21st July - 25 July

"You think any of this makes sense when you stand back from it? You think God made an ordered universe? That's the laugh with the law. We like to pretend it makes life more reasonable. Hardly."

The central character,
a lawyer in Scott Turow's Personal Injuries

Counsel for Professor Walker-Smith, Mr Miller has spent the last week tracing the referral, condition and treatment procedures used in each case of the 12 children who came to be cited in the case-review paper published in the Lancet in 1998. Because we have heard this evidence in developing form on three previous occasions, I don't feel the need to repeat it again. Instead, after a very brief resume of it, I want to look at aspects of the case that have been much on my mind recently, including, the absence from the beginning of a proper prosecution process.

The Twelve Cases

Each time that one of the counsel goes through the cases of the twelve children cited in the Lancet case review paper, it raises the fundamental misinformation that is at the heart of the prosecution.

It is through a strategy to discredit this paper that we end up with a trial based upon it. In order to discredit three of the authors of the paper the prosecution chose to advance upon the basis of 'research misconduct' developing charges against the three doctors that grew directly from the way in which the prosecution say that the research for the paper was carried out. While actually, it is the content of the paper that the government and the drug companies would want to censure, they have approached this by attacking the ethics of the 'research' cited in the paper.

We all know why this trial is taking place, it's a win-win situation for the government and the pharmaceutical companies, a guilty verdict will discredit the three doctors and the premise that they made public, however tenuously, that there was a link between MMR, Inflammatory Bowel Disease and regressive autism. Even if the defendants are found not guilty on every count, their names have now been so sullied that they will find professional life in Britain difficult. And anyway the two years of the hearing have given the government massive space in which to move forward with its vaccine policy.

The problem from the beginning, however, for those wanting to bring the prosecution, was that there was nothing substantially wrong with the paper, the information within it, or its construction or publication. That there is no factual evidence to discredit the case-review paper, has not of course stood in the way of the vaccine manufacturers, the New Labour government or the minions of these agencies. Either by design or ignorance, it has always been hard to tell which. Brian Deer, Medico Legal Investigations and then the General Medical Council constructed their prosecution upon the false premise that the case review paper published in the Lancet was not a 'case review' paper but one that recorded the results of a full blown study that had received considerable funding, that had needed and requested ethics committee approval, parental consent, and such things as a declaration of conflict of interests by its authors.

It was possible to see from the very beginning how the government, the NHS and the science lobby groups would try to metamorphose the 'case review', into a full blown study. One of the first criticisms raised in the media was that 'the sample was too small and there was no control group'. In a case review study, of course, you are not dealing with a 'sample', you are looking only at a number of cases referred to a doctor, a hospital or observed in public through some other institution. And this group does not need a 'control group', any study of this group describes what happens clinically to this small group or sub-set, not what doesn't happen to any larger or similar group under different circumstances.

Having decided that the case review was actually a full blown study and not just a review of 12 children that had been seen at the Royal Free Hospital on the basis of clinical need, the pharma -lobby began by finding fault with the way in which the illusory ‘study' had been organised, coming up with the following basic accusations:

• Andrew Wakefield cherry picked the cases which were not sequential attenders at the RFH.
• These cases did not pass through the Royal Free on the basis of 'clinical need'.
• In fact, the three defendants went ahead with procedures regardless of their clinical necessity.
• As a rationalisation for this the prosecution claimed that the doctors didn't carry out sufficient tests in order to discover what was actually afflicting the children but simply went ahead with 'research protocol' procedures.
• Andrew Wakefield who had corralled the cases into the ‘study', putting all kinds of pressure on some parents to ensure that they entered their children in the ‘study'.
• Parental consent was not sought for these research procedures and in many cases no research ethics committee approval was sought.
• The children were subjected to all kinds of procedures, including colonoscopy and lumber puncture, that were not clinically indicated. This was tantamount to experimenting on children.
• As Dr Wakefield had not actually carried out any of these procedures, he was accused by the prosecution of organising them or 'causing them to happen'. (This is a magical process, something that the GMC took from one of the Harry Potter book's ).

Perhaps the most substantial factor missing from the 'reasoning' lying behind the prosecution case, is that of motive. The prosecution expects the panel and the public to believe that one doctor and two professors, with almost a hundred years collective experience, suddenly acted out of character breaking all the rules of their so far unblemished clinical careers. The matter of motive is crucial in this case because what the prosecution is proposing is so preposterous.

The prosecution seem to be suggesting that Dr Wakefield and others set out to destroy the government vaccine policy and line their pockets in the process. Not only this, but being characters similar to The Joker in Batman, having limitless criminal resources, they also set out to bankrupt the worlds leading pharmaceutical companies. Oh, and we shouldn't forget that at the same time, they wanted to exacerbate any public health crisis, provoking the deaths of an untold number of children and adults from measles, mumps and rubella.

Had it, in fact, been the case that the twelve children in the Lancet case-review paper were used at the whim of a group of doctors, experimented upon with the intention of glorifying the doctors concerned, many parents would have been thankful for the intervention of Brian Deer, the complainant and the GMC itself. If there had been such a case, the prosecution would have paraded these parents as symbols of the accessibility of the prosecution process. Parents whose children had been seriously wronged, helped by the GMC, would have been clamouring to give evidence against the men who had damaged their children. This is patently not the case and in fact, all the parents support the three doctors, while finding incomprehensible the perverse actions of the GMC which in essence constitute yet another hidden attack on the parents. The parents of vaccine damaged children, will not, however, be moved and have stayed committed to the few doctors who have helped and supported their children.

And it is within this contradiction that another very serious and corrupted aspect to this prosecution raises it's head. The GMC has ignored the parents and refused them a venue to voice their complaint against the NHS or the pharmaceutical companies for damaging their children with MMR and has refused to recognise their vaccine damage. We are therefore forced to view the prosecution in the context of the State paternalism that is poisoning the contemporary legal protection of children in Britain. Nothing comes across more insidiously than the fact that the GMC considers that it knows better than the parents concerned, the nature and origins of their children's illnesses.