7

The Utter Irrelevance of Professor Salisbury

Monday 13 August – Thursday 24 August

The inability of prosecution witnesses to attend the hearing through illness or some other cause can be a difficult matter for the defence. This is partly because witnesses who have anything contentious to say should be required to make their accusation directly to the defendants and should be available in person for cross examination.

In the case of the witness whose statement was read on the afternoon of Monday August 13, Mr Koonan, while not objecting to the statement being read, had to say that it was not accepted by the defence and the details of it would be disputed when the defence presented its case.

Miss Smith then proceeded to read the statement of Russ Phips into the record. Phips was an Assistant Director of Finance from 1991 – 2006 and the financial administrator of the Special Trustees at the Royal Free. The statement bore witness to the fact that the money which had arrived at the Royal Free from Dawbarns solicitors had been initially lodged with the Special Trustees and then paid out to Dr Wakefield, so creating the conflict of interest which they are so keen on proving.

This of course seems to be a good point for the prosecution and they have pursued it throughout the hearing. However, like much of the prosecution case, the point has now proved to be wrong. The money sent on from the Legal Aid Board and deposited with the Special Trustees was, in fact, paid out immediately to Ros Sim a Medical Laboratory Scientific Officer concerned with viral detection at the Royal Free.

It was difficult to understand exactly what Mr Phips was saying about the money which originated from the Legal Aid Board. To put it in common parlance it seemed, very much, as if he was suggesting that there was an attempt to ‘launder’ the money through the Special Trustees before paying it into Dr Wakefield’s general research funds.

The next morning Professor Ravel gave evidence. To a great extent, Professor Ravel was a typical prosecution witness; short on facts which might incriminate the three defendants and obviously unsure of what was expected of him. This circumstance was illustrated by the Professor when he was being led through his evidence by Miss Smith. At one point, his flow on an important matter was interrupted, he thought for a moment and then said:

'I've forgotten what I was going to say'

To which Miss Smith blithely responded, ‘Don’t worry’ and passed on to the next issue.

Miss Smith’s continued in her attempt to assert, this time through Ravel, that Dr Wakefield was somehow experimenting, without permission and unethically, on children. This previously ill-fated line of attack took another turn when she tried to insinuate into the evidence the idea that Dr Wakefield’s unit might be illegally and unethically taking biopsy samples from children and then using these for research.

Professor Ravel, however, had nothing bad to say about the clinical methods of the gastroenterology team. He gave evidence about the histology group, which came together to scrutinise clinical cases, and to look at biopsies and samples taken during internal examination. This evidence succeeded simply in shedding further light on how a dedicated group of doctors worked with considerable commitment in a collegiate atmosphere to come to the best conclusions on behalf of their patients.

Having spent many wasted Saturday evenings watching programmes like Casualty, the evidence which began to blossom about the histology meetings ran completely contrary to my received opinion of how doctors in large hospitals work. It would never have occurred to me that, in a profession which is always portrayed as being full of egotists, collective discussions about diagnosis and the outcome of various procedures might be profitably held.

One of Professor Ravel’s tasks as Joint Head of the Department of Histopathology, was to police the taking of biopsy and other samples which might be snipped from patients bodies during this or that procedure. My mind was filled with cartoons of hospital administrators, acting as the docks’ police did before and just after the second world-war. Every worker was searched for stolen goods as he left for home through the dock gates. ‘So what ‘ave we ‘ere chummy, a little bit of bowel. OK, over ‘ere, empty your pockets, drop your pants and lets have a look in your orifices.’

Oddly enough although Ravel’s task had led him to ask questions about the biopsy material taken from the children, these samples had all turned out to be ethically accounted for. Further than this, he made the point that often when doctors do try to slip human material out of the operating theatre, it turns out usually to be at the behest of pharmaceutical company trials for which patients permission has not been sought.

It turned out that Professor Ravel had been the person who was asked to asses at least two of Dr Wakefield’s project proposals. In both cases he was happy to give approval to these studies. About one of them he said, as if taking it for granted, It was ‘a well prepared document; a good example of that kind of study’.