Sunday Times’ Stories Collapse In GMC Wakefield Prosecution

:::: :::::: :: :::: ::::

The Sunday Times stories against MMR doctor and eminent gastroenterologist Mr Andrew Wakefield have just publicly collapsed in English General Medical Council legal proceedings together with the shameful defamatory attack on Mr Wakefield by Dr Evan Harris MP made in the English Parliament on 15th March 2004 under protection from legal action for defamation by Parliamentary Privilege.

The stories written by now-shown-to-be unethical and unprofessional freelance journalist Brian Deer  included the improbable and now shown false allegations that 13 eminent medical professionals at an internationally renowned centre of medical excellence, The Royal Free Hospital, London, England conspired together, possibly criminally, to carry out unethical research for no clinical benefit on severely ill autistic children during 1996 to 1998.

The Sunday Times’ allegations are proving to have been one of the most significant journalistic frauds of the 21st Century. How any editor of any professional commercial newspaper could have believed and then published such stories many will now find hard to understand.

Now revealed in the GMC proceedings by Mr Andrew Wakefield’s trial legal Counsel, Kieran Coonan QC,  is that Deer, Harris and The Sunday Times were citing and relying for their claims on a different document, a proposal for research ethics approval when the investigations were clinically necessary and had research ethics approval under a separate application.

Mr Coonan told the GMC panel that prosecutor Sally Smith QC had failed to disclose this crucial document to the defence, contrary to her legal obligation to do so, along with many other documents which have proven essential for the defences of all three doctors, Wakefield, Murch and Professor Walker-Smith.

Another claim crucial to The Sunday Times’ stories has also been revealed to be false – that Andrew Wakefield’s involvement as an expert witness in the UK MMR vaccine injured children’s litigation was not disclosed to The Lancet medical journal before The Royal Free team’s findings were published in 1998 in a formal paper.

It was revealed in other documents in the GMC proceedings – which were also not disclosed to the Defence teams by the GMC prosecutor – that The Lancet knew of Andrew Wakefield’s involvement as an expert in the MMR litigation up to a year before the fateful Royal Free team’s paper was published. Thus, The Sunday Times’ claims of non disclosure is a non point.  It was prior public knowledge as well as the subject of correspondence between the MMR children’s solicitor and The Lancet. What is more, The Sunday Times’ freelance journalist Brian Deer should have known this before publication of his first story in 2004 and if not then, must have known this before his recently published also shown-to-be-false stories in The Sunday Times: Sunday Times Journalist Made Up Wakefield MMR Data Fixing Allegation .

This prosecution is one for which The Sunday Times can also claim a unique responsibility. Their journalist Brian Deer whose stories led up to the GMC proceedings is the complainant who pursued the prosecution of the case in meetings and correspondence with GMC prosecution officials over a period of more than 3 years.

It was also shown by Mr Coonan that the GMC prosecutor had been misquoting in her summing up on behalf of the GMC the text of the transcripts of the written evidence in the case, such that Mr Coonan had several times to warn the GMC Panel to check the original text and not rely on what Ms Smith was claiming.

Freelancer Brian Deer was present to hear his own name mentioned in the proceedings with an admonition by Mr Coonan to the GMC Panel to put out of their minds the recent inappropriate reports published in The Times and The Sunday Times and that the GMC panel’s Legal Assessor, also a QC, will be obliged to give “robust advice” to the panel on this.

Additionally, the one thing The Sunday Times has failed to report, and which it has studiously failed to report is that Mr Andrew Wakefield’s advice in 1998 that the Government should take the precaution of keeping single vaccines available alongside the MMR vaccine was the responsible act of a Government which was then and is now obliged to do so under English and European law, pursuant to the precautionary principle when faced with the possibility that the MMR might be implicated in causing autism in a subset of susceptible children.  As a matter of fact and law, Wakefield’s advice was and remains correct and responsible and the British Government’s failure to act on that was and remains irresponsible.

That even Professor Sir David King, the immediate past Government Chief Scientific Advisor, was so incapable of properly reading the “science” underlying this issue that he cited to Parliament a study of 500,000 Danish children which has now been shown to be fatally flawed in two peer reviewed medical papers is testament to the determination of all concerned to bury the underlying issues, along with these seriously injured children.

It is also significant that some of the key documents which the GMC held back were ones disclosed in Mr Wakefield’s libel proceedings against it and are therefore documents which The Sunday Times and Brian Deer had and have.

