תוספות האט געשריבן:Kosher Travel האט געשריבן:.ווען מען האט אויפגעהערט וואקסינען נאך די study פון דר. וועיקפיעלד, זענען געוועהן טויטע! ער האט בלוט אויף זיין האנט! און יא, ער האט עס געטוהן פאר financial gain!
שטותים והבלים, לא היו דברים מעולם!!
But Deer’s investigation – nominated in February 2011 for two British Press Awards – discovered that, while Wakefield held himself out to be a dispassionate scientist, two years before the Lancet paper was published – and before any of the 12 children were even referred to the hospital – he had been hired to attack MMR by a lawyer, Richard Barr: a jobbing solicitor in the small eastern English town of King’s Lynn, who hoped to raise a speculative class action lawsuit against drug companies which manufactured the triple shot.
Unlike expert witnesses, who give professional advice and opinions, Wakefield had negotiated an unprecedented contract with Barr, then aged 48, to conduct clinical and scientific research. The goal was to find evidence of what the two men claimed to be a “new syndrome”, intended to be the centrepiece of (later failed) litigation on behalf of an eventual 1,600 British families, recruited through media stories. This publicly undisclosed role for Wakefield created the grossest conflict of interest, and the exposure of it by Deer, in February 2004, led to public uproar in Britain, the retraction of the Lancet report’s conclusions section, and, from July 2007 to May 2010, the longest-ever professional misconduct hearing by the UK’s General Medical Council (GMC).
Barr [audio] paid the doctor with money from the UK legal aid fund: run by the government to give poorer people access to justice. Wakefield charged at the extraordinary rate of £150 an hour – billed through a company of his wife’s – eventually totalling, for generic work alone, what the UK Legal Services Commission, pressed by Deer under the freedom of information act, said was £435,643 (then about $750,000 US), plus expenses. These hourly fees – revealed in The Sunday Times in December 2006 – gave the doctor a direct personal, but undeclared, financial interest in his research claims: totalling more than eight times his reported annual salary and creating an incentive not only for him to launch the alarm, but to keep it going for as long as possible.
In addition to the personal payments, Wakefield was awarded an initial £55,000, which he had applied for in June 1996, but which, like the hourly fees, he never declared to the Lancet as he should have done, for the express purpose of conducting the research later submitted to the journal. This start-up funding was part of a staggering £26.2m of taxpayers’ money (more than $56m US at 2014 prices) eventually shared among a small group of doctors and lawyers, working under Barr’s and Wakefield’s direction, trying to prove that MMR caused the previously unheard-of “syndrome”. Yet more surprising, Wakefield had asserted the existence of such a syndrome – which allegedly included what he would dub “autistic enterocolitis” – before he performed the research which purportedly discovered it.
This Barr-Wakefield deal was the foundation of the vaccine crisis, both in Britain and throughout the world. “I have mentioned to you before that the prime objective is to produce unassailable evidence in court so as to convince a court that these vaccines are dangerous,” the lawyer reminded the doctor in a confidential letter, six months before the Lancet report.
And, if this was not enough to cast doubt on the research’s objectivity, The Sunday Times investigation unearthed another shocking conflict of interest. In June 1997 – nearly nine months before the press conference at which Wakefield called for single vaccines – he had filed a patent on products, including his own supposedly “safer” single measles vaccine, which only stood any prospect of success if confidence in MMR was damaged.
Although Wakefield denied any such plans, his proposed shot, and a network of companies intended to raise venture capital for purported inventions – including “a replacement for attenuated viral vaccines”, commercial testing kits and what he claimed to be a possible “complete cure” for autism – were set out in confidential documents.
One Wakefield business was awarded £800,000 from the legal aid fund on the strength of (later discredited) data which he had co-authored. And, even as the Lancet paper was being prepared, behind the scenes he was negotiating extraordinary plans to exploit the public alarm with secret schemes that would line his pockets. “Disgraced doctor Andrew Wakefield plotted to make £28 million a year from the MMR jab panic he triggered,” was how the British tabloid newspaper The Sun, for example, reported in January 2011 on this disclosure from Deer.