In this episode, EWG President and co-Founder Ken Cook speaks with Brian Deer, an investigative journalist known for exposing the 1998 study by Andrew Wakefield that falsely linked the measles, mumps and rubella, or MMR, vaccine to autism.
Cook and Deer’s conversation focuses on the investigation and impact of the study’s exposé, as well as the evidence he unearthed. They discuss the persistence of vaccine misinformation, even after the study was retracted, and its longevity under Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr., who has collaborated with Wakefield.
The conversation concludes by discussing current challenges to public health and the broader implications for discerning health and medical knowledge from potentially dangerous information.
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Ken: Hey folks, Ken Cook here and I’m having another episode, they’re coming fast and furious these days.
I'll kick things off by saying I had the good fortune this summer to come down with COVID again and while I was laid up I spent most of my time reading an amazing book that has really expanded my understanding of what is currently unfolding in the United States, specifically around public health and the science underneath it. The book is The Doctor Who Fooled the World and it was written by my guest today, investigative journalist Brian Deer.
Brian is a prolific writer and in addition to his outstanding books, he’s been an investigative journalist for the Sunday Times, the New York Times, the Guardian, and the Daily Telegraph. He’s contributed to BMJ, formerly known as the British Medical Journal, and has been writing about corporate, medical and pharmaceutical company malfeasance for decades.
The Doctor Who Fooled the World is a required reading in my opinion if you really want to understand the vast scope of the disarray, dysfunction and scientific damage we are experiencing in American public health today under HHS Secretary Robert Kennedy Jr. Brian’s book is about former surgeon and anti vaccine fraudster Andrew Wakefield.
Wakefield is best known for losing his medical liscence due to his authorship of the fraudulent Lancet MMR autism study. That study falsely claimed a link between the measles, mumps, and rubella vaccine, otherwise known as MMR, and autism.
His study was retracted by The Lancet, a development that unfortunately took years, but the fraud caused untold damage, not just in the UK or even just in the United States, but around the world, and that damage persists today.
Brian is the person who exposed the fraud. As well as Wakefield’s personal financial interests in promoting anti vaccine ideologies. Brian also writes so thoughtfully about the psychological angle that Wakefield received accolades and career opportunities by conducting a fraudulent study. You really get to understand that Wakefield’s objective was never really to help people. It was to pursue fame and fortune.
Now, if you haven’t seen the news coverage, I’ll bet you’ve seen the memes about the Trump administration's claim that the use of acetaminophen, Tylenol, during pregnancy may be linked to an increased risk of autism. We live now in an age of conspiracy, with the folks with the tinfoil hats running around our public health infrastructure. We have the President of the United States dispensing medical advice to pregnant people, telling them to stop taking Tylenol, one of the only pain relievers available to pregnant people, telling them to stop taking Tylenol, one of the only pain relievers available to pregnant people.
We have an HHS secretary who believes that vaccines now cause autism and is now aggressively cherry picking scientific data to prove that belief. We have the Center for Disease Control Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices abruptly changing vaccine schedules and policies in a way that is absolutely counter to what the medical establishment recommends, and one that more than one expert has characterized the changes as illegal and illegitimate. Under the rules of federal administrative procedure that emphasized transparency, due process, and deliberation by impartial government scientists.
The Doctor Who Fooled the World is not just indispensable to understanding how we got here, it’s also a page-turner about events that unfolded over a ¼ century ago but will immediately resonate with what you're reading and watching in the news today.
So Brian Deer, I’m thrilled to have you on the show today. Brian, I’d love to kick off by having you recount for us, as you do in the book, the events that started your investigation. Your journalist nose began to smell a rat about this sudden association between vaccines and autism that utterly disrupted public health in the UK in the late 1990s. It all started with a single article based on a study of just 12 individuals that managed to get into The Lancet, and yet something about it seemed off to you. What was it that caught your attention?
Brian Deer: Well, good to be with you, Ken. The thing that most surprised me at the beginning is why the medical establishment and the enormous numbers of docs and scientists didn't spot what I spotted right at the start of it. I had the advantage that I'd previously done an investigation on another vaccine.
There was an earlier triple vaccine against diphtheria tests and potassium, now I'd done an investigation on that and in the course of it I conducted an interview with somebody completely innocently, this was a mother who was arguing that this previous vaccine had injured her son. I got the feeling that she wasn't telling the truth and subsequently pulled court proceedings and found the judge said the same thing.
The judge said she was lying about what happened to her, happened to her child. She won an awful lot of money though in a lawsuit. So I had that background, and so when it came to MMR, I'd already had more than a year of investigating a previous vaccine, and I thought, oh, I can't face this. What happened was there was a paper published in London Hospital by this doctor Andrew Wakefield and a group of other people who put their names to it, but didn't actually write it.
