Expert In What? GMC MMR Vaccine Trial UK Where to start with this showcase trial delineating the overt General Medical Council support of the controversial MMR vaccine in the UK and the attempted destruction of the careers of three doctors, including that of Andrew Wakefield?
A very good place for all those interested in the vaccine controversy is the GMC Hearings Diary of this trial by stellar investigative writer, Martin J. Walker.
The latest piece to be written by Walker on this trial is just recently published by CryShame. From the vaccine industry to Myalgic Encephalomyelitis, Walker lays out the facts.
To do this showcase trial justice, you need to read the full text of this latest chapter. Please read on below.
The One Click Group
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Expert in What?
The First Expert Witness for the Prosecution
By Martin J. Walker
September 27th to October 3rd
One Click EXTRACTS
"Not only do pharmaceutical and chemical companies kill, maim and torture millions of animals in toxicity trials, but it is generally recognised that pharmaceutical drugs are still going through extended experimentation when they are prescribed to the public. On top of this, pharmaceutical companies are entitled to keep secret their trial documentation in order to safeguard the competitive profitability of their products. And what does the code say about giving legal protection and financial rewards to whistle blowers in industry?"
"With the possible exception of Professor Zuckerman, Rutter will turn out to be the first real witness for the prosecution. He is an ideological witness, one who is not giving evidence to fact, but rather, agreeing with the prosecution critique of the behaviour, the methods, the language and the professionalism of the three doctors being tried."
"In fact the use of Professor Sir Michael Rutter as an expert witness in this case does lead one to speculate about the nature of expert witnesses. While it cannot be denied that Professor Rutter is an expert on the psychological aspects of autism, this is not the subject of his evidence. He was to end up giving expert evidence, with a broad brush, on the work of the whole gastrointestinal department at the Royal Free. This, despite admitting at least three times during his evidence, that he knows nothing about gastrointestinal medicine. Perhaps even more oddly, at the end of his evidence, he assures the Panel of one thing; he cannot criticise the gastrointestinal work carried out in the department and his view in sum, is simply that the neuro-psychiatric aspect of the ‘work up’ on the children was lacking."
"I don’t know how Brian [Deer] felt but I have to admit that by Friday mid-day I was tinkering with the idea of becoming an alcoholic. It was on Friday, while I was being mesmerised by the boredom of Miss Smith’s presentation [Counsel for the GMC], that the Kama Sutra came into my mind. As my thoughts languidly turned over, I tried to envisage Miss Smith presenting this text and others. I concluded quite quickly that any text would suffer the same fate, its juicy, sensual resonance sucked out of it and replaced by dry spiritless air."
"I should not perhaps be so critical of Miss Smith, her brief is hopelessly lacking in substance and she must be hard pressed to turn her instructions into poetry or to exhibit her so far well-hidden legal skills."
"In some senses, I also felt sorry for Professor Rutter as he was frog-marched through the prosecution case. This expert witness was not really being used as an ‘expert’. Rather he was being asked simply to add his weight to the prosecution. Perhaps the panel and others might have gained considerably from hearing Professor Rutter talk about autism, rather than see him perform like a nodding dog in the back of Miss Smith’s almost empty charabanc."
"Certain matters are not deemed worthy of comment by the prosecution. One such matter is the real, rather than prosecution-sanitised, condition of the children and the crisis of coping and caring which the parents were, and still are, faced with daily. An understanding of the severity of the children’s condition is absolutely essential to a realistic understanding of the work of Dr Wakefield in the mid 1990s. We have not however, been given any indication of the real condition of the children by the prosecution."
"Equally, at every turn, any mention of MMR or adverse reactions to vaccination is reduced to anecdote and the correctness of scientific scrutiny is juxtaposed with parents’ apparently hysterical stories about the agony of their children after vaccination."
"In fact, the corporate scientific establishment has been working hard for a decade, to expunge from the public culture the experiential narrative of people who suffer either environmental illness or adverse reactions to medical procedures or pharmaceutical drugs. The replacement of personal observation, human experience and subjective narrative, with the collective, rational narrative of scientific study is a complex phenomenon."
