Part Two: Andrew Wakefield: The Worst Doctor Alive

In part two on the Anti-Vaccine Movement, Robert is joined again by Anna Salinas and they discuss corrupt doctor, Andrew Wakefield.

Learn more about your ad-choices at https://www.iheartpodcastnetwork.com

See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:00):
Mmmm. Welcome to Behind the Bastards, the show where we
tell you everything you don't know about the very worst
people in all the history. I'm Robert Evans. Sophie does
not like me using my my accent, which I consider
a type of racism, because I am a Southern man
and I have to hide the reality of who I am.

(00:23):
Is that your natural voice, that's my natural no affectation,
that's me. That's deep South, deep South man. I I'm
a Southern gentleman. I don't know. I feel like you
went from Southern farmer to uh, Southern lawyer in a
white linen suit. Well, now that one was not my honor.

(00:43):
There's no there's nothing classy about my background. H yeah.
Now Anna Selina's back comics by Anna Comics artist Uh.
Uh street fighter uh. President of the Anti Vaccination Society
of America. Unfortunately, that is why you brought me on here,
not because of my comics or Twitter hot takes, but

(01:07):
because I am the president of the anti vaxers. That
was me to me and you're not. But we are
talking about the anti vaccine movement still we are, and
I feel weirdly conflicted about it so far because we
spent an episode talking about how both sides had points
and we're also racist. Yeah, I mean everybody's racist. In

(01:29):
the nineties, you're not going to find a lot of
not racist people. Even like the not racist people still
use terms that are like, oh, guys, you are. Yeah.
It's like watching Blazing Saddles where it's like, oh my god, yeah, yeah,
I could see like revolutionary for its time, but also
like my old bosses were like, it's the best movie.

(01:52):
That's your that's your homework. You need to go watch
that movie. It's so funny. And I watched it and look,
that movie is racist and sexist. And the first time
it was a huge step forward. I understand nobody and
say you'll never like it was everything that's great on
a scale when we talk about history, yes, for itst

(02:15):
time it was, but watching it now, it's just like,
this is not least. You go to a lot of abolitionists,
like people who are like fighting to end slavery in
the eighteen fifties, and they would be like, well, of course,
you know, black people earned as intelligent as white people,
but they shouldn't be slaves. And it's like, okay, well
you're racist, but you're not in favorite slavery. So I
guess we're greating on a curve here. That's true. Yeah,

(02:37):
it's it's just it's complicated. I can't wait for twenty
years from now when people look over at my tweets,
because you know, Twitter will be here in twenty years. Oh. Absolutely,
this one all collapsed like the house of cards that
people look at my tweets and be like, oh problematic. Yeah,
I feel like that might be just bite owning pets
and stuff. You think, No, I wonder if that's the

(03:02):
next frontier. Who knows. I know that future generalation generations
will judge me for all of the meat that I yeah,
no arguments there. I hope. I hope we get there.
We will, I mean, because the planet will die, that's true.
That's like with these vaccines. It's like people will get it,
people will get it, but tens of thousands of people

(03:22):
will die first. The human totally nightmarish. That's what convinces people.
That's what convinces people. I love. I guess one of
my favorite kinds of stories is like terrible people who
we're heroes. Still, Like there's this great story of like
during the Japanese invasion. I think it was not Shanghai. Um,
it might have been Shanghai. Was the Japanese invasion of
this one Chinese city where like a massacred tens of

(03:45):
thousands of civilians, and like the guy who protected a
huge number of them by like creating this international quarter
in the city to like protect all of these civilians
from being murdered by the Japanese was a Nazi Like
this literal knots are you saving thousands of women and
children from like the Japanese murder? So why did he
Well because he was just like everyone was a member

(04:07):
of the and this was like before the Holocaust really
got started. So he was like racist and anti Semitic,
but he wasn't pro murder. He was just like a
businessman who joined the Nazi party. But like once he
saw people getting killed in the streets, was like, I
don't want this happening. It's a it's a mess. Like
that is a mess. That's a mess. I I'm always
interested in stories like that of like people who are

(04:30):
objectively flawed bad people. You still did a good thing. Well.
I think we are all objectively flawed bad people doing
what we think is right or ignoring our moral compass altogether.
And those people are not always the worst people. I
ignore my moral compass all the time, all the time.
And uh, I'm not the worst person. And that's that's

(04:53):
what I always shoot for, is not the worst, not
the worst, My the worst person today. Note Roger Stone
is still alive. Fantastic good. I'm doing nailing it. The
bar is low boy. This has been a long and
meandering introduction. We're talking about Andrew Wakefield today. Yes, any Wakefield? Okay?
So uh. The current ongoing measles outbreak of two thousand, nineteen,

(05:14):
centering around Portland, Oregon, is the largest such outbreak in
twenty years. Clark County, Washington, where the outbreak began, had
a measles vaccination rate of just seventy eight percent, not
high enough for her community to protect the immuno compromised.
Clark County just happens to be a recognized hotspot of
anti vaccine sentiment. In December two thousan fourteen, a trip
to Disneyland led to a hundred and forty seven confirmed
cases of measles. A hundred and ten of those people

(05:36):
lived in California, and half of that group had not
taken the MMR vaccine, so this is not purely a
coastal phenomenon. Over the last five years, the number of
children who go unvaccinated each year, or in Texas each year,
has doubled to more than fifty seven thousand. Of course
it's Texas. Of course it's Texas. The direct cause here
is the existence of non medical exemptions, essentially a descendant

(05:57):
of the old British exemptions for conscientious objectors. But the
real true cause of these outbreaks of diseases that by
all right, should be long dead by now is a
single man. His name is Andrew Wakefield, who's his name
should be more well known. I feel like Jenny McCarthy
really gets the blame for this movement, and what she's
doing is bad, But this guy's why. Oh yeah, bring