It was a very strange kind of relationship there. They had sort of guest authorship of the paper. Which reported on 12 children. And the essence of it was, the parents of these 12 children were reported to have said that their child was developing perfectly normally, received the MMR vaccine, and within days, within days was showing the first symptoms of autism.
These are all tabulated in this paper that was published in February, 1998. I was actually working on this other vaccine. I looked at this, this paper. And I thought to myself, yeah, well there's lawyers involved in this somewhere.
Ken: And what made you think that? What made you think that?
Brian Deer: Well, one of the very few, and probably the only benefit of getting old is you have this experience of previous incidents and previous knowledge.
And over the years, the Sunday Times, I mean, my favorite subject and my, the subject where my heart is, was in social policy, was in poverty, homelessness. All that kind of stuff. You know, bit of health here and there. Prisons, all the sorts of liberal causes. And the Sunday Times is a conservative newspaper and my work was tremendously valued, but editors always put them on stories on page five or page seven or something like that.
But if I did a medical orientated story, they put it on the front. I thought, well, I'm just not getting involved in this, but I was given a routine assignment in, in 2003 because at the time, the fear of this MMR vaccine, provoked by things very similar to what Donald Trump was saying, about “Oh, well, I think you, you should separate the three shots and, and give them separately and, um, that they're, they're dangerous and, uh, but the safest thing is blah, blah, blah.”
And all the stuff that he came out with interspersed with this stuff about Tylenol, it was a weird kind of event where they were like running together, these two completely different issues.
Ken: Yeah, it was bad policy improv. It was a sketch. Yeah.
Brian Deer: It took us all away from thinking about Jeffrey Epstein.
But, you know, it was all the same thing breaking in the uk and vaccination rates were plummeting. They reached their lowest point since the vaccine had been introduced. And I was just asked to do routine reporting for the feature pages, looking at the controversy and what was going on.
And I went to see a mother who was Wakefield’s, of what he called his sentinel case, the first case that he claimed to have discovered. Where the mother said, my child was developing perfectly normally, and she said within two weeks he was headbanging. That was, that was her story.
Ken: Just to underscore for people, when this paper came out, it made headlines everywhere. Completely brought the medical establishment to a standstill. How did you come across this one woman of the 12 that were mothers to these children?
Brian Deer: Well, it was as you say, it was a huge story. In fact, I mean, subsequently, and for years afterwards, he would say, oh, I was being persecuted and the medical establishment was out to get me and this, that and the other. None of that was true. The actual fact was that he was being lionized, being championed by newspapers.
Ken: Yes.
Brian Deer: Especially in Britain by the Daily Mail, which ran story after story, just simply repeating what he said. And, championing the case that the MMR vaccine probably causes autism.
Ken: And he was in effect, the savior. He was the one whose insights and science was reversing this great malfeasance on the part of academics, the medical community, pharmaceutical companies, and government.
Brian Deer: Yeah. So there was all this press attention and this mother was parading her son through the media as the big winner for a lawsuit because there was this huge lawsuit being prepared in the background, which she was one of the test cases about to go forward. So I saw that she was speaking at a meeting in Central London and I went along and listened to her and then I phoned her up the next day and went to see her.
And [I] asked her, what happened to her son. And I went through it very, very carefully. So you took your child to the doctor. What happened? What did the doctor say? And I went all the way through. What happened next? What happened next? She told this story that was plainly not true. So I thought, well, maybe this piece that I was expecting to spend a couple of weeks on is gonna need to take a bit longer.
The first round of discoveries was that whilst these 12 children appeared to be just routine patients being written up as a case review, which is very common investment
Ken: That showed up at this hospital.
Brian Deer: Yeah, they were just routine children turning up at a pediatric bowel clinic in fact, it was. But in fact, they had been sent there by an anti-vaccine group in cahoots with Andrew Wakefield.
He knew where they were coming from and he was speaking at their meetings, and he'd been funded through a lawyer by, in fact, the British taxpayer through a thing called the Legal Aid Fund, which provides money for people who can't afford access to justice. But he was holding himself out as if he was an independent researcher.
He never said that he'd been hired. To create a case against the MMR vaccine. Never revealed that at all until I revealed it. That conflict of interest, which he had, clearly had, he denies it. He says, oh, I have no conflict of interest at all. The idea that he was being paid to make a case that was precisely the case that he was presenting in his paper, which he put forward at a press conference in 1998.
Making out that he was just a researcher in a bowel unit. And he turned up these extraordinary stories that these parents were telling, but they'd all been orchestrated, the referrals were orchestrated, and it was all planned out. And that was the first story I ran, and it was on the front of the Sunday Times.
