L’affaire Wakefield: shades of Dreyfus

... & BMJ’s descent into tabloid science

Age of Autism links to Alliance for Human Resesearch Protection for Vera Sharav's damning indictment of the British Medical Journal's intervention in the Wakefield affair. She traces its history from the beginning but focuses on the journal's allegations of  fraud in 2011 and its sinister repercussions.

L’affaire Wakefield: Shades of Dreyfus & BMJ’s Descent into Tabloid Science

Introduction: I have undertaken this review of the case against Dr. Andrew Wakefield because the issues involved are far more consequential than the vilification of one doctor. The issues, as I see them, involve (a) collusion of public health officials to deceive the public by concealing scientific evidence that confirms empirical evidence of serious harm linked to vaccines – in particular polyvalent vaccines; (b) the “willful blindness” by the medical community as it uncritically fell in line with a government dictated vaccination policy driven by corporate business interests.

Public health officials and the medical profession have abrogated their professional, public, and human responsibility, by failing to honestly examine the iatrogenic harm caused by expansive, indiscriminate, and increasingly aggressive vaccination policies. On a human level, the documented evidence shows a callous disregard for the plight of thousands of children who suffer irreversible harm, as if they were unavoidable “collateral damage”.

All of the documented evidence and testimonies submitted to the General Medical Council, upon which GMC issued its guilty verdicts against Dr. Wakefield and his two co-defendants in 2010, were subsequently forensically assessed by the UK High Court in March 2012, in the appeal of Professor John Walker-Smith, the senior clinician and senior author of the Lancet case series. The High Court determined that the verdicts of professional misconduct and ethics violations were unsupported by the evidence.

Indeed, the adjudicated evidence refutes the case against Dr. Wakefield; the documents and testimonies demonstrate that there is no evidence whatsoever, to support the charges of professional misconduct, much less the accusation of fraud. The accusation of fraud was hurled by the Editor-in-Chief of the BMJ, a medical journal whose corporate ownership is intertwined with the vaccine manufacturing Behemoths, Merck – with whom BMJ signed a partnership agreement in 2008 – and GlaxoSmithKline which provides additional financial support to BMJ. Among their numerous vaccine products, Merck and GSK manufacture the MMR vaccine.

My commentary is buttressed with details from the High Court decision (2012); transcripts of testimony before the General Medical Council (2007- 2010); documents and testimony that have been judicially adjudicated; the sworn deposition of the Deputy Editor of the BMJ with internal BMJ emails(2012); internal correspondence by CDC officials and CDC-commissioned scientists (2000-2009, some uncovered in 2011; new documents obtained in July 2017); the suppressed finding of CDC’s first large-scale epidemiological study (1999) and a transcript of the closed door meeting of the Epidemic Intelligence Service at Simpsonwood (2000); a transcript of the closed meeting of the US Institute of Medicine Committee on Immunization Safety Review (2001); the U.S. Grand Jury criminal indictment of Dr. Poul Thorsen (2011); transcripts of the UK Joint Committee on Vaccination and Immunisation (1988); a confidential report Re: Infanrix hexa submitted by GlaxoSmithKline to the European Medicines Agency (2012) documenting sudden infant deaths; Cochrane Collaboration MMR reviews (2003, 2005, 2012); HHS Inspector General investigation report – CDC advisory panel corruption (2009); CDC scientists letter of complaint about “rogue interests” “questionable and unethical practices” (2016)...    Read more at AHRP.org here.

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By Vera Sharav

A public advocate for human rights is the founder and president of the Alliance for Human Research Protection (AHRP) which serves as an information resource and public interest watchdog organization whose goal is to unlock the walls of secrecy in biomedical research and bring accountability to that endeavor. AHRP Infomails have a wide following: they are read by physicians and scientists, public health officials, journalists, lawyers, and patient advocacy organizations.

Her advocacy achievements include: suspension of Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) pesticide experiment (CHEERS) on children; complaint led to two federal investigations on the use of children in foster care as guinea pigs in experimental AIDS drug and vaccine trials; suspension of smallpox vaccine on children; suspension of “violence prediction” experiment that exposed 6–11 year old NYC boys of color to fenfluramine ; opened a public debate about the ethics of relapse-inducing experiments in schizophrenia patients. Organized families and victims of unethical research to join her in testifying before the National Bioethics Advisory Committee (NBAC) — re: unethical experimentation on mentally disabled psychiatric patients; those testimonies led to a prize-winning series in the Boston Globe, “Doing Harm: Research on the Mentally Ill” — ultimately resulting in the shutdown of 29 clinical trials at the National Institute of Mental Health (1999).

Mrs. Sharav served on the Children’s Workgroup of the National Human Research Protection Advisory Committee where she was the sole dissenter objecting to expanded use of children in high risk medical experiments. She has testified before public policy advisory panels including, the Institute of Medicine — against human pesticide experiments; against prison drug research; numerous FDA hearings, against misuse of psychotropic drugs for children.

She has been an invited presenter at various professional and academic forums: World Federation of Science Journalists, London; National Academy of Sciences Policy Fellow program and National Public Health Association re: screening for mental illness; Consumers Institute for Medicines and Health, Stockholm — re: America’s overmedicated children; Columbia University; NY Hospital, Cornell; U.S. military medical ethics forum; University of Texas.

Her recent peer-reviewed publications include: Medical Ethics and Contemporary Medicine in Vaccine Epidemic Edited by Louise Kuo Habakus and Mary Holland, JD (2011); Screening for Mental Illness: The Merger of Eugenics and the Drug Industry, Ethical Human Psychology and Psychiatry (2005); Conflicts of Interest in Biomedical Research Harm Children With and Without Disabilities,” Journal of Disability Policy Studies (2004); “The Impact of FDAMA on the recruitment of children for research,” EHPP (2003); “Children in Clinical Research: A Conflict of Moral Values,” American Journal of Bioethics (2003); The ethics of conducting psychosis-inducing experiments,” Accountability in Research (1999).

Read recent Profile of Vera Sharav: “Distrustful of authority…a fierce critic of medical establishment” in STAT News /Reporting from the frontiers of health and medicine.

(Source: ageofautism.com; November 1, 2017; http://bit.ly/2zpc3Bf)
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