot of argument for to put a concrete example the the issue of the aerosol spread of the recent.
Yes, pandemic. There were a lot of doctors who were prepared to argue with aerosol scientists and people who feel that is to to determine that these kind of things but we had clinical doctors with no scientific basic science experience at all, who are very
prepared to be adamant about scientific principles of which they really didn't seem to know much. No, absolutely. And, and you know, okay, so I don't have any quibble with them, potentially arguing with aerosol scientists, but not if their arguments are nonsense. And that's the problem. You know, they could easily have boned up on the information and make her an argument but but they didn't. And the arguments and nonsense.
The arguments against aerosol spread, and it turns out that for a long time, these arguments have been nonsense and that actually, you know, a lot of infections are spread by airborne mean.
And the most influential philosopher for me was Thomas Kuhn, who was a American philosopher of science who in 1967, wrote a book called the structure of scientific revolutions, which kind of build I think Max, really was Max Planck who first wrote this in the early part of the 20th century but basically, you know, nothing changes in science, really, until the current practitioners are retired and or dead.
In other words, the, the kind of fortress of contemporary scientific knowledge is is is defended to the death by the current practitioners, because they've got a period of learning, which is pretty intense, then we get into a period of our life where we're where we're practicing.
And we're, we're, not only are we pretty comfortable at that point, and and used to doing things efficiently with the knowledge that we have but we also become the leadership within the profession who have the say over who pointed to training positions and, you know,
this is the way we treat our patients now we, we pay lip service to to lifelong learning and we can't be changing what we do every week, but people like Nobel Prize winner Barry Marshall, certainly come up against the same forces, when they're trying to explain
that actually stomach ulcers are caused by helicobacter, and we need to treat in that, but you have a medical and pharmaceutical industry, which have a different understanding, and, you know, again, I think we talked before about the shining brand that we have in medicine and also science that we're these kind of noble warriors who are out there. Our only quest is for knowledge and truth.
And that is so naive, and just just painful in its simplicity because we are human scientists are humans doctors are humans politicians are humans. And the reality is that, as you say once you get to a position in life where you have something to defend, you will defend it and there is no question that that influences your degree of bias as novelist said, you know it is impossible to persuade a man of something if his salary depends on believing otherwise.
That's something I chill Lincoln would say, yeah, it's one of HR Mencken's contemporaries I will remember it in one of his. And it's analogous to to make his line that it's very difficult to believe that as someone is telling the truth. If you would lie. If you were in their shoes. Yeah, it's a, it is the same thing. Yeah, human nature thing. I just want to say we just be really infuriating.
The really infuriating thing is the pretense that we aren't all human, and that some of us are, you know, that that that by profession we can stratify one group out as particularly noble, and the reality is it just is not the case and we have to factor that in to our deliberations and understanding of what's happening in the world.
The interesting thing is, is that building systems to overcome the problems of us being human is something that we do a lot in in medicine and and in industry, we just need to take it to the next level, where it also applies to those who are making decisions about
how these technologies be applied if you work on an oil rig. There are multiple processes in place everywhere to ensure that it doesn't blow up through somebody making a simple human error, the equivalent of the keys in the car accident, leaving a valve open because there are systems in place, as there are in aviation, which is something else we should get on to. Yes. When you.
So, you finished medical school what where do you do your internship and residents so I did quite well in medical school. And, which you mean you won some prizes did you get some. Yeah, well, yeah. Oh, just, you know, the whole kind of British thing about prizes and gongs and things so I finished. Sorry, like at Hogwarts. Yeah, exactly. Exactly all that stuff.
So I was sort of supposed to be on track for becoming a consultant physician so I did some reasonably kind of prestigious jobs in general internal medicine around London. I did the, I took the membership of the Royal College of Physicians became a sort of MRCP which is the, the time was the entrance exam into physician into high physician training. And then I just thought, God, you know, I'm just not going to be able to survive in a hospital environment.