Other newspapers, the editor of The Lancet, who I'd been to interview about this, he published the paper in [a] very prestigious journal, the Lancet. He published his 12 child paper. I'd gone to see him and he tried to sabotage my investigation by issuing a press notice on the Friday, knowing that we published on a Sunday. The mistake he made was to not appreciate that everybody else would know what was going to be on the front page of the market leading Sunday newspaper, which was, it's the Sunday times.
All the other papers knew what we were gonna run, so they ran it. So you had this firestorm that erupted in the UK and then Wakefield told this preposterous, I have to say this, I mean, I'm very mindful of what the word lie means. Often when you are on the internet and you know, in social media, people call you and say, you're a liar, you are lying.
It's like somebody the other day was calling Grok you know, the artificial intelligence program on X of lying. And I felt like trying to explain to them that a lie requires intent. Somebody at the time they make the statement, knows what they're saying is untrue, says it anyway, with the intent to deceive you.
That is a lie. It's not just saying something that's wrong. What Wakefield did wasn't just wrong. What he said in response to my first report wasn't just wrong. He was lying. And that caught my attention. He's never really lost it ever since.
Ken: Yeah, and to me, one of the things that I think the book describes so well is in the background of this Lancet study, there was already a really significant anti-vaccine movement.
Could you say a little bit about that? Because the elements of it that fascinate me now have to do with how impervious it is to facts and science, largely because of the conspiracy elements that have been woven together.
And it borrows from what you might think of as classic conspiracies spawned by the left and by the right, it's either, you know, big intrusive government or profit hungry corporations. The amalgam of those conspiracies is incredibly resistant to the kinds of insights that your front page article probably forced upon people.
Brian Deer: Sure. Now, that article was the first of a couple of dozen. Now at the time, the anti-vaccine movement in the UK was really quite small and was focused on this lawsuit. Parents were being told that if you join this lawsuit and your child has an issue which they can pin on MMR, you might get, you know, 2 million pounds, what’s that say maybe $3 million?
So people were signing up like crazy. They ended up with 1600 families enrolled in this class action lawsuit. That was the anti-vaccine movement at the time. But what was beginning to occur then is a phenomenon that really has just run outta control now, which is that people who think they understand these things or they're willing just to copy out what somebody would tell them like this Andrew Wakefield character.
People who worked around him, people who simply did not have the technical expertise or awareness of the subject. So they would make mistakes and the kind of mistakes they were making were being passed backwards and forwards and being embellished and growing.
And when experts challenged them and said, well, actually, you're not getting it right. We went to medical school, or we've got PhDs in. Molecular science or whatever, virology - we know about these things, perhaps we could take you through it, they weren't interested. What they wanted to do was to get onto the next link in the chain of conspiracy.
I, on the other hand, and this is something I'm not sure journalists could do today. The audiences were sufficiently massified. The readership was sufficiently big for me to be funded to spend months and months. My first story, I spent four months on it.
But because the Sunday Times editor's view would be, this was of sufficient interest to our readers, they could fund it. Today, I'm not sure there'd be many journalists outside the New York Times or the Washington Post [or the] Wall Street Journal in newspapers who could call on the kind of resources to make that kind of investigative effort, but that's what I was able to do to start with.
And then [I] carried on with the TV program and a series in the Sunday Times, which added to the first discovery about the conflict of interest that Wakefield had, that these children in this paper were recruited and sent to the hospital to make the allegation so that his finding of their association between MMR and autism in eight out of the 12 children face value think, well, good god, so two out of three parents of children with autism blame the MMR, and that's the way it was kind of looking on an admittedly small number.
But in fact that wasn't the case at all. They'd come to the hospital in order to make that allegation. That's why they'd come. So they were a preselected group, which means that the case series was rigged.
Ken: Yeah
Brian Deer: So that was a very important discovery. But then you might think to yourself, well, if it was rigged, how did he get his results?
Because if you got a dozen families and he used to phone them up to get them to come to the hospital. If you've got just kind of a ragbag collection of parents who believed that vaccines might have caused their child's autism, and not all of them did. I mean, a British parent came forward to me.
And said, I want you to know what happened to my son. This paper is fraudulent and I can see that from what it says about my son and an American family I found, and they told me that the Wakefield paper was outright fabrication. Because he'd selected children in the way that he had, the chances of getting the picture he wanted to make a scientific connection, wasn't there.
So he started altering the data and misrepresenting the data. That was the next stage of the thing. He went through, changing diagnoses, changing histories so that when a mother might have made the connection between MMR and autism after they'd heard of him. And months, months or even years after, he published his paper, he would change their histories to make it look as though they made these allegations and believed these things at the time.
So he altered that. And then the third part we were able to establish was that he had enormous commercial interests. He was trying to make a great deal of money out of this. He was getting a very substantial sum in today's money, about a million dollars, to make this case for this lawyer. But he was also on the side trying to start all kinds of business ventures.