The Sunday Times’ reliance on Mr Wakefield’s discontinuance [not withdrawal] of the libel proceedings is nugatory.  The reasons for that withdrawal had nothing whatsoever to do with the merits of any defences, except for the technical “Reynolds defence”, under which the House of Lords, decided:-

“newspapers could print untrue and defamatory information if they could prove it was in the public interest to publish it and that it was the product of responsible journalism.” ‘Reynolds defence’ in new libel law test – Julia Day – Media Guardian 3 Feb 2005

And The Sunday Times has been so wrapped up in pursuing its witchhunt against Mr Wakefield that it has failed to report that the MMR vaccine injured children have strong cases but that the system of legal aid forced on them is so flawed that The Legal Services Commission were shown in the GMC proceedings to have been working against the interests of and undermining the legal cases of those children.

The Legal Services Commission, supposedly responsible for supporting the children’s cases with Government funding for their legal actions have been shown to have been working behind-the-scenes seemingly improperly and illegally to achieve a prosecution of Mr Wakefield, as one of the main medical expert witnesses for the children.

The Legal Services Commission were shown to have been withholding documents critical to the defences of all three medical doctors whilst voluntarily disclosing other documents belonging to the children which no Court could have ordered them to disclose and which in other legal proceedings the Legal Services Commission have claimed it would be illegal for them to have disclosed.

And worse still is the question of why when the cases of some of these children had a high probability of succeeding, they were funded by the Legal Services Commission to be pursued in a system which appears to have run slowly.

The first applications for legal aid funding were made in 1991, yet the proceedings were issued in October 1998, seven years later and [Amendment 13/4/09: some parents were left to believe] the detailed claims to support the proceedings were never filed, including and after the collapse of the proceedings in 2004 with the withdrawal of funding [Amendment 13/4/09: because whilst the LSC made documents freely available to the GMC,  and some documents were provided, other documents needed by some parents to continue alone with their children's claims were not being provided, including the detailed claims].

The evidential basis for cases of adverse drug reactions is the standard approach in pharmacology – that requires a biologically plausible mechanism and not proof of the causal hypothesis. The assessment is clinical. Some of the cases were of known adverse effects such as deafness, so biological plausibility was already established. For other cases, such as autism, it has been known since 1964 that a live virus like rubella virus can cause autism and there was also the Wakefield hypothesis.  [Amendment 13/4/09: Both the US and UK legal evidential systems appear defective in their approach.  In the US Federal Court biological plausibility is accepted in case law, but cases are tried one by one, with individual test cases seemingly ignoring the reinforcing effect of the evidence from each additional case from large numbers of cases  with closely similar facts.  In the English Courts, the biological plausibility criterion appears ignored together with the case series evidence also not being taken into account to the extent it should - or if it was intended it should at trial then the LSC appears to have applied a less than inappropriate approach to its assessments of the evidential validity of the cases when withdrawing legal aid.]

It was the lack of scientific proof of the causal mechanisms which the Legal Services Commission used as the main reason for withdrawing funding and withdrawal caused the collapse of all the cases.

Kieran Coonan QC, started his summing up this week on Day 127 of the marathon GMC prosecution of former Royal Free Hospital, London eminent medical doctors Mr Andrew Wakefield, Mr Simon Murch and Professor Walker-Smith.

Mr Coonan who will be summing up for approximately 5 days is well regarded by his peers at the English bar and considered by some as the best in his field.

A decision in the case by the GMC Panel is not expected for several months.

RELATED STORIES

Sunday Times Journalist Made Up Wakefield MMR Data Fixing Allegation

Brian Deer’s Boss Joins MMR Manufacturer Glaxo’s Board

Times’ Group Journo Costs GMC £1M – But Blames MMR Doc!

Sunday Times Journalist Admits Wakefield MMR Data Fixing Allegation Is  Unqualified Speculation

Sunday Times’ MMR Lies Nailed At Last – Editor Witherow Should Resign

Sunday Times – Sinks To New Low With Yet More MMR Junk Journalism

Sunday Times Journalist In Cedillo Vaccine Case Controversy

Sunday Times’ London Editor Must Quit Over False “Wakefield MMR Data Fixing” Story

US Federal Court, US Justice Dept & The Sunday Times – More Questions Than Answers

Sunday Times Journalist Challenged Over Role in US MMR Cases

---

Possibly related posts: (automatically generated)

• Sunday Times Journalist Instigated GMC Case Against Dr Andrew Wakefield
• Sunday Times’ London Editor Must Quit Over False “Wakefield MMR Data Fi…
• Sunday Times Ordered ‘Remove Wakefield MMR “Data Fixing” Story’
• The Malicious Smearing of a Crusading Doctor