(06:20):
it on. Andrew was born in nineteen fifty seven. We
don't know an awful lot about his early life, or
at least I was not able to find an awful lot.
His parents were both doctors, and his father was a neurologist,
which is about the doctor is kind of doctor that exists? Um. Yeah.
He enrolled in St. Mary's Hospital Medical School as a
young adult, focusing on gastro Inturology. He seems to have
been popular throughout this period. He was the captain of

(06:42):
his medical school's rugby team and generally looked to be
on a winning path in life when he graduated. And
I'm just going to say this, I played female rugby
and frougby as it's known, and male rugby players can't
be a little much they can, they get a little brilli,
they can. It would have been a red flag for
this guy. It's basically war without guns or paths or paths,

(07:04):
and when women do it, it's pretty cool and feminist.
But women do it, they get fraddy. Yeah well yeah, well,
are making a blanket statement. I hope male rugby players.
There's only one sport that I'm going to attack blanket
all of the players of on this podcast, and that's
high ally. Yes. Yeah, well that's a correct take. Yeah yeah,

(07:26):
funk that sport. Fuck you for doing it. Yes, strong stance. Now.
For more than a decade, Andrew Wakefield seems to have
been a perfectly fine doctor and medical researcher. From nine
to nineteen and nine, he worked at the University of
Toronto as part of a team studying tissue rejection from
transplanted intestines. From the early nineteen nineties. Back in the UK,
he started doing research at the Royal Free College of London.

(07:47):
In nineteen three, he published an article suggesting that the
measles virus might cause Crone's disease. This drew a lot
of ice his wife, and two years later, when he
published research suggesting that the measles vaccine might cause Crone's disease,
even more people's started talking about this brash young doctor
who was turning the system on his head. Now a
lot of evidence suggests that there is a link between
measles exposure and childhood and Crown's disease. There is, however,

(08:10):
no evidence of a link between vaccination and Crown's disease.
At the time when he started the research and made
sense to look into, made sense to look into. But
did he have any bias pushing him toward. That's going
to be a big focus of the episodes. So, and
one thing I should point out is that if you
know a lot of people with autism, kids with autism
in particular, a lot of them have weird bowel issues,

(08:30):
gastrointestinal issues and stuff like that. It's very common. So
this is something that like people and trying to explain
for a while, and why why do these kids with
autism also have all of these weird like gastrointestinal issues.
So that's why he sort of gets into the study
of autism as a gastroenturologist because there's some stuff there
that that needs explaining. Okay, So it seems like maybe
Andrew Wakefield was starting from an honest place. It's not

(08:52):
clear at what point that changed, but the evidence suggests
that Andrew Wakefield instantly saw financial opportunity in this purported
connection between the MEAs vaccine and Crown's disease. In March,
Wakefield filed for a patent for a test that would
detect Crown's disease or ulcerative colitis by finding measles virus
in the battel tissue product or fluids. Two years later,

(09:13):
Andrew Wakefield drew up a business scheme to present to investors.
In it, he suggested using his patented tests to create
a company that would make enormous profits from running these tests.
The anticipated annual income top seventy two million pounds per year.
The perspectives he put together trying to Interact investors noted
in view of the unique services offered by the company
and its technology, particularly for the molecular diagnostic the essays

(09:35):
can command premium prices. It sounds like he's just a scammer.
It sounds like he's just a scam artist already. You
don't even so it's so scammy like there's like so
many levels that a scam artist could be a scammer.
And Andrew Wakefield is a scammer on twice as many
levels as that. But it's going to take some unpacking
to get through. So during all this time, Wakefield was

(09:56):
conducting a study at the Royal Free College. This study
of tw children suggested that the MMR vaccine, which bundled measles, mumps,
and rubella vaccinations together, could cause the measles virus to
infect a child's intestines. Now, this study was an attempt
to explain something that yeah parents with autistic children reported
for years. Wigfield's research, published in nine seemed to suggest

(10:17):
that the MMR vaccine harmed not just the child's intestines,
but the neurons and its brain. So this is the
beginning of the idea that like, maybe this vaccine is
what's causing the auticis and what year is this? This
is when he publishes his research. Okay, so this is
pretty recent, pretty recent, and again twelve kids, so not
a huge study, not what you would want to make

(10:39):
sweeping claims about a vaccine. I feel like technically that
would be rejected, right, that's the smallest sample. Flight Well,
that is how you start, you know, you would be
an anecdotal at that point. It seems like it would
be anecdotal. It is almost It's one of those things
where if if he had immediately gone from that to
doing a two and fifty person study or something like that,
that would be how a normal scientists have preceded. But

(11:03):
that was not what Wakefield did. Wakefield did not immediately
start telling people to not vaccinate, like he wasn't starting
from anti vaccine, but he did start by saying, like,
because of this research, I found we should stop bundling
all these vaccinations together, and right at that same time,
eight months before releasing his paper, actually he patented a
single measles vaccine, which is what he claimed after releasing

(11:26):
his paper was the safest way to vaccinate your kids.
Separate all the vaccinations so when they released this study
in nineteen ninety eight. Andrew Wakefield in the Royal Free
Medical School released the paper via a twenty three minute
long video news conference, which is not how scientific studies
involving twelve people are usually. You wanted people to see

(11:46):
his face. Wanted people to see his face. In this
press conference. He made a very direct plea for people
to start using the exact kind of single use vaccine
he just patented eight months before. Oh god, quote, this
is Wakefield. There is fishent anxiety in my own mind
for the long term safety of the polyvalent vaccine that
is the MMR vaccination and combination that I think it
should be suspended in favor of the single vaccines. Now.

