Doubt: The Man Behind The Myth

named Michelle Sadillo. He says, there are two reasons why everyone has gathered here in a nondescript room of the National Courts Building in Washington, d c. The purpose first purpose of this hearing is to determine whether Michelle's own autism and your other conditions were vaccine cause. But the second reason they're here is much bigger than this one individual case. Nearly five thousand other claims like Michelle's have

also been filed. Each one alleges a child has developed autism or a similar disability after being given their routine measles, mumps and rebella vaccine, the MMR shot. In this hearing today and over the next three weeks, we will hear not only about Michelle's own condition, but also extensive expert testimony concerning the petitioner's first general causation theory, That is, the general theory that MMR vaccines and bimerisol containing vaccines

can combine to cause autism. These proceedings will not actually take place in a courtroom, but in front of a trio of judicial officials called special Masters. Their job is to resolve complaints filed with what's known as the National Vaccine Injury Compensation Program. This little known program is where people who believe they were injured by routine shots in the US go to make their case. It exists as

an alternative to suing drug makers. Instead, vaccine injury can planes are heard by the US Court of Federal Claims. In other words, this is vaccine Court. Public anxiety about autism and vaccines had been simmering for years. Now the court would hear the evidence. It would rule on whether there was a possible link between the two. Michelle Sadillo's complaint was just one of six test cases. It had taken five years to get to this day. A lot

had been building to this moment. Both sides would present a parade of expert witnesses, among them psychiatrists, toxicologists, and neurologists. But one name in particular, kept coming up. As one of the attorneys for the US government frames it, the root of this controversy could be traced back to just one man, and that one man's theories. The attorney says, we're fake. It's a contrivals. It's a contrivance that's been developed and are articulated and promoted by its chief proponent,

and that's Andrew Wakefield. Andrew Wakefield was the spark that turned to modern skepticism about vaccines into a movement, and now his movement is having its day in court. Wakefield had spent roughly a decade trying to sell the public on the idea that childhood vaccines were unsafe. If the government sides with the Sadio's case, it could legitimize that campaign. Wakefield was not a party in this hearing, but this

pivotal moment probably would not be possible without him. In this episode, we're going to tell you the story of Andrew Wakefield. Will trace the path of the former gut surgeon as he became the world's most well known critic of vaccines. Will show how it's decades long misinformation campaign gained recognition from concerned parents, lawmakers, and celebrities and how the groundwork Wakefield late decades ago helped seed the mistrust we're seeing in the age of the coronavirus. But this

isn't just a story about Andrew Wakefield. It's also a story about the forces that propelled him into the spotlight and then kept his myth alive. I'm Bloomberg News health reporter Kristin B. Brown from the Prognosis podcast. This is doubt the story of Andrew Wakefield's quest to undermine the safety of vaccines doesn't actually begin with vaccines. Yeah, it didn't start from M and R at all, Although that's the sort of public perception. That's not where the story starts.

This is David Salisbury. For a long time he ran the UK's National Immunization program. I used to be the Director of Immunization at the Department of Health in London, UK, where I was responsible for the National Immunization Program. So that was for bringing it into use new vaccines, managing the use of existing vaccines, looking at the impact of our vaccines and heading up the national policy. David says Andrew Wakefield first reached out to him in September. It

was an odd call. It was a long lines. You need to take very seriously what I'm telling you, and if you don't take seriously what I'm telling you, it may be to the detriment of the immunization program. And by the way, I want to talk about funding my research. It had an undertone of threat about it that unless I we the Department of Health, the government funded his research, then there could be threats to the vaccine program. At the time, Wakefield was a little known researcher at Royal

