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.