Friday 23 April 2010

WAKEFIELD TRIES TO SHIFT BLAME

Why does Wakefield now try to shift blame onto Dr Thores? Here’s a history of Thores’ involvement.
In 1998, after seeing a newspaper article, Thores contacted Jackie Fletcher, organizer of anti-MMR organization, JABS, to explain to her that the problems with Pluserix and Immravax MMR vaccines had been known before they were introduced and that the problems had nothing to do with the nonsense being peddled by Wakefield and Richard Barr. But Jackie Fletcher was in thrall to Barr and with him set up an ambush for Dr Thores. An appointment was made for Thores to meet Fletcher at Newcastle station, but instead he was met by the corrupt lawyer Richard Barr and his bedmate, Kirsten Limb. Thores explained his background in MMR manufacturer SKB and in Health Departments in Canada and UK. From 1988 onwards he had warned Kenneth Calman and David Salisbury over the dangers of Pluserix and the similar MMR, Immravax. Pluserix had been sold in Canada as Trivarix and had immediately caused unacceptable meningitis problems and had been withdrawn.
Thores was unhappy at being conned into a meeting with a lawyer when he was expecting to meet the parent of an MMR-damaged child. He was also uneasy about Barr’s apparent determination to ignore evidence and to instead pursue a generalized attack on MMR vaccines.
Another meeting was set up for Wakefield to attend with Barr and Limb on 28 February 1999. Thores repeated his account of warning Salisbury and Calman over the dangerous nature of Pluserix and Immravax and explained how he had circulated published papers to members of the Joint Committee on Vaccination and Immunisation. Thores went on to explain how members of the JCVI had been worried over their personal liability as they were approving a product they knew to be defective. According to Barr’s notes Thores claimed a representative of SmithKline Beecham had told him not to worry as “we are immunising the children and the Government is immunising us” and he took this to mean that there was a deal that had been struck between SmithKline Beecham and to the Government in relation to legal liability arising from the use of the Pluserix vaccine. Thores referred to another deal – Pluserix was not licenced in the UK and committee members were told that its licensing procedure was rushed through on a “fast track” basis.
Thores was also bothered by the bonus payment scheme for doctors that the Government introduced in 1990 to incentivise GPs to reach vaccination targets.
Thores told Barr that although he had signed the Official Secrets Act he was wiling to make a written statement confirming his claims.
It is noticeable from Barr’s notes on the meeting that although he had been involved in the MMR issue for several years he couldn’t spell the names of MMR products or the names of key individuals involvedand that Barr failed to make the most basic checks of Thores between the two meetings.
Jackie Fletcher was in a position to ensure that the litigation was soundly-based so it’s hard to understand why she ignored Thores’ warning as well as the others she received about the way in which Wakefield and Barr were exploiting the situation to the disadvantage of MMR-damaged children. It’s also hard to understand why Jackie Fletcher absented herself from the meeting with Thores while tricking him into meeting with Barr. This is one of a number of instances where Fletcher seems to have had far too close a relationship with the corrupt lawyer Richard Barr.
Later, Thores was interviewed by parents of MMR-damaged children and confirmed what he had said at the meetings with Wakefield, Barr and Limb, but Thores revealed that he had refused to have anything further to do with Wakefield or Barr because he had noticed that they had a hidden agenda. Thores confirmed that the MMR issue was based on the mumps component, not the measles component that Wakefield and Barr were using to make money. Thores confirmed that although he was bound by the Official Secrets Act he was willing to go to court where a judge could clear him to give evidence. He also revealed that he had retained key secret documents that were stored in his lawyer’s office in Edinburgh.
In view of the above it may seem remarkable that Wakefield and Barr did not use Thores’ expertise, but the sad fact is that Wakefield and Barr were interested only in exploiting the condition of MMR-damaged children and making as much money as possible from it. Using Thores evidence would have made it easy to win cases but that would have yielded little profit for Barr and Wakefield.
WAKEFIELD, THE PARENTS' FRIEND?
Dr Bill Long's article "On Second looking into the Case Of Dr Andrew J. Wakefield" in the Autism File (Issue 31 2009) records how Rosemary Kessick in a phone call to Dr Wakefield of 19th May 1995 told the story of how her son had descended into autism after having the MMR vaccine. The Findings of Fact following an investigation by the Fitness to Practice Panel at the GMC into the conduct of Wakefield and two of his colleagues at the Royal Free Hospital outline how nearly all the Lancet 12 children did not fit the inclusion criteria for the study because they had had the MMR vaccine, Ms Kessick’s son included.
Wakefield knew as far back as the 1995 phone call that Ms Kessick’s son had had the MMR vaccine and did not fit the criteria for in inclusion in the Lancet 12. How many of the others, found to have been wrongly included in the Lancet 12 because they had had the MMR vaccine, made that known beforehand? This is a clear demonstration of research fraud? Is this why Wakefield ensured that parents were not called as witnesses?