Free Hospital School of Medicine in London. He had trained as a gut surgeon, but now he was on the hunt for the root cause of Crohn's disease. The UK introduced the new MMR vaccine, a shot that combined vaccines for three viruses into one. Then in ninety two the government discontinued use of two brands of the shot. Occasionally it seemed to cause meningitis instead of prevented. This was

wakefield opening his research. Hadn't even looked at vaccines yet, but it seemed that he was already plotting to cash in on the concern surrounding them. He was researching that measles disease, not the vaccine that measles disease was in some way related causally to inflammatory bowel disease, and his theory was that measles virus caused a vasculitis and inflammation of the blood vessels within the bowel, and that that was a trigger for Crohn's disease and alsative colitis, so

inflammatory bowel disease. Wakefield thought that the measles might actually be causing inflammatory bowel conditions like Crohn's disease. If at this point you were confused as to why Wakefield thought the government should fund research into vaccines because of research that had nothing to do with vaccines, you should be David didn't think wakefield hypothesis made a whole lot of sense, but he heard him out anyway. Remember, there were concerns

about the MMR already brewing in the zeitgeist. Those two brands of the shot had just been pulled from market after it appeared they increased the risk of miningitis. And even with rigorous and extensive safety testing, sometimes vaccines do

have problems. Any medical intervention can. It led to eventually the Department of Health agreeing to set up a scientific meeting for him to present his work along with another researcher who had got a different theory, nothing to do with measles, but who've got a different theory about the origins of inflammatory bow disease. And we brought together a number of experts only inflammatory bow disease on measles virus together and the two presented their work, and we gave

them careful consideration. So you know, we didn't ignore his letter. But right off the bat in that meeting with Wakefield, some of the experts there were able to poke some holes in his theory. He seemed to be using some of the lab equipment in a way that differed from

the manufacturers instructions. One of the measles experts for whom I have always had the highest respect, was clearly a long away from persuaded when Wakefield explained how many PCR polymerase chain reaction cycles he was doing to try to get a positive signal. They were basically running samples to the machine way more times than recommended. The particular measles experts said, if measles was there, you would not be doing thirty five PCR cycles. You would have found it

very very much earlier. This risk producing a false positive. Yeah, I think The analogy was that if you have a stereo and you've got nothing playing through it, but you keep on turning the volume up, you'll start to hear something what you're not hearing. His bet open. This is probably a good place to point out that since then, nearly three decades ago, Andrew Wakefield's work has been dismissed

over and over again by the scientific establishment. Eventually British authorities would ban him from medical practice and his work would be revealed as fraudulent, but this would take years. There were a lot of reasons why Wakefield was already thinking about a potential link between the MMR vaccine and autism.

The first factor was that in the nineties, awareness of autism was increasing as researchers expanded the diagnosis to include a wide spectrum of conditions, and so what the public saw was an increase of autism cases without any context. The second factor was that the meninginist had kicked up fears about the MMR vaccine. Even before Wakefield hit the scene, people were starting to mobilize against vaccines. A British mother named Jackie Fletcher launched an anti vaccine group called JABS.

Fletcher started the organization because she believed the MMR caused brain damage in her infant son, and a British lawyer named Richard Barr was working with other attorneys to put together a class action lawsuit over the MMR. Around this time, David says Wakefield's theories changed too. He then moved on and said, ah, it's not wild virus, it's not the natural measles virus, it's the vaccine. Those initial raised eyebrows

did not deter Wakefield from his quest. He went on to publish work that suggested Crohn's disease was more common in people who were vaccinated against the measles but he made his argument by comparing two previous studies that were unrelated in the same journal that published the study. Other scientists pointed out that comparing these two studies didn't make a whole lot of sense. It didn't matter. Wakefield was convinced it wasn't the wild measles virus causing the bowel issues,

it was the measles vaccine. Wakefield's research got the attention of moms who were already concerned that MMR vaccines had hurt their kids, but that was nothing compared to what would come next. In February, Andrew Wakefield published a study in The Lancet. The Lancet is one of the world's most prestigious medical journals. It's a big deal if your work is published there. The study made Wakefield famous. The study itself falsely linked the MMR vaccine to developmental issues

and stomach problems by looking at just twelve children. Wakefield was an opportunist. He had seen the conversations bubbling about the MMR vaccine and autism and found a way to fit them into his initial theory. Wakefield didn't just quietly put out his study, though he held a press conference, a big one. There was credibility from the places in which his work was being published. There was a sort of credibility because he was saying it in the public

domain in a way that doctors didn't often do. It was very unusual for a doctor to be going so public, and I think that as a person he is persuaded. Wakefield went even further in his claims at the press conference than he had in the paper. He also suggested that individual vaccines could be safer than the triple MMR, measles maps and rebella given together, maybe too much for the immune system of some children to handle. It was the launch of an all out war against the MMR vaccine.