(12:10):
The journal he published in The Lancet is an old
and extremely authoritative publication. They and his hospital, the Royal
Free Hospital, knew about Wakefield's ambitions to profit off of
this work. They threw resources into helping him launch his
study with the press conference, which you know, again is
not the norm. They knew he was trying to raise
money to start a company, and they knew he'd patented
a form of medicine that he was advising everyone to take.
So both institutions took steps to protect themselves. The Lancet

(12:33):
published a critique of wakefield study and the same issue
in which it was released. This critique pointed out that
the sample group was too small to draw big conclusions
from and that it had not been randomly determined. The
Lancet did not make any mention of this critical article
in the press release, though. The Royal Free Hospital convened
a panel of five doctors to present to follow up
press conference, where their panel would all agree that people

(12:54):
should keep using the MMR vaccine until more research had
been done. Now, that was the plan for the press conference,
but it didn't work out that way. The press conference
wound up turning into a ship show. I found a
recollection of it from a journalist who attended. Quote the
five of them the panel that the hospital had convened.
We're sitting behind a table with Andrew Wakefield on the
extreme left in Ari Zuckerman on the right. The tension

(13:15):
rose as the event progressed, and by the end Wakefield
was coolly urging patients to give their children single vaccines
at annual intervals, while Zuckerman was on his feet banging
the lectern and frustration as he insisted that the MMR
vaccine had been given to millions of children around the
world and was safe. So within a year of this
press conference, Andrew Wakefield had become the director of two businesses,
both Carmel and Unigenetics Ltd, who were registered in early

(13:37):
nine Right after this press conference came out, Andrew Wakefield
submitted a confidential report on behalf of Unigenetics to the
British Legal Aid Board and secured eight hundred thousand dollars
in public funding to perform his tests on children in
a public hospital. Ward Wakefield sought an additional two point
one million pounds to get his venture off the ground.
In a quote private and confidential prospectus that later wound

(13:58):
up in the hands of a journalist for the British
Medical Journal, Andrew Wakefield stated that he believed that within
three years of launching his diagnostic testing business, it would
be worth twenty eight million pounds. He's so transparent. If
you're listening, I can see. I mean, it's just how
people get scammed. It's just yet another grifter or era

(14:18):
of grifters. Now Wakefield still needed that investment money and
one study of twelve kids no matter how publicized, was
not going to draw the kind of funding that he needed,
especially since other members of the medical community had started
loudly pointing out the flaws in Wakefield's research. In order
to secure that extra cash, Andrew Wakefield and a pathologist
he had hired for Unigenetics, prepared to present new research

(14:38):
at a London meeting of the Pathological Society in March
of two thousand. According to the British Medical Journal quote,
based on alleged gut biopsy samples from Walker Smith's patients
tend with autism and three with Crohn's disease tested at
a Dublin laboratory, it claimed a possible causal link and
given a Wakefield presentation, promised a storm like the press
conference two years before. So he's done more research, but

(15:00):
he's not doing another study. He's just going straight to
press conference without actually publishing a peer of you'd study. Yeah,
and did you say ten people? Ten thirteen total patients?
This is not how you do research. This is not
how you do research. And it's it's such bad science
that I don't even have a good way to segue

(15:21):
into this Dorito's plug. But I'm gonna I'm gonna that's
a good Derito Dorito's if you're listening, sponsor this podcast now.
And in deference to the fans who don't like the
sound of crunching Dorito's. Really it's like the anti vaccine
pro vaccine argument in the eighteen hundreds, were like, there's

(15:41):
two sides here. There's a lot of people who say
more Dorito's crunching, and a lot of people who say less.
I'm gonna lean on the side of not doing as
much Dorito's crunching. But every now and then, you gotta
right now and then I got, you know, fifteen minute
fast for our fifteen seconds past forward. That's the thing. Yeah,
that will be the only crunch in this episode. But
I just needed it. I needed to. I want to
believe everyone who listens to podcast has a little love

(16:05):
of a s mr. Oh yeah, I mean you would hope.
Some people don't like the sound of eating, which is
why I wolf found like a third of a bag
of Derrisos like a fucking monster. Yeah, I was eating
my cookies, so I was trying to be so sneaky
about it. Sophie's eating dog treats right now. Yeah, I mean,
while they're next to her bag of fritos. There's no

(16:26):
way to know which one she's eating, and she did reach. Yeah,
that's what I thought. Now. Wakefield started talking with pharmaceutical
companies right before this planned like press release um. One
of them even flew him to Canada to talk. He
was negotiating with Johnson and Johnson, Merk and Smith Klent
Beach him. So it looked like he was about to
get the funding. He wanted a couple of million dollars

(16:47):
to start producing this single shot vaccine. Where was the
oversight of this guy? Why did he lose his license?
That's coming up. Thankfully he did not get to carry
out all of his plans. Another doctor, Mark Peppi's, would
find to put a stop to wakefield scheme. Peppies had
recently been made the head of medicine at the Royal
Free College and he did not like Wakefield or his research.
Peppi's convinced the college to send Wakefield a letter finally

(17:09):
admitting their concern about his involvement with these new companies
he'd created in his financial interest in producing the single
use measles vaccine quote. This concern arose originally because the
company's business plan appears to depend on premature, scientifically unjustified
publication of results which do not conform to the rigorous
academic and scientific standards that are generally expected. So first study, fine,

(17:30):
it's okay to do if you're trying to prove something
new and put out a study with a small sample size.
But the fact that your second press release isn't even
a study and involves one more person this seems shady
to us. So the college did not immediately cut his
funding or fire him. They offered him a continuation of
his funding if he would conduct new research and test
his theories about the MMR vaccine. He was promised help

(17:52):
with the study of a hundred and fifty children to
see if his research for the lance that could be
replicated with a larger group was what real scientists do.
But mon, how did they not get it by this point? Well,
so what might have been wishful thinking? Um, some of
it might have been legitimately being like, okay, well, maybe
you know, there's clearly something going on between like bow
disorders and autism, so maybe something's happening here it's worth

(18:13):
looking into. So they offered to pay him to do
a study with a hundred and fifty children uh and
Wakefield initially agreed to conduct the study, but he never
actually did because the nine lands that study had been
a total scam. None of this came out until two
thousand eleven, when a journalist named Brian Deer published an
investigation for the British Journal of Medicine. It was revealed