WHAT ABOUT THE CROOKED JUDGES?

Justice Bell played a major role in the great MMR swindle. He was the appointed judge, but then announced that he would hand over the case to another judge. So, knowing that he would not be responsible for the consequences, Bell corruptly made an order that would ensure that injustice was done and that none of the children damaged by any of the various MMR vaccines would be compensated. How the Government, the pharmaceutical companies and their insurers must have laughed.
Bell made an order that the entire action would be based on tests on eight children, an obvious fraud by Bell:
1. Why was he making an order when he had already announced that he was leaving the action?
2. The tests he ordered would involve the children being exposed to unethical tests, as shown by the GMC ruling on Wakefield and his fellow crooks. So the tests should not have been carried out at all.
3. Half of the test children were to be chosen by the defendant pharmaceutical manufacturers!
4. Bell did not specify what results would be regarded as +ive or –ive. It was like an examination where there is no means of marking answers and no passmark.
5. Bell had decided that the central issue was autism, even though many of the children were not autistic and had quite different and well-evidenced damage.
Bell then departed and a story was put about that he had discovered a conflict of interest – a distant relative with autism. That really is odd because he had pre-announced his departure, which means that he had been aware of the conflict of interest before issuing his order. He should have stepped down the instant he became aware of the conflict of interest.
But the story of the conflict of interest was probably a lie. Bell’s maneuver was one that is familiar to pickpockets and judges. Pickpockets ensure that they cannot be caught with the loot on their person by passing it to a collaborator. The thief doesn’t have the loot and the man with the loot didn’t do the thieving. Bell handed the action to a new judge who would run it according to Bell’s order. Bell would not be on the scene when the action inevitably failed. The failure would be on the watch of a different judge, one who had not issued the original order.
The new judge was Justice Keith, freshly arrived from Hong Kong and ignorant of the new Civil Procedure rules. Keith was keen to be accepted by the corrupt English judiciary, the alternative would be to return to China where corruption is not as profitable. Keith’s ignorance was such that he was guided by the lawyers when he should have been controlling them. Keith should have looked at the order controlling the litigation and thrown it out but he chose to ensure injustice. No wonder the action cost a staggering amount of money and not a single child was compensated.
At the end of the process, Keith had the impertinence to point out that some of the cases had not been allowed to present their evidence at all. But the action had been managed by Keith so the perversion of the course of justice was by him. Keith’s crocodile tears were most unconvincing.
But Keith hadn’t finished helping the Government, pharmaceutical corporations and their insurers. The action over autism had failed and the autistic cases had been thrown out when Keith received an application for an order for the Dublin laboratory that had tested the samples of the autistic children, to open its doors to inspection by an expert appointed by the pharmaceutical companies. There was no basis for Keith to agree to this request because:
1 The laboratory was in Eire and therefore outside Keith’s jurisdiction.
2 The relevant part of the litigation had ended.
Keith chose to do something quite bizarre. He wrote to the Dublin court to request an order for the Dublin laboratory to open its doors to the defendants’ expert. The Dublin court would have been deceived into thinking that this request was relevant to ongoing UK litigation. The Dublin court issued the order and the expert, Professor Bustin, made his inspection and produced his 2004 report.
Later, the true purpose of this farce was revealed. The defendants in the US litigation applied to Keith for a copy of Bustin’s 2004 report, and Keith eagerly agreed to this request. Now the reason for Keith’s letter to the Dublin court became apparent. The US authorities wanted Bustin to inspect the Dublin laboratory but a request from them to the Dublin court would have been rejected as the laboratory was not used by the US defendants. So Keith fabricated a reason for Bustin to inspect the laboratory. That makes it clear that this had been a dirty conspiracy executed by Keith to supply the US authorities with material they could not obtain by legitimate means