That was really the start of a series of publications and statements that Wakefield made on a public footing that left us always having to chase to find evidence to show that he was wrong, and that put us, being the scientific community us response for the humanization program, in a very very difficult position because each time that he produced what he said was new evidence, we were having

to chase that to show that it wasn't right. Still, Wakefield kept trying to convince the scientific community that this work was credible. In March, Wakefield presented his work and a meeting at the Royal College of Surgeons. David was there again. David says, other scientists poked holes in wakefield theories and I don't believe that at the end of that meeting the audience was persuaded by his presentations. David says the UK's Independent Advisory Committee on Vaccines had also

reviewed the research and found it unconvincing. So all of the relevant bodies that could look at the data at the science as the policy implications were not persuaded that we needed to be making any changes, and indeed we were not being asked by way it feel to make any changes until the press conference on the day of the release of the Lancet paper. None of that mattered, though. The public was much more receptive to the controversial and

shocking idea that vaccines might cause autism. News organizations ran with the debate, but there has been growing concern among parents and advocacy groups about the safety of many of these vaccines. In fact, some groups now believe there's a connection between autism and vaccines. The U S Department of Education. Doubts about this safety of the MMR vaccine had been seated, and they would just keep growing. By the end of the nineties, Andrew Wakefield had gone from a little known

researcher to a rock star scientist. But as his profile grew, his work also invited more scrutiny, and it caught the attention of one man who would make it his mission to expose the truth of Wakefield's fictions. My name is Brian Dear. I'm the author of the book The Doctor Who Fooled the World, An investigation into the origins of modern anti vaccine campaigning. Brian Deer has written about vaccines for more than two decades, and when he first heard

about the Lancet study, he thought it seemed fishy. There were some odd coincidences between and a debunked whooping calf vaccine study. I saw that both of the papers had this time link of fourteen days written into them, and I thought, how could that be when the vaccines were in fact two very different technologies. One was based on killing a bacterium with the formally preservative, the other was

based on live viruses. That's They're very different technologies, And I thought, well, how could they have that time link? But Brian let it go. I could see no way of ever being able to get to the bottom of that, so I put the thing to one side for five years. I never got involved in the story for five years after that paper was published. Then in two thousand three, Brian was doing a routine assignment on the MMR vaccine. Very quickly, I think within within the first week of

me actually see reously doing some work on it. I interviewed one of the mothers who had enrolled a child in Wakefield research. That is, he interviewed the mother of one of the twelve children in the Lancet study. The names of patients involved in studies are usually anonymised. This made it tough for anyone to go about fact checking many aspects of Wakefield's work. And the story she told

me could not be reconciled with the paper. And from that I could see that there was at least some kind of mismatch, some kind of irregularity in this paper, some kind of peculiarity going on. Brian kept digging. Remember Richard Barr, that lawyer who was trying to get a

class action suit together over the MMR vaccine. Wakefield had actually been approached by a firm of lawyers two years before the paper was published, and had taken employment with them to make a case for them for this firm of lawyers against the MMR vaccine in order that they could get a class action lawsuit going. Bryan says, Bar first guy interested in vaccines, sort of by chance, he had a client who after he did the conveyancing on her house, she'd said to him later that her child

had received the MMR vaccine and had developed meningitis. And as soon as the government withdrew two brands of the MMR vaccine, he was on the phone to this This mother got her into the newspapers, and once he got in the newspapers, he was the person to go to if you wanted to make a complaint about the MMR vaccine. Bryan discovered that before the lance that study, bar Heard hired Wakefield to help prove their claims and send them patients for the research. Neither wake Builds hospital nor his

study co authors knew anything about the connection. The children who had come to the hospital weren't just children off the street, if you like, or routine patients. They had actually been sent to Wakefield by an anti vaccine group. The kids in the study were sent to the hospital because their parents already believed that they had been vaccine damaged. Basically, Wakefield had made a big assumption about what his study would find and then cherry picked research subjects in an

effort to prove it. The relationship between Richard Barr and Andrew Wakefield and that paper which they which they devised together, and that is the acorn from which the modern anti vaccine movement has grown. They all began with Wakefield, and that's what the patent was all about. It was designed to be the battering ram which created the law so that they could recruit a lot of class to this lawsuit, which they ultimately did not. Long after the paper was published,