(18:35):
for the first time that Andrew Wakefield had actually been
running a second secret scam alongside his other more obvious scams.
Rather than being a legitimate study motivated by sheer interest
in the truth, his Lancet paper had essentially been commissioned
by a lawyer named Richard Barr, who represented a bunch
of families who believed their kids had gotten sick through
the MMR vaccine. Wakefield's research started as paid work for

(18:55):
a lawyer trying to justify a lawsuit. He made something
like four hundred fifty thou dollars for this work alone.
None of this was known until Brian Deer's report came out.
All of Wakefield's patients had been recruited by anti MMR
vaccine campaigners, and even then, Deer's research showed that Wakefield
had strayed up lied about many of their symptoms. Being
a journalist, Brian Deer actually took Wakefield's research to the

(19:18):
parents of the kids in the study to like be like,
is this what happened to your kid? Is this what
happened to your kid? Is this what happened to your kid?
And it turns out that he had essentially misrepresented everybody's symptoms.
Whoa so complete fabrica, complete fabrication. Not just a guy
who came up with a study, saw that there might
be a connection and they decided to try to profit
on it, which is what it looked like at first,

(19:39):
but a guy whose whole study was falsified from the
beginning because a lawyer was paying him to find a connection.
God damn it. Yeah, now we're going to get into
just how that famous Lancet study, which by the way,
is still to this day the single biggest scientific underpenning
of the anti vaccine movement. Do they know it's fake? Well,

(20:00):
everyone does, but some people don't accept it. It's like,
you know, Nathan Phillips and that Sandman kid confrontation on
the in d C where we all have the same
hour and forty five minute video of everything we read
different and we all read it differently. This one is
like it was fake. Truth is dead, Anna, truth is dead,
but you know it's not dead. Doritos, Derito's and the

(20:22):
wonderful sponsors that helped keep this show afloat with products
and services. We're back, Anna, You're eating a derrito, I am,
But I'm trying to avoid chewing into the mic because
I know some people don't like it. Some people don't
like it. You know what nobody likes falsified medical studies.

(20:45):
People need to collapsing vaccination rates in the Western world.
So Brian Deer put together He's got a great article
for the British medic Coool Journal that goes into detail
on all this, but he put together a little summary
that just sort of walked through how bullshit the study us.
So I'm going to read from that little bullet point summary.
The Lancet paper was a case series of twelve child patients.

(21:06):
It reported a proposed new syndrome of intero colitis and
regressive autism, and associated this with MMR as an apparent
precipitating event, but in fact, three of nine children reported
with regressive autism did not have autism diagnosed at all.
Only one child clearly had regressive autism. Despite the paper
claiming that all twelve children were previously normal, five had

(21:26):
documented pre existing developmental concerns. Some children were reported to
have experienced first behavioral symptoms within days of MMR, but
the records documented these as starting some months after vaccination.
In nine cases, unremarkable colonic history O pathology reports noting
no or minimal fluctuations and inflammatory cell populations were changed
after a medical school research review to non specific colitis.

(21:50):
The parents of eight children were reported as blaming MMR,
but eleven families made this allegation at the hospital. The
exclusion of three allegations, all giving times to onset of
problems in months, helped to create the appearance of a
fourteen day temporal link. Patients recruited through anti MMR campaigners,
and the study was commissioned and funded for planned litigation.
So it was false. It was all lies. It was

(22:12):
just nonsense. He just he found some people who are
willing to who are saying what he wanted the study
to say, and when people reported something else, he just
lied and said that they said the same thing as
the other people. I mean, that's really really bad, and
I understand that doctors were reporting on it, but it's
almost like we need a better measure to discredit someone

(22:36):
who is a real doctor saying lies, yeah, and that
that does happen in this So there was no way
Andrew Wakefield could replicate his research on a larger group
of patients under the watchful eye of critical experts because
his research was a sham, a cheap cash grab from
the very beginning. Wakefield refused to carry out the follow
up study, which the Royal Free College would have paid for,

(22:57):
and tried to proceed on capitalizing on the controversy stirred up.
In September two, he responded to the College quote, it
is clear that academic freedom is essential and cannot be traded.
It is the unanimous decision of my collaborators and co
workers that it is only appropriate that we define our
research objectives, we enact the studies is appropriately reviewed and approved,
and we decide as and when we deem the work
suitable for submission for peer review. This is how he said,

(23:20):
I'm not going to carry out another study trying to
prove my research works. This is so depressing, though, because
once something is out in the public eye, it's a thing,
and this took off like wildfire. So Wakefield's career as
a legitimate doctor ends at this point. He's fired. In

(23:41):
two thousand one. Dr Peppi's later claimed quote, we paid
him to go away, giving him two years salary upfront
and a statement that he was innocent of any misconduct.
What it looked bad for them too. They had helped
publicize a wildly fallacious study. Guys, come on. They also
promised not to say anything about the fact that they
knew he was a fraud. Quote. And of course one

(24:01):
of the conditions of him going away was that I
wasn't supposed to say anything critical of him to anybody
forever after. Dr Peppi's is clearly kind of piste bad policy.
Bad policy. In the year since, other doctors have directed
plenty of ire towards Andrew Wakefield. Two thousand three paper
published in the Archives of Pediatrics and Adolescent Medicine used
more than a dozen epidemiological studies and concluded that there

(24:22):
was no evidence supporting an association between autism and the
MMR vaccine. Multiple other peer reviewed studies in the fifteen
years since have said the same thing. In February of
two ten, the editors of the lance that retracted Wakefield study.
They told The Guardian that quote, it was utterly clear,
without any ambiguity at all, that the statements in the
paper were utterly false. This prompted a review by the

(24:44):
General Medical Council, which in May of two thousand ten
stripped Andrew Wakefield of his medical license, among other things.
Come on, the slowness of that is like, that's white privilege, man, Yeah,
and doctor prov doctor, I think protecting their own kind.
And more than that, I think it's then protecting themselves.