"The denial of subjective experience in environmental illness, or adverse drug reaction, began in the mid-eighties when individuals suffering from environmental illnesses were made the butt of jokes and ridiculed when they described how their bodies were responding to modern toxins. The early ‘quackbuster’ organisations consistently disputed the reality of such things as food allergy, saying that it was a mental aberration. Now twenty years on, we find that British society has some of the highest recorded rates of food allergy in the world. The same can be said of chemical sensitivity, now recognised by some of the leading medical authorities. Corporate medicine has consistently denied the environmental aetiologies of illnesses caused by chemicals for the last twenty years."
"Perhaps the most central case, which is raised consistently in my mind during the GMC hearing, is that of Myalgic Encephalomyelitis (ME) or chronic fatigue syndrome (CFS). Quackbusting groups have singled this illness out for the last two decades, denying any organic aetiology and arguing that subjective recognition of it is due to mental disorder rather than an organic or biological condition."
"In order to prize ME from the hands of the psychiatrists and psychologists, activists have argued for years that each patient needs a thorough biomedical work-up which will throw light on the medical nature of the illness. Perhaps the most interesting matter brought to light by Rutter’s evidence, which reflects on this social, medical and political conundrum, is the fact that we see at the end of his evidence that he is really opposed to the idea of biomedical work-ups for children with autism - an idea woven into Wakefield’s approach. When Rutter disputes the biomedical basis of regressive autism he is defending a neuro-psychiatric position which some would say has stymied progress in medical research for the last half-century."
"While the whole of the prosecution case has settled on the children reported in the Lancet paper, no one has made mention of the fact that in the five years between 1993 and 1998 hundreds of parents made their way to the gastrointestinal unit at the Royal Free. They went there often with their own determination, because this was the only collection of doctors in the whole of the UK who were dealing with the public health crisis which had occurred following the introduction of the various MMR or MR products after 1988."
"All these points, I am sure, will come out during the presentation of the defence case. I feel a need to introduce them now because they were seriously omitted from the prosecution case and the evidence of Professor Sir Michael Rutter. The central matter of the denial of the experience of both parents and children, is perhaps the most upsetting aspect of this case and I feel that there will never be enough space or time to bring this tragedy to the surface."
"In terms of argument, what Hopkins was able to do was to make it clear to the panel that much of what Professor Rutter claimed during his evidence-in-chief was little more than personal opinion. Perhaps even more exactly, it was personal opinion heavily biased towards the neuro-psychiatric axis of the arguments around autism."
"One of the biggest problems for the biomedical school, is that, because pharmaceutical drugs and vaccines count as environmental factors, the school faces an apparently unlinked but powerful opposition. There are similarities here again with ME. The biomedical school, which advocates a wide range of biomedical tests for those presenting with ME, face major opposition, not just from the psychiatric school, but also from the chemical companies whose toxic environmental products and processes might be a contributory factor in some cases."
"With this final criticism it appeared, to me at least, that the whole case for bringing Professor Rutter as an expert witness was brought into question. To hear Rutter say that he had no criticisms of the gastrointestinal side of the work, but only the lack of psychiatric and neurological aspects of research or patient care, was to invoke the words of Mandy Rice Davies in the trial of Stephen Ward, ‘Well, he would say that wouldn’t he’. There can be little doubt, however, that this personal and professional bias is very far away from anything even vaguely resembling damning, or even ‘expert’ evidence."
"On Monday October 1st, a cockroach was observed strutting around the base of the tea and coffee dispenser at the GMC. I wasn’t there for the aftermath of the discovery, but I have been told that after it was found, a cluster of lawyers and doctors from the hearing went into a huddle. After a long and sometimes heated discussion it was decided by all concerned not to report this public health threat. The doctors were concerned about being struck off following a four year wait for a fitness to practice hearing. The lawyers feared being taken before the bar council on the grounds that they had brought the GMC into disrepute by spreading alarum and despondency."
Read the full text of the latest chapter in Martin J. Walker's Diary of the GMC MMR Vaccine Trial Hearing here