Richard Barr's lawsuit had its first day in court. Richard Barr declined to be recorded for this podcast. He said in an email that at the time of his lawsuit there were genuine concerns about the MMR vaccine. He said that Wakefield was just one of many experts that he relied on to make his case in court. He wrote to me that quote, vaccine damage is real, and it was a question of whether the symptoms described by the hundreds of parents who approached us were attributable to the

MMR end of story end quote. He also added that he had just gotten his own COVID nineteen vaccine and hopes that others do the same. Wakefield was not a fan of Brian's reporting on his work. He turned to the courts to try and shut Brian down. Wakefield, Brian and Britain's Channel four wound up locked in a libel battle. No one wants to get sued, but it actually turned out to be great for Brian. Brian had already figured out the identities of all of the kids in the

length of study. Then he and his lawyers received medical records from Wakefield's research, and somehow, presumably accidentally, somebody had forgotten to redact some of those records. This gave Brian access to pretty detailed medical histories of the kids in the study. This led to some incredible fines over Wakefield's claims. Brain found that Wakefield had changed some of the initial diagnoses of the kids in the study to fit his theory.

Brian says that's because Whakefield had other motivations besides scientific discovery. Firstly, he wanted money. Remember when Wakefield started suggesting that the triple MMR shot might not be safe together. Brian says there's a reason for that. He also had set up a network of companies that was going to sell what he claimed to be the first potential safer vaccine to

the MMR. He'd filed for a patent eight months before his paper that launched the scare over the MMR vACC and he patented his own single measles vaccine, so he had that he was planning on selling diagnostic tests and what he called a potential complete cure for autism. But Brian says it also wasn't just about the money. He wanted to be a great man. He thought he was a remarkable character. He thought that he was he was a very special person, and he believed he was entitled

to win the Nobel Prize. Brian's reporting found that Wakefield's university eventually insisted he do a rigorous study to replicate his findings. He refused. By this point, other researchers had already failed to duplicate his work. A lab in Ireland claimed it had independently verified the findings, but Brian found that the lab pathologist and Wakefield were actually in business together. It was a convoluted web of lies and conflicts of interest.

The study that had ignited widespread panic over the MMR vaccine was pretty much anything but scientific. Bryan says that the reason Wayfield focused on the measles in the first place was even suspect. He got this idea reading an encyclopedia.

He went to the hospital library and took out an encyclopedia and went as an encyclopedia of viruses, and went through this encyclopedia virus by virus until he came to one that he thought he thought, well, oh that looks that looks promising and it was measles, and he latched onto this idea. So he was unable to let go of his idea. But Brian hadn't even begun to look into Wakefield until five years after the study came out. By that point, doubt about the vaccine had spread, the

damage had been done. David Salisbury had started his career not long after another crisis in vaccine confidence, this one over unfounded concerns about the whooping cough vaccine. There had been major epidemics of the disease in the late seventies and eighties, but eventually the UK managed to restore trust in the shot and get vaccine and rates back up.

But David says the MMR vaccine rumors were stickier. If you put the balance and you have autism on one side of the scale and you have measles on the other, it's very easy to say, I'll take the risk of measles, but I won't take the risk of autism. It was hard to convince parents to take on even a teeny risk of artism to protect against an illness most people

had never even seen in their lifetime. In the years after Wakefield study, the number of cases of measles, mumps, and rebella would take up each year to counter that.

It wasn't good enough to say we don't believe it or we know better when we had nothing to put that on other than the background knowledge that we had, because nobody had been into the Island Lab until much later to be able to go through their workbooks and look at what they were actually doing and try to make sense of the positive responses that we later learned were coming from empty wells in the PCR machines that themselves had not been serviced according to the manufacturer's specifications.