(25:05):
Just like they'd hoped that this would fade away and
it didn't, and so they had to do something. No,
you have to deal with this ship out front now, Anna,
I bet you're thinking there's nothing else we could learn
about how Andrew Wakefield conducted the study. That makes it shadier.
What there's more So, he already lied about what their

(25:27):
autism was and what they were saying it was caused by,
and when it started, lied about who he was working
for when he started doing the fact that he was
being paid by a lawyer to prove something, the fact
that he patented a medicine specifically to try to sell it.
After releasing this right he'd lied about all that, but
it gets shadier. Okay. Yeah, So that investigation that stripped

(25:49):
him of his medical license found that, among other things,
Andrew Wakefield had bribed children at his son's tenth birthday
party to let him use their blood for research. Do
we know how heed, Oh boy, we do. Yeah. Now
there's actual video of him describing this. I found a
report about that video in a New York Times article.

(26:12):
The video showed him at a conference in telling the
audience about the time he lined up kids to give
blood samples at the birthday party of one of his children.
He needed a control group of children who did not
have autism, and this was convenient. Two children fainted, he said,
another threw up over his mother. For their service, they
were rewarded with five pounds. People said to me, Andrew,
you know you can't do this to people. Children won't

(26:33):
come back, he recounted. I said, you're wrong. Listen, we
live in a free market economy. Next year they'll want
ten pounds. Whoa First of all, that poor kid whose
birthday it was like rough birthday, rough birthday. He got bullied.
After that. They were all like, I don't want to
go to your birthday. You guys want to come over

(26:54):
to my house. No, your dad's gonna take our blood again.
But what's even crazier is not only did he take
their blood, they fainted and threw up, Like kids don't
like blood drawn at a birthday. I mean he was
taking a sizeable amount for that to happen, I have
to imagine, but also at a birthday party when they

(27:15):
were like filled with cake and excited. And I don't know,
Andrew Wakefield, We've all had blood drawn as kids. There's
some nurses and doctors that are really good at it,
that are good at like interfacing with the kid and
making it comforting. And there's some doctors that's like, no,
I'm just going to do this and it sucks. I'm
gonna guess he was one of the bad. He wasn't
good at Everyone is complicit. This is my lesson from
all of this. The people at that birthday party, but

(27:37):
the adults besides him should have been like, I wonder
what the conversations were you just like sitting at the
side of the room. Is he taking my son's blood?
Should probably have some scammy argument where he was like,
I'm doing a test and to advance Medical science, DOBE.
That is how he sounded. That was how he sounded,

(27:59):
and everyone was stupid. Gotten a lot of a lot
of accent play out of these episodes now uh. The
General Medical Council concluded that Wakefield had acted with quote
callous disregard for the distress and pain the children would suffer,
which is a good summary of his career. None of this,
and none of Brian Deer's fantastic reporting, has been enough
to kill rumors of a correlation between vaccination and autism.

(28:22):
By two thousand and eight, the British national vaccination rates
against MMR went from above nine to below Every measle's
outbreak we've had since can be traced to Andrew Wakefield's research,
and the movement had helped reignite. In the years since
all this broke, Andrew Wakefield has continued to be a
shady con man. In two thousand four, before his license
was taken away, he fled Britain for Austin, Texas, figuring

(28:43):
that it would be an easier place to continue to
be a greasy disease grifter. If Alex Jones has taught
us anything, he was probably wise to do that. The
next New York Times article on Wakefield was titled The
Crash and Burn of an Autism Guru. It's author, Susan Dominus,
caught up with Wakefield about a year after he was
stripped of his licen The picture he paints of him
is of a bitter con man quote. For Wakefield, the

(29:05):
attacks had become a kind of affirmation. The more he
must defend his research, the more important he seems to
consider it, so important that powerful forces have conspired and
aligned against him. He said he believes that they public
health officials pharmaceutical companies pay bloggers to plant vicious comments
about him on the web because it's always the same,
he says, discredited doctor Andrew Wakefield. Discredited doctor Andrew Wakefield.

(29:26):
He also wouldn't be surprised if public health officials were
inflating the number of measles mortalities, just as he thinks
they inflate the risk of the flu to increase the
uptake of that vaccine. Having been rejected by mainstream medicine, Wakefield,
the son of wore regarded doctors in Britain, has apparently
rejected the integrity of mainstream medicine. In return, I hope
he dies of a disease. Yeah, I mean to say,

(29:49):
come on a podcast now, where we can be a
little dark, where we can wish death on people. Fine
to call out doctors for inflating fear around the flu
while he literally created a crisis, created a fear to
sell his measles vaccine. Yeah, what you know, it's the

(30:14):
pot calling the kettle of vaccine denialist agitator. I'm deeply
lost in the metaphor. I didn't know, but yeah, he sucks.
So that article that noted that Wakefield still enjoyed a
healthy fan base and was able to pack two fifty
paying customers into a church near Austin to hear Wakefield
talk about his research for a subset of desperate parents,

(30:37):
most of whom were struggling with children who suffer from
severe complications due to autism. Andrew has become something of
a cult leader. Here's the New York Times. Many complied
with lavish thanks. We stand by you, and thank you
for the many sacrifices you have made for the cause.
When he finally took the podium, the audience members, mostly
parents of autistic children, stood and applauded wildly. Some of

(30:57):
Wakefield's cult status is surely because of his person charisma,
and he spoke with a great rhetorical flare. He took
off his glasses and put them back on, like a
gifted actor maximizing a prop. What happens to me doesn't matter,
he said at one point, what happens to these children
does matter. Why do all conments down the same because
it works like as you're describing him, I'm like, well

(31:19):
that sounds like Trump. Yeah. Yeah, they're they're all more
alike than they are different. They would all get together
at the same sort of parties where they would probably
all bribe children for their blood, pretending they're not self
interested when they're literally just conning scared people out of
their money. Yeah, yea, yea yeah yeah. And for some reference,
actual heroic people never talk like that because they're too