My wife, because it was too constraining, and because I found the Kafka esque nature of the hospital to be too infuriating. Yeah, so the, the, the, the red tape around trying to get patients treated was not something that excited. And the fact that I'm just a tremendous identification with patients who are essentially I mean, you know, for people who haven't come across Kafka's the trial it's the, the novel where a man's on trial, and he doesn't know what he's on trial for
and what the process is, and it's completely inexplicable. And to me that that that really is the situation of the patient in the hospital you know, all these things happen people come and see you, and you get whisked off for this that and the other and it can appear completely incomprehensible. I just found that system to be so constraining, and it was clear that to get on in that I was going to have to make compromises that I wasn't prepared to do.
So, so, my wife who's also a doctor from the same year as me in St. George's. We 1995 we went to Solomon Islands. In the south, when were you married around before about that yeah 1995. Yeah, okay, so you'd finished school you're, you're a couple 91. We finished medical school in 91 we did our house jobs we did right, we were not we were not them back in the medical school. Yeah, yeah from the first week of med school, what would be this, we will be she's bird on Berger.
Well, that's an, that's as efficient a way as I've heard of exactly. You were on the same corridor you see in the in the in the residence, so make sense easy enough to walk too far. Yes, well you were very lucky by all accounts. Yeah, exactly. By all accounts. Yeah, especially. Yeah, so, um, yeah so we went to the soul minds for a bit which was a fantastic experience.
You went to the Solomon Islands. You put a no there was a guy called John Colley who was a doctor who's now a screenwriter, who he's actually screenwriter a lot of Hollywood films now. And had a column in the Observer newspaper. Every Sunday.
Talking about his experiences as a doctor in the Solomon Islands I don't know how he'd ended up there anyway so I thought, absolutely fantastic. So I just found directory inquiries because we didn't have the internet and I just found directory inquiries and started
ringing around the hospitals in the Solomon Islands, and eventually got through to the medical superintendent one and I said oh we'd love to come out and he said oh yeah yeah no that's fine well just turn up at the airport, you know things a bit easier than just the airport was this what was this on a rotary dial phone. Yeah, yeah, yeah, it must have cost a fortune during this yeah yeah it did it did and of course it was all middle of the night stuff from Britain and lots of sounds.
Oh, you know, lots of static down to the South Pacific is quite, you know, quite fun. That's it that's very exotic. And yeah, you still have the articles that Colley wrote. Yeah, I've got some somewhere yeah yeah yeah and they were very good so we actually went to that hospital. And, you know, great, fascinating, fascinating experience.
And then, then we came back to your own. How long were you in Solomon Islands for we were only there for four months, because in the meantime, I have managed to sort out a job, which I don't really know why I thought about but I had sorted it out at the University Hospital of Geneva.
Right. So, while you're on the phone to the Solomon Islands that occurred to you to you. Was this through a connection in London, no, no, you just got it. Well I thought, well I, I'd grown up partly in Switzerland I spoke French. Yeah, you can keep in that one quad I'd heard about. I mean my god, you know, I was in the Swiss hospitals. So, that didn't work at all. So, I Carol was about to get a job. So I resigned and we came back to Britain did GP training.
Right. So, just to sort of wrap these ideas together around what was driving your decisions at this stage because one one possibility here is that Berger and his, his wife are quite mad. You know they've finished medicine he has opportunity in London, he has a bit of the golden boy smell about him with the, with the prizes for medical school and could have set up a very handy practice as a member of the Royal College of Physicians, but starts finding the Solomon Islands.
Looking for something. And what it's reminding me of is in reading the House of God, and with the psychiatrist who who wrote it under the pseudonym of Samuel sham. One of the rules of the House of God, which was the House of God was the university hospital. One of the rules was that we must do everything we can to do as little medicine to the patients as possible.
And it seems to me, though, your rejection of this hospital system is from the same breed of thinking that the medical system has the potential to do so much good. Yes, but often the structure of it is not serving the patients the way that it should be.
Very much so. And I mean I came to the conclusion as a senior house officer in medicine in London but which I haven't had cause to significantly alter the probably about 20% of the things that we were doing for patients were making a really significant difference. The problem was, it was very hard to see which which 20% it was. So you end up doing an awful lot of things. And, yeah, I think, I mean, everybody from our generation, every doctor from our generations read the House of God, of course.