None of that was known. Study after study had failed to reproduce Wakefield's findings. The scientific consensus was still that the MMR vaccine was safe and had no link to artism or any other similar condition, but the public was becoming increasingly hesitant. Saying to people, measles can kill. Actually confronts credibility when they've never heard of anyone dying of measles. These are not quick to turn around. These are supertankers, These stories that really are difficult to turn around. By

this point, Wakefield was hardly scientist. He had become something else, a guru. Wakefield had used his time in the limelight to push his false message, not just across the UK, but across the globe. He played the victim, the outsider to the medical establishment, speaking the hard truths about government and big pharma. And by this point Wakefield was done with the UK anyway. His conspiracies had found a warm

reception across the Atlantic. In the United States, It's April two thousand and Andrew Wakefield is about to testify, but for cong Us we will now will now welcome our second panel to the witness table, Dr Andrew Wakefield, who came all the way from Merry Old, England. We appreciate him being here. The topic is the potential link between vaccines and autism in kids. The chair of the committee is Republican Representative Dan Burton of Indiana. This is his investigation.

It's personal for him. He believes his own grandson got autism because of a vaccine. But unfortunately, after receiving nine shots in one day, the MMR and the d p A T shot and the hepatitis B within a very very short period time, he quit speaking, ran around, banging his head against the wall, screaming and hollering, waving his hands and became totally a different child. By this time, Wakefield had become a full blown media darling. And now

he's speaking directly with American lawmakers. Yes, thank you, Mr German, members of the committee. It's a great privilege to be here. The purpose of my destiny is to report the results of the clinical and scientific investigation of a series of children with autism. Now, nothing in this testimony should be construed as anti vaccine. Rather, I advocate the safest vaccination

strategies for the protection of children. Wakefield speaks matter of factly, citing papers and using dense medical language as he rips through his presentation. What about vaccines? This is a paper from the Vaccine Damage Compensation Board in the United States Acute en cephalopathy followed by permanent brain injury or death associated with further attenuated measles vaccine? What was intriguing in

this cohort? During the hearing, others question his research, like British scientist Dr Brent Taylor, which, of course is the problem much of Mr Wakefield's research that it has never been independently verified. Most no one anywhere in the world hasn't been able to reproduce any of his studies, and it seems possible, but Wakefield seems unfazed. He keeps us cool even when asked if his research is biased. We are funded to test hypothesis and we present the data

whether the hypothesis was correct or not. And we have done that. We've got on records doing it. We've published negative studies in association with measles and Crow's disease. That doesn't mean it's not there. It means that our hypothesis was wrong in terms that we could not find it using the technology. So we have gone on record as publishing both positive and negative data. Wakefield is affable and charming. He is a good listener, and he knows how to

target his audience effectively. He knows how to get his message heard. I reached out many times to Wakefield during a system. At first he agreed to speak with me off record under one condition. I had to watch several of the movies he's produced about vaccines, and so I did, and after I told his people I had watched them, he declined to be interviewed for this podcast. His assistant told me he's just tired of being demonized by the

mainstream press. Wakefield has continued to stand by his research and deny allegations against him. Parents around the world rallied around Wakefield in the early two thousands, but in the US he found an especially big support network. His fans claimed the truth was being buried by scientists in the government. We were in cahoots with the pharmaceutical industry. In the US, his ideas would merge with another already percolating fear about the marisol and vaccines. The marisol is a mercury based

preservative that had been added to vaccines for decades. It helps prevent bacterial growth in vials with multiple doses. So bear with me for a minute, because I have to talk about mercury in detail. There are two types of mercury. One is very bad. It is the reason why you're not supposed to be fish when you're pregnant. That is methyl mercury, and it's toxic, and in the ninety nineties there were all these confusing public health messages warning people

to stay away from it. But there is also another kind of mercury. Its name ethyl mercury sounds almost exactly the same, but the body clears it quickly and so it's unlikely to do harm. This is the mercury and vaccines. And at the same time that there was growing concern over the bad mercury, the number of vaccines given to infants grew, and some of those shots had the okay mercury in them. You see why this might be confusing. At the same time, like I mentioned earlier, awareness of