(31:41):
busy doing good things, saving the world and such. Since
moving to America in two thousand and four, Wakefield has
tried repeatedly to cash in on his hero status among
the AMT vaccine crowd. In two thousand and thirteen, The
Guardian caught up with him at a convention for the
reality TV industry. He'd paid six dollars for a chance
to pitch his idea for a new TV show to
executives from Discovery, National Geographic and TLC. Now. The pilot

(32:07):
for this new business venture was a TV show called
Autism Team. Oh No, not a great title. I've watched
an excerpt from this uh, and I think it would
be most accurately described as sickness porn. It includes a
lot of long, lingering shots of suffering children. Received a
lot of criticism from autism sufferers because it doesn't really
focus at all in the humanity of these people. It's
just sort of seeing a kids suffer and then a

(32:28):
doctor will come in and diagnose the kid with autism
associated indoclitis, the syndrome Andrew Wakefield invented, and then yeah,
it's it feels like resistance against him and his conning
has to come a little from like people without autism

(32:49):
and people like connected to autism being like, no, don't
stop praying on this, Yeah, stop making a dollar off
of something that is like, really, I have a pretty
white view because the kids I worked with UM were
very low functioning for the most part. UM So these
were kids who their parents had to live with the

(33:09):
knowledge that, like number one, their kid was never going
to live independently, was never going to be able to
work a job or hold like normal relationships. And I
was going to have to go to a home when
they died um and in some cases before because like
these parents would know that when I get too old
to sort of like sometimes these kids could be violent.
They need to be physically restrained. When I got too
old to deal with that, my son or my daughter

(33:30):
is going to live in a home without me, And
that's horrifying and to have to deal with um. And
so yeah, it just it infuriates me thinking about turning
that into a reality TV show to talk about how
great a doctor you are. Yeah, I mean it's really
gross such a certainly in nineteen I would hope like

(33:50):
public opinion would turn against a show like that, being
like no, And it didn't get picked up because it
was like, I like, the reason I'm not playing it
for you is that it's really not it's boring too.
It wasn't not a good preview clip or whatever. But
I am going to read a summary of an episode
from the Guardian. John's mother, John is one of the
suffering kids, says Kriggsman's diagnosis is the answer to everything,

(34:11):
and Krigsman is the doctor that they had to bring
in cause Andrew Wakefield is not a doctor anymore. John's
father tells us the subsequent change in his son has
been absolutely dramatic. Finally, the short teaser wraps. The narrator
says that groundbreaking work by the Autism team means that
children can be treated effectively. So join us and follow
their journey. So, yeah, Wakefield did not find a buyer

(34:34):
for that totally awesome show, but he did wind up
directing a feature film a little bit later. Yeah, Vaxed
is the name of the documentary. Yeah, it built itself
as quote an investigation into the CDC's destruction of a
study linking autism to the MMR vaccine. Was it, of
course not. I'm shaking my head there. Uh, and yes,

(34:55):
you'd better believe he showed up on Info Wars to
promote it. In this clip, he starts, he's been on
inf Wars a lot. By the way, Yeah, he's a
frequent guest of Alex Jones's. Okay, now starting to make sense.
These terrible people are all friends. I'd be one about
Andrew Wakefield's party with Steven Seagal, like they all know

(35:16):
each other. Oh my gosh. Yeah. So in this clip,
he starts by claiming to Alex Jones that he found
a CDC whistle blower who was willing on record to
say that he designed a study which proved a connection
between autism and the MMR vaccine and then watched the
CDC cover it up. That's the claim he's making an
Info Wars is the claim it's being made in the documentary.

(35:36):
So Wakefield presents this CDC whistle blower as being overwhelmed
by his conscience and needing to come clean. Alex declares,
not a doctor Andrew Wakefield to be an American hero.
I'm gonna play a little clip of Andrew Wakefield talking
on inf Wars. Well, you're admirable because every time I
have you in here, here at the cutting edge of
working with family is trying to put the truth out

(35:57):
you name it, lawsuits. You've just been proven vindicated in
the Spade's a true trailblazer. I know you don't like that,
the true hero, Andrew Weggfield. You every wanna talk about
yourself being vindicated. It's always we have a top whistle blower,
the head of the program. You know, hired to cover
it up, did all the studies. He's now gone public.
The media won't cover it. You're just still worried about
the millions of kids getting brain damaged. Alex. It's not

(36:18):
about me. It's not about me at tool. I'm just
a guy trying to do a job and trying to
and being prevented. So I'm really just obstinate. But I'm
not going to go away. I'm not going to duck
for this issue. It's far too important. It's going to
be from the estimates in the movie one and two,
children born in T two are going to have autism.
That is absolutely unacceptable. So whatever the media say about me,
whatever the politicians, sam I mean, it doesn't matter, because

(36:40):
I don't matter. It isn't. What matters is the future
of this country, and the future of this country is
its children. So I do want to hit a little
bit on the conspiracy theorist vaccine people will often say
that like my twenty thirty or ever, one out of
every two children will have autism, to believe that it's
something being spread by these vaccines, that's nonsense. The number
of people with autism has shot up massively in the

(37:01):
last couple of decades because they didn't used to know
it was a thing, and they used to think that,
like all these different syndromes that we now know are
different kind of expressions of autism were totally different illnesses
and stuff of sense. And the even bigger part of
it is that it used to basically just be white
kids who got diagnosed with autism, because you had to
have some money to be able to go to a
doctor for this, and if you were a black kid
or a Hispanic kid it came from a poor area,

(37:23):
they'd just be like, oh, you're just bad at learning,
like yeah or yeah, and they wouldn't get to go
to the doctor over yeah, you're you're just different. And
now that medicine is less racist, we're realizing that it's
more common than we thought, and we're be getting better
at recognizing and we like, now they recognize that it's
a spectrum, and so all these people who would never
have been diagnosed as having anything everything like, well, no,

