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Page 1 of 7 8Dealers in Second Hand WordsMonday September 3rd - Thursday September 6th
A couple of weeks ago I commented on ‘abuse of process’ and pointed out how the prosecution could manipulate both the information of the case and its outcome by delaying or dragging out the hearing. I don’t usually quote my own writing but I have done it here because I have seen my words recently become reality. In my fourth piece on the hearings I wrote:
On Tuesday 28th of August, the prosecution and the defence organised another schedule which entails ending the hearings on August 29th 2008. On the 30th August, those ranged behind the prosecution, by which I mean those linked to the government, the medical establishment, the GMC and the pharmaceutical companies, began a massive out-of-hearing campaign specifically in support of the measles component of MMR. This flurry of amplified campaign material reached the media at exactly the time that Dr Wakefield’s defence was supposed to have begun in the first time-table of the hearing. One can almost see the cerebrally bloated Professor Salisbury, hunching back into his office, his pride fatally wounded by the defence unwillingness to ask him a single question, picking up the phone, calling the Health Protection Agency and barking out an order for them to produce propaganda. The Health Protection agency organises all the scare stories about vaccination and such things as bird flu as well as all the un-scare stories about other public health matters from mobile phone masts to toxic chemicals in the water supply. The statement issued by the HPA on August 30th went to all the media and was massively reported by Sky and The Times, both outlets belonging to Rupert Murdoch who over the last decade has worked hand in glove with Tony Blair and New Labour. On the front page of The Times, a story headed ‘Vaccine warning as measles cases triple’, which included a scientifically educative five and a half inch square picture of a child with a measles rash over his face and shoulders, had a tucked away paragraph about Dr Wakefield.
Apart from the obvious issues raised by this paragraph, especially ‘over unfounded concerns’, and ‘the study … being scrutinised’, when the reality is that three doctors are on trial, it is interesting to note the semantic twist when David Rose talks about the GMC hearing. Andrew Wakefield ceases to be a doctor and the treatment of 12 children, carried out by a whole team at the Royal Free becomes ‘his’ (i.e. Wakefield’s) research. Dr Michael Fitzpartrick took up the story and ran with it in the Guardian, a paper which is becoming well known as a major outlet for pharmaceutical company propaganda.
Having dedicated a large part of his life to the maniacal Revolutionary Communist Party (RCP) it is inevitable that Fitzpatrick can’t help but draw attention to what he considers class issues; even if in a very superficial manner. His writing is always rhetorical and so founded on personal assumptions that it rarely makes sense when closely examined. At the end of the 1990’s some 2,000 parents had spoken to lawyers over serious illnesses which had occurred in their children coincident with their receiving MMR or MR. It goes without saying that all of these parents initially believed in vaccination (can you grasp that Fitzpatrick?), they all had their children vaccinated! Obviously they came from across class boundaries. That they believed that their children were damaged by a vaccine and that they then protested but were ignored, says nothing whatsoever about class. To suggest that it is only ‘privileged’ parents who are involved in the arguments about MMR and that working class parents have not fought their corner shows exactly the same contempt for the working class that the RCP showed during its short life as a ‘political party’; amongst ‘privileged’ university students and lecturers. (The Revolutionary Communist Party, were the only left grouping, to side with the State at the start of the miner’s strike, when pressure was put on the NUM to hold a ballot of members so as to get a ‘democratic mandate’ from the workforce to go ahead with a strike. Although there is nothing wrong with this view from a communist perspective – over the last century, communists have always suggested working within democratic frameworks until they reach a point where they are able to seize power – when the NUM failed to do what the RCP thought correct, the RCP withdrew from any comment, analysis or involvement in the strike. This was not of course a proper political strategy, more like a child taking his ball from a football match after a disputed gaol. What it made me think was that the RCP leadership were inevitably more concerned with ideology than the day to day lives of the working class from whom they contemptuously withdrew their support.)The situation of the parents whose children may have been adversely affected by MMR, while it has nothing to do with class, has a great deal to do with the power of the State, and what has often been termed the medical-industrial complex. If we approach the situation of vaccination and adverse reactions from a political perspective, it has everything to do with the power of the state to override the wishes of the individual. Such discourses might well leave a nasty taste of libertarianism in Fitzpatrick’s mouth. But surely he knows that his oppressive ideas about state power place him, in the eyes of many, within a collectivist tyranny. A tyranny whereby state power - in congregation with multinational commercial cartels, inimical to individual liberty, demonstrate a complete lack of care for the citizens whose safety it compromises. The real poverty of Fitzpatrick’s politics and that of his crowd, is shown by the fact that this whole matter could have been resolved along the lines of good ethical and moral principles. Had the government instructed doctors much more carefully on the application of the vaccine and avoided giving it to children who showed the slightest signs of vulnerability. Had they accepted, as they have in the past, that some children are inevitably damaged by vaccination and pledged itself to care for those who were damaged. Had they at the same time kept a high level of pharmaco-vigilance and consistently updated research that might have had a bearing on these adverse reactions, then the whole political complex of the problem could have been quite different. Anyone who thinks that the policy outlined above is subversive of democracy obviously doesn’t deserve to be working with vulnerable people in the public sector. In his Guardian article, Fitzpatrick makes a point of saying that a measles epidemic has recently been underway in Hackney in East London, and that there have so far been 150 cases in the borough in the last three months. The Times, using emotive statistic-scattered prose, suggests that ‘hundreds of thousands of children returning to school as early as next week may cause the highly infectious disease to spread’. In fact the tripling surge which the Times is referring to seems to have taken place only in Hackney, one of the poorest and most disadvantaged of London boroughs. Nevertheless, the Health Protection Agency (HPA), Fitzpatrick and The Times, all suggest that the 480 cases so far this year are ‘well on the way’ to being greater than the total annual 736 measles cases reported in 2006. This assertion, however, doesn’t really stand up. An estimate based on figures already disclosed for the first 8 months of 2007, would bring the years cases to around 732, actually less than the total cases in 2006. While we’re on the subject of statistics, perhaps someone could explain the meaning of the figures in the table for Measles Notification: England and Wales, By Age Groups, 1989-2006, that appears on the Health Protection Agency web-site. This table shows the number of measles cases notified (excluding ones at Port Authorities, to exclude the bias of people bringing measles into the country from abroad) for 2006 as 3,739. Why is this figure almost 3,000 more than the figure quoted by the HPA and repeated in the articles of Fitzpartick and others?
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