autism had grown as the diagnosis for it expanded. Some parents were concerned that there was a growing autism epidemic, and then all this mercury and childhood shots was to blame, adding fuel to this theory. Out of an abundance of caution, the CDC asked vaccine makers to remove the marisol from routine shots. When Wakefield's ideas crossed the pond, they found fertile ground. The media had started to throw some shade on Wakefield's claims, but he was still grabbing a lot

of headlines. On those headlines kept the debate alive, when in reality, there was nothing to debate if you turned on NPR in two two, four years after Wakefield's paper came out, an article in Yesterday's New York Times magazine is getting a lot of attention from parents who worried

that vaccines may be causing autism. These parents long have felt that their fears have been dismissed by mainstream scientists, but this article is or c span in two thousand five, seven years after the paper came out, Did you come to the conclusion that the parents are right? That's an

excellent question. I can comfortably say that I'm becoming more convinced that there is a connection when you look at the biological evidence, when you look at the children with autism themselves and you notice that they have higher levels of mercury in the system. It seems like Wakefield was simply able to deflect any criticism of his research. In two thousand four, ten of Wakefield's Lancet co authors published a statement saying that the paper did not show the

MMR vaccine caused autism. That didn't seem to make much of a difference. The Lancet also looked into accusations of ethical misconduct in Wakefield's research. This included claims that he had recruited patients that would prove his theory. I found only that Wakefield should have been clearer in disclosing sources of his funding, said the evidence did not support other claims They also published a response from Wakefield refuting most

of the allegations. His theory remained untarnished in the eyes of much of the public. All of these ideas were still circulating when Michelle Saddio's family took their case to vaccine courts in two thousand seven. Thousands of parents now believed their children had become autistic after receiving either vaccines with the mirrossole or their MMR shop or a combination of both. The two theories had merged into one mega conspiracy theory, and now it was up to the Saddio's

attorneys to prove all of this to the court. The summarise, very very briefly is straight for that you have a case here that is a test case for the theory. The general theory that the combination of exposure to fimarosl containing vaccines with a significant dose of ethyl mercury early in a child's life, combined them with MMR can result in a complex system response that presents symptoms that get diagnosed as autism and in particular are suppressive use system

from the fimarosol in the vaccines. I'm guessing that most people listening to this have probably never heard of the National Vaccine Injury Compensation Program a k A. Vaccine Court. The roots of vaccine Court go back to the nineties. I mentioned earlier that there were unfounded concerns about the whooping cough vaccine. At this time, the whooping cough vaccine

was part of a combo shot called the DPT. In the US, parents had begun bringing lawsuits against doctors and vaccine manufacturers alleging to the shot harmed kids, and one of the lawsuits to succeed. For example, the parents of a three month old who received the shot said it had paralyzed him. A jury awarded them more than a million dollars. Between the late seventies and mid eighties, cases like this became more frequent, and the amount of money

parents sought from drug manufacturers grew too. It was becoming expensive to be in the business of making these vaccines. There was a shortage of DPT vaccines, and manufacturers threatened to stop making them all together. By the mid eighties, only one manufacturer was still making the DPT shot. The price of the shot went up, doctors were told to no longer give out boosters to older kids. It was a real crisis. Congress decided to address this crisis by

creating Vaccine Court. If you are in the minority of people who have some kind of bad reaction to a vaccine, vaccine Court is where you go. On the surface, it really was kind of a perfect solution. We all get vaccinated as part of an effort to keep terrible diseases from circulating in our society. The tiny risk of a bad reaction is part of that social compact, and in order to compensate the people that do get hurt, we

all pay a small tax on each childhood vaccine. The system protects drugmakers from lawsuits and also was designed to make it easier for victims to get compensated. The thing is drawing a direct line of cause and effect between an injury and a vaccine is not always that simple. Improving that link between the MMR shot and autism was at the heart of Michelle Citos case. And we're in a start with the opening statements by counsel for the petitioners.

So which of you will be starting? Mr Powers starting, and Christiane Happer will give an el test. Okay. Mr Powers will make an opening statement on behalf of the petitioners Steering committee Mr Powers, please go ahead. Michelle's case was the first test case in the Autism proceedings. The proceedings worked basically like a class action. The Vaccine Court had received so many similar claims that asked the petitioners to get together and pick a few to represent them all.