(37:44):
you're on some level of the spectrum. Right. Spectrum has
totally changed the way. It's just the fact that we
didn't get this ship and it's not new. Autisms exist
as long as there's been human beings we just didn't
like it just used to be that like, oh this person, Wow,
the way that their mind works is really different, which

(38:04):
they didn't have, Like fucking tons of Greek philosophers and
scientists probably had some kind of autism, Like yeah, and
does he acknowledge spectrum? And uh, you know, I don't.
I don't know enough about what he says about autism
because it's not an autism expert and gastro and urologist
who lost his medical exactly. And it feels pretty fearmongry

(38:26):
to say one and two people will have autism, as
if it evokes like low functioning autism, which is not
inherently bad. I feel like there's no there's this like
it's fearmongering, and I don't think it helps people see
the humanity and people with autism. It's it is that

(38:47):
like suffering porn. It is that suffering porn. And I
do want to state, you know, I just talked about
working with the really low functioning kids. I also want
to like my jobs when I was teaching in special
ed was to work with this kid who had pretty
severe aspert or cinder, but was very smart and was
like he was an expert. We would go on walks
and I would try to get like trying to socialize
and getting used to like having conversations. And his thing

(39:08):
was pumps, like like fountain pumps, And anytime we walked
past like a pump in an apartment complex, he would
explain how the whole thing was assembled underground, just looking
at the top and he would he'd like would design
them for fun. And the president of a company that
designed pumps for like Las Vegas and stuff like like
the Bellagio flew out to Dallas to like meet with
this kid and like talking them and be like, when

(39:30):
you graduate, send us a resume because like you're like
the it's it's I don't know, like the idea, like
both the making it out to be this horrible, doomed
thing um and the suffering porn. Like it's all really
gross to me. It oversimplifies something that's very complicated. Absolutely, yeah, yeah,
but that's just the tip of how infuriating that clip. What, Yeah,

(39:54):
it's really bad. I I I'm glad. I hadn't even
read that he'd been on info Wars. I just thought, Oh,
he's in Austin. I bet he's been on aug What
a good assumption. Oh, Alex Jones loves that he is
a British accent. Probably sounds so legitimate anytime he can
get a British person on that. Oh my god, you

(40:14):
better believe it. I love when he says it's not
about me, it's not about me. It's it's not about me.
I can't I'm not going to know that was doing
his accent, but like, no, no, you scamp people. Okay,
you know what it's time for and we're back. My god,

(40:46):
those ads. I you know what I love about ads
is the way it makes me aware of the products
and services that I can look into purchasing for myself
and my loved ones. Oh yeah, that's what I like
about them. Not to pushy, just just right, just just
putting information out there. Now. Wakefield's documentary, you know, in
that in that clip on info Wars, he claims that

(41:07):
he's got this interview with this guy from the CDC,
Dr Thompson, and the documentary basically claims that this guy
the research proved that there was a connection between MMR
and autism, and the CDC covered it up, and this
guy's blowing the whistle on it. That's not what happened.
Dr William Thompson was in fact critical of a single
two thousand and four study that did fail to find
a link between the MMR vaccine and autism. He had

(41:28):
issues with the way the study was conducted that he
believed needed to be fixed, but he never requested that
his name be removed from the paper, which would have
been the first step of scientist who wanted to disavow
a piece of research would take. Wakefield's documentary includes interviews
with Dr Thompson that have been carefully edited to give
the impression that he is alleging to cover up rather
than just angry about several very specific issues with the study.
I'll put a link on our website behind the Bastard's

(41:49):
dot com to an article that breaks down exactly what
Wakefield did. But the short version is that he just
chopped up a long, complex interview in order to put
lies in someone else's mouth. Actual public published transcript up
the full interview painted very different picture. I checked out
the website for VACT because I wanted to get an
idea for how Andrew Wakefield presents himself to a sympathetic audience.
But I found was pretty cringe worthy. Here's an exerpt

(42:10):
from a section of the website called who is Andrew Wakefield?
If you heard Andrew Wakefield's name, and you probably have,
you've heard two tales. You've heard that Dr Wakefield is
a charlatan, an unethical researcher, and a huckster who was
erased from the British Medical Registry in whose nine article
on autism and gastro intestinal disease was retracted by a
leading medical journal. You've also heard a very different story

(42:33):
that Dr Wakefield is a brilliant and courageous scientist, a
compassionate physician, beloved by his patients, and a champion for
families with autism and vaccine injury. What's the truth? Anyone
who writes that about themselves is not courageous and brilliant.
And speaking of the last episode you were on, sounds
more than a little bit like Keith Renieries biography of himself.

(42:56):
I don't understand why I get how scam artists work.
I get out you listen to like Mumbo Jumbo and
it's in a soothing voice, and you're like, well, maybe,
but once they start bragging about themselves and how great
they are that's like the alarm sounds for me. No,
especially like just as a journalist, whenever somebody starts bragging

(43:16):
about themselves in that way, you kind of like, no, Okay,
I probably shouldn't be listening to anything you have to say.
You're probably a connorst trying to sell something. Yeah, well
that's not how it works though, So yeah, well, okay.
The truth is that thanks in large Part two no
longer a Dr Andrew Wakefield, vaccination rates have fallen in
numerous Western countries. It took twenty years for rates in

(43:39):
Great Britain to return to their pre Wakefield levels. Time
Magazine claims that quote, by the end the UK families
had experienced more than twelve tho cases of measles and
hundreds of hospitalizations, many with serious complications, and at least
three deaths. That's some careful wording, because he's saying vaccinations
are falling. Vaccination rates fell and then there were disease outbreaks.