And I think there's an awful lot of truth in that. So, defending patients from the system becomes a bit of a theme. And in how did I just say that's that's the role of the primary care physician. Well that's that's that's what I'm thinking is you did your general training general practice training.
And how did, and as a GP you're often the gatekeeper. Yes, to the to the rest of the system. And so, that's a, it's a great role for somebody who's trying to trying to get people to the right place and not to the to the wrong place and find like minded people to look after their patients. So how did you end up as a director of the British Medical Journal. It. They advertised. And I applied you're an opportunity taker aren't you. Yes.
They advertised. I literally I mean I didn't know anybody there. I've written a couple of articles, a couple of editorials for them. So you already wanting to express an opinion about how the medical operating. Yeah. Yes.
And, yeah, I literally I applied, and I got it, which really surprised me I have to say, and I was actually appointed as the BMA. So the BMA owns the BMJ group, and I was one of the two BMA appointed non executive directors on the board of the BMJ, which again is that kind of delicious irony that it was the BMA that kept my grandfather out of Britain.
Interesting. Yeah. And so were you were, were you a welcome director around that table did they realize what they were getting in terms of someone who wasn't going to just necessarily go along with medical conformity. Yeah, I mean that's what they said. That's why they wanted me. They said, I was interviewed by Hamish Meldrum.
Okay, Hamish Meldrum was the chairman of the BMA at time was he a Scottsman. Yes. Yeah, yeah, yeah, Scotts don't mind mixing things up. No, no, and he wanted a bit of aggro. So, yeah, and it was a, it was a really good, it was very good for me I hope it was good for them. You know, sort of challenging preconceptions etc. It was, it was also at the time where we were being sued by Wakefield.
And Wakefield for people who have not followed the career of the infamous, he was the gastroenterologist at the Royal Free in London, the Royal Free Hospital, who wrote what subsequently turned out to be a fraudulent paper in the Lancet in 1998 I think it was
identifying basically drawing the link between the MMR back measles vaccine the MMR vaccine and autism in kids and shortly after I joined the BMJ we ran a series by the excellent investigative journalist Brian dear, which is exposed that fraud, once and for all, and actually eventually caused the Lancet to withdraw the paper, although it took them a while. Anyway, he spent a long time trying to sue us from the US.
It's a bit of a bit of a worry for the journals directors in a financial sense and I'm yeah I can up a lot of brain cycles having to deal with the litigation process and yes, it's an incredible time waster. It was, it was vexatious litigation. And eventually, it got dismissed under the, under the Texas anti slap legislation so it eventually came to nothing.
But it was a time and mind share for me. So, yeah, so and that, I mean that for me has been very ironic because I, you know, I've lastly been kind of slandered as an anti back up for having, you know, written about the problems for the AstraZeneca vaccine as it as it came up in the early part of the pandemic.
It's difficult to now imagine the pre vaccine, the covert world unless you have a child under the age of five of course because some calls, they don't have the the vaccine in Australia or the UK. The, the sum total of all of these things has left you in a position of wanting to be an advocate. And why is it that you chose to come to Australia. There were a whole variety of reasons.
Firstly, we were both my wife and I Carol and I were both a bit bored with being the kind of medical civil servant public servant, but general practice in the UK has become. We both wanted to do more medicine. We also were very aware of the limitations of Britain for our children. And so, we also took a very long term sort of geopolitical viewpoint. The upcoming century for our planet which is going looking troubled. And we took, we had the opinion that for us for our children.
The locus of operations, as I put it to the southern hemisphere, look sensible. So your dinner time conversation was a little different to what what what did you think about that episode of the bill. Yeah, it was, it's very, you know, this is, this is, this is going to ship pretty quickly, where are we going to go.
And, and refugees, we became yeah kind of I mean we were in our mid 40s. We had a nice house the kids were in a private school we were GPS and a nice practice which we just built the building. And we thought, this is just not going anywhere we're going to leave we have to leave now. And then I was on a train back from the BMJ board meeting in London to Devon where we lived and I train was late and I was reading the newspaper was reading the times. And I got to the birth marriages and deaths.