They picked six, including Michelle's. If the Special Masters found these cases to be credible, it would pave the way for similar cases. If they didn't, it would make it a lot harder for other autism cases to get compensated in the court. You can hear the gravity of all of this and Special Master George Hastings opening remarks, we realize what a very important task has been assigned to us in deciding these cases, and we will give our

greatest effort in carrying out that heavy responsibility. Going into the proceedings, there was actually a lot of anxiety in the public health community over how the Vaccine Court might rule. It was known for being somewhat liberal in its awards, sometimes doling out compensation where it wasn't clear that a vaccine was actually at the root of health issue. We're the Court to find in favor of Michelle's CEO. It could validate the concerns of her parents and thousands of

others that falsely believed vaccines could cause autism. By this point, the public health community had spent years trying to fight that idea. Vaccination rates were dropping, cases of the measles were rising, and there were signs that it could get even worse. The year before, the UK had its first death from the measles in fourteen years. The stakes were high. My name is Sylvia chan Kaplan and I of all of my hot was Kenn Conway and one Homer represent

the shells to deal. Michelle was born on Aust thirty. She weighed eight pounds, probably in In other words, she was perfectly on day one when she was born, she received hippatite fe ignization and it contained one five micrograms of her pats didn't know about it. Joe, how profession didn't know about it. The studio's attorney claimed that getting one immunization at birth with the safe kind of mercury had primed Michelle's gut for things to go horribly wrong

when she received her MMR. They claimed that the combination of the vaccine with the Marisa all and the MMR had caused Michelle to develop stomach issues and regress into autism, along with the host of other very heartbreaking medical conditions. Worse, they insinuated that the government and the drug industry we're working together to hide vaccine safety evidence, conspiring to make it difficult to mount the Cidio's case. The story was compelling.

More than seven people dialed in to hear testimony from the case live on the first day the press covered it. On Monday, a federal vaccine court here in Washington started to hear testimony in a trial that's expected to last for weeks. Of finding for the families could make many parents think twice about vaccinating their children, and doctors worried that could leave. The Cidio family, including Michelle, were present, and Special Master Hastings commended the family for how they

had dealt with Michelle's illness. Andrew Wakefield looms over these proceedings. That's fury that Michelle's autism had been caused by the MMR was rooted in his work. Michelle's mom, Teresa Sadio, testifies that she came across the lance at paper early on when she was looking for answers to what happened to her daughter, but not only that she had actually met Wakefield at a conference, he had even examined Michelle. She testifies that they had exchanged more than a hundred emails.

At the end of the first day of testimony, Teresa Sadio takes the stand. Her lawyer starts by asking about what Michelle was like as a newborn. Michelle a happy baby. I'm very hurty, a very responsive, very very normal, very happy. Then Teresa testifies, Michelle got her MMR vaccine at fifteen months old. She developed to fever six days later. She was different. She she seemed withdrawn um. She I thought her hearing had been affected. She was no longer talking um.

In fact, she was completely quiet. She didn't make any sound, which is why we thought it was her hearing. We thought maybe she couldn't hear, so that's why she wasn't responding or making her own sounds. This story would evoke empathy in anyone. How scary would it be to go through that as a parent, to have your child seemingly become a different person practically overnight. The thing is as compelling as that explanation was. There was a big hole

in the story. A few days into the preceding a French psychiatrist from McGill University named Eric Fomband takes the stand. Eric studies autism in the nineties. When Wakefield first first onto the scene, he had been living in London. Eric had always found Wakefield's work to be flawed. The way the studies described the onset of autism just didn't gel with what he had found in his own work. Eric had conducted studies and written papers that refuted the theory.

As part of the autism proceedings, Eric told the government attorneys to subpoena sidio family home videos. Eric told me that what he found would determine the case's outcome. I had the first birthday video clip of that child, and that was all able to see because you could see she was very delayed in motor development and social development. She could barely walk, and she she barely barely stand, and she her parents were calling her and she was

never like turning her head to look at them. And then so that was a very very sort of poignant, really uh scene to to see. Eric says that Michelle was already showing clear signs of autism by her first birthday. This includes specific types of hand gestures. That was several months before her MMR shot. This is a very typical hand finger mannerisms that you see in kids with autism, well somewhat affected, So they were so unambiguous autistic symptoms.