Friday 19 March 2010

EXPOSED BY AN ALLY

Connie Howard inadvertently revealed more dirt on Wakefield in her article http://www.vueweekly.com/article.php?id=14512
She asked Wakefield if he’d been paid over £ 400,000 pounds by lawyers who wanted to show that MMR vaccines caused autism. He replied "I worked as a medical expert for nine years on the MMR litigation. When the case folded because Legal Aid was withdrawn, the lawyers refused to pay what was owed and the costs judge took a lot of the fees back from the various experts. What I did earn was donated to an initiative to build a new centre for gastroenterology care and research at the Royal Free [in London]. Unfortunately I was forced out and it never got built."
So the lawyers who employed Wakefield were dissatisfied with his work and he tried to swindle more than £400,000 but the judge turned him down.
What about the money going to a new centre at the Royal Free? Wakefield tried to buy a professorship by offering profits from his various frauds but he’d been kicked out of the Royal Free by the time he got the £400,000. Did he expect to buy his way back with £400,000? But why doesn’t he tell us where the money went. You pocketed it, didn’t you, Andy?
Wakefield did another piece of fancy footwork in his interview. He said “the case folded because Legal Aid was withdrawn”. Not true. His research was such rubbish that the lawyers who had employed him were forced to conclude that there was no case and reported that to the Legal Aid Board. The collapse of the litigation was absolutely due to Wakefield’s incompetence.

WAKEFIELD, THE PARENTS' FRIEND?

Dr Bill Long's article "On Second looking into the Case Of Dr Andrew J. Wakefield" in the Autism File (Issue 31 2009) records how Rosemary Kessick in a phone call to Dr Wakefield of 19th May 1995 told the story of how her son had descended into autism after having the MMR vaccine. The Findings of Fact following an investigation by the Fitness to Practice Panel at the GMC into the conduct of Wakefield and two of his colleagues at the Royal Free Hospital outline how nearly all the Lancet 12 children did not fit the inclusion criteria for the study because they had had the MMR vaccine, Ms Kessick’s son included.
Wakefield knew as far back as the 1995 phone call that Ms Kessick’s son had had the MMR vaccine and did not fit the criteria for in inclusion in the Lancet 12. How many of the others, found to have been wrongly included in the Lancet 12 because they had had the MMR vaccine, made that known beforehand? This is a clear demonstration of research fraud? Is this why Wakefield ensured that parents were not called as witnesses?

THE LONG AND THE SHORT OF IT

We would not normally reveal the identity of a child claimant in litigation but the child involved in this piece has already been identified publicly by his mother and so he and his mother are identified in this piece that is based on an article by Dr William Long, “On Second looking Into The Case of Dr Andrew J Wakefield”, see http://www.autismone.org/content/second-looking-case-dr-andrew-j-wakefield-william-long-mdiv-phd-jd .

Long demonstrates the role of Rosemary Kessick in the Wakefield fraud, her role having been previously outlined in the expert testimony of Professor Thomas McDonald in Hazlehurst in the US courts when referring to the MMR/ASD theory he stated that “The theory was made up in January 1997 by a lawyer Richard Barr, a woman called Rosemary Kessick and Andy Wakefield”

Long refers to the study involving the now notorious Lancet 12 children as “Study Two” and in the chapter “The Phone calls and the Genesis of Study Two” he records how seven months before Wakefield was to meet Richard Barr, the lead solicitor in the MMR litigation on the 6th January 1996, he had received a phone call from Rosemary Kessick on May the 19th 1995. Wakefield advised her to seek help for her child from Professor Walker Smith at St Barts, where blood tests were performed on the child to eliminate the presence of Crohns and Coeliac Disease. No arrangements were made for the child to be seen again!

In an interview of Ms Kessick in the Independent 27th November 1996 it was stated that “William is one of 10 children taking part in a pilot study at the Royal free Hospital in London which is investigating possible links between the measles vaccine with the bowel disorder Crohns disease and with autism. The study is being organised by Norfolk solicitors Dawbarns one of two firms awarded a contract in 1994 to co-ordinate claims resulting from the MMR vaccine”. Barr stated in his newsletter that the Pilot study at the RFH was coordinated by Dr Andrew Wakefield.

It is further recorded that William, Ms Kessick’s son, in February 1996 joined a group of more than 300 children seeking compensation for damage from an MMR vaccine. That’s a month after Barr made contact with Wakefield and nine months after Kessick’s phone call to Wakefield.

Dr Long records in his article how the cases of the 12 children were investigated between July 1996 and January 1997. Kessick in a letter published on the Age of Autism site on May 8th 2009 states that she is the mother of Child 2 from the 12 children investigated as the Lancet 12.

William Kessick was therefore confirmed by his mother to be part of the MMR lawsuit in February 1996 some 5 months before the tests on the Lancet 12 (of which he was Child 2) at the Royal Free Hospital.

So how could Dr Wakefield in his Matt Lauer interview say that ”none of the children in the Lancet Study at the time of their referral for investigation …none of them were involved in litigation”?