(44:00):
But like he's taking credit for a vaccination rates. This
is Time Magazine immediately after like vaccination rate, he was
bragging about making the vaccination rates. No, he thinks they're
lying about how many measles cases there are because all
of the evidence suggests that, oh, right after you published
the study, people started getting vaccinated less, and then there
were multiple daily measles outbreaks. Maybe there was two are connected,

(44:24):
Maybe you caused them. Now it's probably impossible to put
together an accurate account of the number of deaths and
hospitalizations due to Andrew Wakefield and two thousand ten, there
was a whooping cough outbreak in California, the worst in
fifty years. It was spread by a kid whose parents
had non medical exemptions for school vaccination requirements. Later research
showed that most whooping cough cases occurred in clusters of

(44:44):
unvaccinated children, causing nine thousand one infections and ten deaths.
Two eighteen study published by the National Institute of Health
drew a direct line between Wakefield's research and a worldwide epidemic,
saying that as a result of the movement he ignited
quote ultiple breakouts of measles have occurred throughout different parts
of the Western world, infecting dozens of the patients and
even causing deaths. In the UK and nineteen fifty six

(45:07):
people contracted measles in two thousand six, this number increased
to four hundred and forty nine in the first five
months of the year, with the first death since nineteen
ninety two and two thousand eight, measles was declared endemic
in the UK for the first time in fourteen years,
and Ireland an outbreak occurred in two thousand and fifteen
hundred cases and three deaths were reported. The outbreak was
reported to have occurred as a direct result of a

(45:27):
drop in vaccination rates following the MMR controversy. In France,
more than twenty two thousand cases of measles were reported
from two thousand eight to two thousand and eleven. The
United States has not been an exception, with outbreaks occurring
most recently in two thousand eight, two thousand eleven, and
two thousand thirteen. As I write this, several dozen people
have been hospitalized with measles in the Pacific Northwest. More
are likely to have fallen sick. By the time you

(45:48):
hear this episode, every one of those people can thank
Dr Andrew Wakefield for what they're about to endure and
only hopefully survive. Wow, that's my episode on Andrew Wakefield.
He's so bad, He's real bad. It's so crazy that
that one study did so much damage It is kind

(46:11):
of like, you know, people always talk about like you
could change the world. One person can change the world.
They can't. They sure can't. They can't. That's not always
a good thing. Yeah. Yeah, wow, that's why I'm always
really like cag about using language like that around kids,
like shoot for the Stars, you could do anything. It's like, well,
you know that's true in good cases, but like Hitler
believed that too. Yeah. Yeah, he was just a poor

(46:34):
kid who wanted to achieve things. Yeah, ambition on its
own is not good. Maybe don't encourage ambition. Maybe just
encourage people to be happy, yeah, or to do things
for other people. Yeah, the ambition to because it's complicated
because like a lot of these vacs, like the Jonah Salk,
the polio vaccine guy was a guy who just grew

(46:55):
up seeing everybody diapolio and was like, fuck polio. I'm
gonna I'm gonna fuck this disease up. So that's a
good ambition. Yeah. So I guess I wonder what's our
defense against this stuff, because it's like Alex Jones, some
of his stuff is like whatever, people don't actually believe
in gay frogs words video where he dresses like a

(47:18):
frog and hops around. That sounds delightful, But this is
so weirdly mainstream, is like you were saying, like people
on the left and the right at a certain point
believe it. Yeah, and I uh, I don't know what
to tell you, Like I think that the only I
honestly think that, Like if we're drawing a connection all

(47:40):
the major problems of our current era, like you know,
anti vac like vaccine denial, the apologist for people like
Buthar al Assad who think that he's a socialist hero
who's been maligned by the media, like the rise of
Nazism in the Western world. I think this all has
the same connection, which is that like our our schools
are shitty and like people aren't taught critical thinking and
taught how to like you wait and know when someone's

(48:01):
lying to them and like it all it's the same
reason why cut Co like got so many young people
to like go out to try to trick them into
believing they had a job when they were just like
joining an MLM to sell shitty knives. Like yeah, we
just need to be better at teaching people to recognize
when they're being scammed, better at critical thinking. We need
a vaccine for scams. And that's what that's what an

(48:23):
education should be like. People should there should be classes
in every school about like here, I don't know if
someone's trying to scam you, here's how to here's how
to recognize grifters. These are the words they use. It
sounds like the vaccine against scamming could be this podcast.
Sounds like the vaccine against scamming could be this podcast.
So play this podcast to your children, play it to
strange children on the street, abduct children who live near

(48:44):
you and force them to listen to it, and then
take their blood, and then take their blood, take any
kids blood you want, because that's fine. Uh, this is
Sophie's even it might get us in some legal trouble,
all right. If you abduct a child, tell them Joe
Rogan's podcast told you to do it. Yes, yes, that's perfect.
Laime it on Rogan. And if you take their blood,
double down, double down on Joe Rogan. Yeah, yeah, I

(49:06):
feel like we're safe now, all right? By a T
shirt public behind the bastards, Uh, you can use the
T shirts to bind the arms of a child in
order to make them listen to the show. Oh boy,
I'm in some an you want to plug some stuff. Yeah,
you can find me on Instagram bad comics with an
x by on. I make web comics about anxiety and

(49:29):
depression and stuff, and that's also my handle on Twitter.
Hit me up if you have thoughts about anything. I
feel like I said some things on this podcast that
we're blanket statements, and I am afraid that I will
be fact checked. All blanket statements are accurate. Um, I'm
Robert Evans. Uh. You can find me on Twitter at

(49:50):
I right. Okay. You can find this podcast on the
inner webs at behind the Bastards dot com. You can
find us on Instagram and Twitter at at bastards pod. Uh. Anna,
we have one more episode to get through about an
even guy, just another terrible doctor. Uh. It's gonna be
a fun It'll be a short one, but you can

(50:13):
all get to listen to that. Tomorrow we're gonna be
talking about Dr Bob Sears. Strap in boys and girls
and people who don't identify as either gender and whoever.
I don't I don't care, Like, do you just strap in? Yeah?
Anyone can strap in. Anyone can strap in, especially if
you've abducted a child. All right at the end of
the episode,