On the sixth day of the hearing, the defense attorneys showed the home videos. Then Eric testifies, good morning dr from me and do you please introduceduced yourself to your book. Granted with you a video taking a Michelle at nine months two thirds she's at Jane Toney five. Yes, just looking at the video, you could see that it was abnormal, because you don't make that up. And so it was very It was very terrible for the City of Family and I was I didn't feel it well for for them.

But but my duty was to the coortom, to the to the science and to the tool of the defense. Dismantles other parts of the city's case, like how the data is applied by Andrew Wakefield's business partner in the Irish lab was contaminated. Which you've been offered is a series of fanciful notions that are backed up only by the fact that someone who's offered them has a couple of letters after their name. M d or pH d.

That does not make a good science. I'm going to be as charitable as I can be about the petitioner's case here at the PSC case, it's at best speculation. I had a speculation now at worst, at worst, it's a contrivance. It's a contrivance that's been developed and are articulated and promoted by its chief proponent, and that's Andrew Wakefield. The Special Masters listened to the evidence, and eventually they

gave their verdict. Two years later, after other test cases were heard and both parties filed lots of post hearing briefs, Special Master Hastings issued a ruling. He wrote that the city of Family had been quote misled by physicians who are guilty in my view of gross medical misjudgment. The other test cases were defeated as well. Vaccine Court would not be awarding compensation to any parent that claimed their child became autistic after vaccination. But the ruling did not

convince vaccine skeptics. If anything, it fueled their concerns. Now they felt even the Vaccine Court wouldn't listen to them. It wasn't just the vaccines that were a problem, it was the whole system. The year after this ruling, the Lancet finally tried to correct the record. In two thousand ten, twelve years after the study came out, the Lancet retracted Wakefield's paper an issued a statement that said several elements

of the paper seemed to be incorrect. This was only after Britain's General Medical Council ruled that Wakefield had acted unethically. A few months later, the council also suspended his license to practice. Wakefield supporters did not abandon him, though they doubled down. You can hear it in the news reports when Wakefield shows up outside the Medical Council. Andrew Wakefield arrived at the GMC this afternoon to face the cameras, but not the music. He simply wasn't there when the

disciplinary panel found him guilty on almost every charge. They hold signs saying scapegoat and Dr Wakefield cares. Vaccine safety scares are nothing new. They've been around for as long as vaccines have, but usually they went away. By this point, it was clear that concerns over vaccines and autism we're not going anywhere anytime soon. It had been more than a decade since wakefielder he had been announced, his paper had been retracted countless times, new research had debunked his ideas.

But instead of quietly and shamefully retreating into the shadows, he gained followers, and not just parents of potentially vaccine injured kids, celebrities like Robert de Niro would go on to join us cause Wakefield would eventually date a supermodel and be invited to one of Donald Trump's inaugural balls.

We're in a different media landscape, but that, I think is why the the scare over MMR isn't going away, because it's constantly being regenerated and refueled and repackaged by anti vaccine campaigners using their own me media, their own Facebook channels, on YouTube, and so on. Sufl. What's different is the Internet, specifically social media. Andrew Wakefield had said things in motion in the nineties, and now the vaccine

hesitancy movement was seemingly unstoppable. It didn't matter if the press, or the scientific establishment or even vaccine court turned against it. The vaccine skeptics now had a megaphone allowed them to reach like minded people in any corner of the world. Social media was their sword, and they would learn to wield it deftly. That's next time on Doubt. Doubt is written and reported by me Kristin V. Brown Top Foreheads is our senior producer, Molly Nugent as our associate producer.

Our theme was composed and performed by Hannis Brown. Special thanks to Bloomberg editors Tim Anette and Rick Shine. If you'd like to know more about Andrew Wakefield, check out Brian Dear's book, The Doctor Who Fooled the World. Francesco Levy is the head of Bloomberg Podcasts. Be sure to subscribe to Prognosis if you haven't already. And if you like our show, please leave us a review. It helps others find out about the show. Thanks for listening, See you next time.