And it said, it's so bored I was reading the birth marriages and death so I'm scanning down the marriages. And it said, Kirsten Bradby, director of admissions Woodstock School India marries Ed Bevan. Well, it's interesting. So I Google Woodstock School India, which is a school in the Himalayas. And, oh, well that sounds interesting so look it up as 150 years old so a couple of stories short.
You spent a year in India, living in the Himalayas. Of course you did. I'm a bit Australia. You only spent a year in India after seeing random line in the back of a newspaper in. While you're waiting. Exactly. So you saw a train leaving for India and you decided to jump on it. Yes, and it was great. It was a fantastic experience, living, living at 7000 feet on a ridge in the foothills of the Himalayas. Meeting, lots of amazing people. That was a good experience for us.
So, Berger, are you risk averse, or are you actually have a huge appetite for risk because I'm getting confused about now, because you seem very worried about what might happen to your patients. Yes, you decide you're going to ship your kids and your wife off to India to the Himalayas. Way to an unknown life in Australia. So what would we, as far as taking risks is concerned, I mean it's just, you know, I just don't take, you just don't take stupid risks.
You take risks where there's, which you which you can mitigate and where you think the payoff is is good but you don't take stupid risks and allowing the coronavirus to spread in the way that we've allowed it to spread is a stupid risk. It is just, it's dense, it is offensively stupid.
And that's what I don't like. I mean I, as you know, in 2019, I flew a single engine aircraft from the USA across the North Atlantic to Europe across the whole of Russia to Japan down to Australia and then my son took it on to New Zealand. So, that's not an enterprise without risk. But we've had all the risk mitigated. And there was some risk left it was like, we'll take it. But it wasn't stupid risk. It wasn't, you know, and there was a big benefit to it.
It just don't take stupid risks and and what's happening now what has happened in the last three years. I find it, I find the stupidity of it offensive. It doesn't just irritate me. I just find it offensively stupid, what is happening on the public health level that we take a that we allow a virus, which every day, we find out more and more about its multi system effects. And we bathe the population in this virus repeatedly.
So, yeah, we'll do more of a deep dive on the pandemic a bit later, but I think it's really interesting for people to take a breath now and understand why what's driven your advocacy where the sort of seat of it came from. And then we can talk more about specifically how they got applied. Refugee advocacy during the coven pandemic, and where it leads to from here because I think what we're determined to do is in the midst of war in the midst of plague in the midst of famine.
The key is to also do as much as we can for others whilst living a happy life. Yeah, there can be some contentment, even in the midst of turmoil, even in the midst of terrible things. I know that so well in medicine. I think it's finding the the optimism, amidst the measures that we need to take, and even in the face of overwhelming stupidity.
We can form a community of people who will support one another. And yeah, absolutely one another, because if the government won't do it, then we have to kind of take this into our own hands in terms of a embarrassing the decision makers about the decisions they're making to stick up for people who can't stick up for themselves, and be providing information direct support where we can to the people who are carrying the burden of this at the moment.
Yeah, and I think that's, that's been the most important thing for me in all of this is that a lot of people have felt reassured less alone, and that they're not mad because, you know, we all look around us, or fellow carama self look around every day and go, you know, who's mad is it me or is it everybody else. And knowing that there are other people who think as you do is is a real reassurance so yeah, I think you might be a bit mad. A bit mad. I'll take that. Lemonade.
I'm back here again. I told myself I'd stay a while away. Solutions ahead, but don't carry on. Blinded by nothing, we'll wait through it all. Hold on to the dark, there's a grace in the fire and the flames, thus drift so far, in this room of the lost my way, old trees I climbed, so far below me now. And where do I go when the signs aren't so bright and I'm weighed down by feeling I don't have much time. It's okay, I suppose, let's just hope that it goes. No need to stress over a failure to cope.
I'll take my anguish and go. Ooh. Ooh. I know you know I see right through, you try your best, you fucked it through, it's all the same and all you're waiting for is wasted on the day. I know you know I see right through, you try your best, you fucked it through, it's all the same and all you're waiting for is wasted on the day. The leaves, they'll grow in the spring and they'll fall again soon, still we grow taller. Ooh.