From the GMC’s “Findings of Fact” it is stated that Child 2, identified by his mother as William Kessick, was seen at Barts by Professor Walker Smith on 29th June 1995 approximately one month after his mother had called Dr Wakefield and that he was eventually admitted to the Royal Free “on or about the 1st September 1996” some six months after his mother says he was part of Barr’s lawsuit and almost 18 months after she originally called Wakefield.

To make matters worse, GMC charge 9c(i) records how William Kessick should not have been included in the Lancet 12 study because (a) he had been enrolled into the research study before 18th December 1996, the date permitted under the Ethics committee approval for inclusion and (b) he had had the MMR vaccine.

How could Wakefield not have known that William Kessick was part of a class action law suit before he was enrolled as one of the Lancet 12? Wakefield was coordinator for the MMR litigation Pilot Study AND a lead researcher in the Lancet 12, both studies being conducted at the RFH.

Wakefield as coordinator of Barr’s MMR litigation Pilot Study funded by the LAB would have been working with William Kessick both as a child litigant and a Lancet 12 member. Barr would have known this too.

William Kessick and the others who were in both studies underwent the battery of invasive tests twice, once as a Lancet 12 participant and then as a litigant in the Legal Aid Board Pilot study. This involved 2 sets of blood/urine tests, 2 barium meals, 2 colonoscopies, 2 lumbar punctures etc. Is it really the case that one set of tests was charged to the NHS and the other to the Legal Aid Board?

Poor William Kessick, who went through all that unnecessary testing, should not have a Lancet 12 guinea pig because he had had the MMR vaccine, information that had been placed in the public domain as far back as November 1996 by his mother when she gave her interview to The Independent. According to Dr Long, Ms Kessick in her May 1995 phone call to Dr Wakefield advised him of the “wrenching story of her son’s descent into autism after having received the MMR vaccine a few years previously”.

But it gets worse. William Kessick wasn’t just a claimant in the MMR litigation, he was one of eight Lead cases to be pleaded in the UK Courts. All the claimants children depended on the results of the eight Lead cases. If the 8 Lead cases failed so did every other claim in the MMR litigation, as was seen in 2003 when the Legal Services Commission removed funding for ALL of the children.

Of the May 1995 phone call from Rosemary Kessick to Andrew Wakefield, Dr Long states that it “led to a second set of circumstances and what I will call the Second Study or Study Two. I emphasize this point now because every online and book treatment of Dr Wakefield I have read has conflated the two studies thus leading to an improbable series of events that led to the hostile or critical narrative related at the beginning of this paper”

Little wonder that the two studies have become conflated when at least one of the children involved was included in both.
Justice Bell played a major role in the great MMR swindle. He was the appointed judge, but then announced that he would hand over the case to another judge. So, knowing that he would not be responsible for the consequences, Bell corruptly made an order that would ensure that injustice was done and that none of the children damaged by any of the various MMR vaccines would be compensated. How the Government, the pharmaceutical companies and their insurers must have laughed.
Bell made an order that the entire action would be based on tests on eight children, an obvious fraud by Bell:
1. Why was he making an order when he had already announced that he was leaving the action?
2. The tests he ordered would involve the children being exposed to unethical tests, as shown by the GMC ruling on Wakefield and his fellow crooks. So the tests should not have been carried out at all.
3. Half of the test children were to be chosen by the defendant pharmaceutical manufacturers!
4. Bell did not specify what results would be regarded as +ive or –ive. It was like an examination where there is no means of marking answers and no passmark.
5. Bell had decided that the central issue was autism, even though many of the children were not autistic and had quite different and well-evidenced damage.
Bell then departed and a story was put about that he had discovered a conflict of interest – a distant relative with autism. That really is odd because he had pre-announced his departure, which means that he had been aware of the conflict of interest before issuing his order. He should have stepped down the instant he became aware of the conflict of interest.
But the story of the conflict of interest was probably a lie. Bell’s maneuver was one that is familiar to pickpockets and judges. Pickpockets ensure that they cannot be caught with the loot on their person by passing it to a collaborator. The thief doesn’t have the loot and the man with the loot didn’t do the thieving. Bell handed the action to a new judge who would run it according to Bell’s order. Bell would not be on the scene when the action inevitably failed. The failure would be on the watch of a different judge, one who had not issued the original order.
The new judge was Justice Keith, freshly arrived from Hong Kong and ignorant of the new Civil Procedure rules. Keith was keen to be accepted by the corrupt English judiciary, the alternative would be to return to China where corruption is not as profitable. Keith’s ignorance was such that he was guided by the lawyers when he should have been controlling them. Keith should have looked at the order controlling the litigation and thrown it out but he chose to ensure injustice. No wonder the action cost a staggering amount of money and not a single child was compensated.
At the end of the process, Keith had the impertinence to point out that some of the cases had not been allowed to present their evidence at all. But the action had been managed by Keith so the perversion of the course of justice was by him. Keith’s crocodile tears were most unconvincing.
But Keith hadn’t finished helping the Government, pharmaceutical corporations and their insurers. The action over autism had failed and the autistic cases had been thrown out when Keith received an application for an order for the Dublin laboratory that had tested the samples of the autistic children, to open its doors to inspection by an expert appointed by the pharmaceutical companies. There was no basis for Keith to agree to this request because:
1 The laboratory was in Eire and therefore outside Keith’s jurisdiction.
2 The relevant part of the litigation had ended.
Keith chose to do something quite bizarre. He wrote to the Dublin court to request an order for the Dublin laboratory to open its doors to the defendants’ expert. The Dublin court would have been deceived into thinking that this request was relevant to ongoing UK litigation. The Dublin court issued the order and the expert, Professor Bustin, made his inspection and produced his 2004 report.
Later, the true purpose of this farce was revealed. The defendants in the US litigation applied to Keith for a copy of Bustin’s 2004 report, and Keith eagerly agreed to this request. Now the reason for Keith’s letter to the Dublin court became apparent. The US authorities wanted Bustin to inspect the Dublin laboratory but a request from them to the Dublin court would have been rejected as the laboratory was not used by the US defendants. So Keith fabricated a reason for Bustin to inspect the laboratory. That makes it clear that this had been a dirty conspiracy executed by Keith to supply the US authorities with material they could not obtain by legitimate means.

Friday 5 March 2010

We need a Public Inquiry into the financing of Wakefield

The Fitness to Practice Panel at the General Medical Council has recently delivered the Findings of Fact following an investigation into allegations of “serious professional conduct” by Wakefield and two colleagues at the Royal Free Hospital.

Wakefield was one of the most highly- paid experts in the MMR 1 litigation to address a possible link between MMR/MR vaccines and Autism /IBD. He was contracted into this role by Mr Richard Barr, initially of Dawbarns solicitors, then Hodge Jones and Allen and later, Alexander Harris.

Charges 3 and 4 on the GMC charge sheet refer specifically to Wakefield’s role in supplying material to that Barr used to extract money from the Legal Services Commission. The Legal Aid Board, as it was then, awarded an initial £55,000 to the lawyers. Charge 4 (a) (i) was that Wakefield failed “to cause the legal Aid Board to be informed that investigations represented by the clinicians as being clinically indicated would be covered by NHS funding”. Charge 4(a)(ii) was that Wakefield “caused or permitted the money supplied by the Legal aid Board to be used for purposes other than those for which you said it was needed and for which it had been granted”

The findings on these two charges show that Wakefield acted dishonestly with funding while acting as an expert witness.

An investigation is needed into how the LSC was defrauded? Wakefield was hired by lawyers appointed by the LSC to represent the claimant children, and it is the lawyers who must explain how the money was purloined. What is the LSC doing to recover the money and ensure that such a fraud cannot be perpetrated again?

Lord Taverne asked about the squandering of £15m of public funding on the MMR-Autism IBD litigation in Parliament on 16th June 2004…“The Legal Aid Fund has been depleted and, indirectly, the access to justice for others who might have benefited from the proper use of the £15 million has been prejudiced”… “despite the lack of any evidence in support of them, in 1994 the legal Aid Board, as it was then, funded claims for compensation against the pharmaceutical companies”… “after 10 years and the expenditure of more than £15m, not surprisingly no evidence has emerged to provide a prima-facie case. Earlier this year the Legal Services Commission withdrew support and declared that the failure to find evidence meant that the case was very likely to fail. It also observed that aid should never have been granted, because the courts are not the place to prove new medical truths”

We need a Public Inquiry into how £15m was squandered on litigation that (a) by the LSC’s own admission should not have received legal aid, (b) was unable to provide a prima-facie case, (c) included the funding of a lead expert witness shown to have used the funds inappropriately, and (d) denied access to justice for non-ASD/IBD claims because Wakefield and the lawyers had walked away with the money.

Lord Taverne summed it up “it was a disgrace that legal aid was ever granted. The so-called research was, and was always likely to be a farce. None of the families benefited by a penny from the whole operation”