Ken: The fact that you had to really fundamentally overturn the decision making process at The Lancet by bringing this evidence forward and it took years for them to correct it. And then I think the first change was in, if I remember correctly, 2004, where a bunch of the authors that had been added to the paper asked to be taken off of the paper and denied that the conclusions of it were valid, so they didn't wanna be on the paper.
And then it took a little while longer before the Lancet itself retracted the paper. How do you explain that? There is a process within science where there's a, I've noticed and certainly in public health, where once a decision's been made, it sometimes is very hard. For the establishment to change its mind or make an adjustment, and that seemed to be the case as you were presenting this evidence, a non-scientist who had gone in there and found evidence that should have been there for all to see if the editors at The Lancet and the reviewers had been paying attention. What did you make of that?
Brian Deer: Well, I just thought it was a classic cover up from the start. The Lancet didn't want to hear what I said.
My first meeting with them went on for five hours and they straight away betrayed my confidence. They told me, oh, we'll keep this all confidential. And then they put out a press release on a Friday afternoon to try and sabotage my story. And the academic institution where this man Wakefield worked, he worked inside a hospital, but there was a medical school there that was part of university college land, a very prestigious university.
They went for me to try and destabilize me and then peculiarly around the world as the investigation went forward. All kinds of other people, doctors came forward to say, oh no, it was a perfectly good case series.
There's a doctor involved in the whole vaccine issue who, anyone who follows it at all will know his name, but he turns up absolutely everywhere. A man named Paul Offit who's in Philadelphia. Very highly respected. He's just got kicked off of the Vaccine Advisory Committee at CDC.
Done a lot of very good work. He went for me too, suggesting that
Ken: Oh, isn't that right?
Brian Deer: Oh, yes. And he dismissed my findings. Firstly, there was a desire to cover it up and in, in many ways, protect Wakefield. And then there was this attitude of who is this journalist? A mere journalist could be saying these things.
It was like it was impertinent. You see, their critique of Wakefield's work was that, oh, he didn't have controls. Well, you know, case series don't normally have controls, you're talking about something else if you're putting controls in it. It was just a series of clinical reports. You get a case study and you just get one clinical report.
You don't have a control. But mostly they were angry about the impertinence of him criticizing vaccines and then they took the same attitude towards me, sort of the impertinence of a journalist saying these things when we, with all our institutions and, and research fundings and God knows what missed it. It's actually a British, very British kind of thing.
You see, if the truth of it was what I was saying at a very early stage, they would be thinking. So this man Wakefield, who not only did they not, were not out to get him, they promoted him. They promoted him from senior lecturer to reader, which is one rank in the UK away from being a professor. So actually while he was coming up with this stuff, they were promoting him, they were backing him.
They were involved in business plans to be spun off the back of this vaccine crisis that developed. This is all a British hospital and medical school doing this. They were not happy at all about me. They believed that the scientific process would work and was, was enough. And, that was the end of that as far as they were concerned.
Ken: As you peel it back layer by layer in your book, and I'm gonna name it again, the Doctor Who Fooled the World, you have to read it to understand what's happening with public health policy in the US these days, in my opinion. As you peeled it back, there was one juncture where the medical school, the leadership there as this controversy was beginning to really boil, offered him an opportunity and the resources to conduct the studies he would need to conduct in order to once and for all prove that he was right and Brian Deer was wrong.
That, to me, was a real turning point where all of the incentives for a scientist in a situation like that are to discover something that breaks through and contradicts the common understanding. That's where all the incentives are. If you do a study now on autism and anything, it just reaffirms, there's no linkage, say to Tylenol or to vaccines.
Uh, you know, it's another study that affirms it. If you did a study that proved Wakefield was right, that would be earth shattering. So all the incentives for a scientist going in are really to kind of discover such things. But when Wakefield was offered this opportunity, he stalled and stalled and then ultimately said, no thanks.
Brian Deer: That's right. The mythology, which he spins today. Really manipulating vulnerable people. I mean, he spends half his life on the American autism conferences and other conferences and making YouTube videos, and God knows well making films. In which he alleges that somehow they were out to get him.
They felt threatened by his work. That's why they got rid of him. And classic feeding this to people who often are inclined to mail abuse to me. So I get this constant stream of abuse and suggestions that I'm working with the pharmaceutical industry and God knows what else, you know, the whole, all, all the sort of stuff that Robert Kennedy comes out with.
Ken: Yeah
Brian Deer: But in fact, the truth of it was, that his university, University College, London. He was taken to see the head of it, the Provost who said to him, look what we want you to do. You are going around the world saying vaccines cause autism, you’re causing all this fuss and stoking controversy.
We'd like you just to now reign that in. Focus on your work and we will back you to do a replication study with many more children. You've told us you've got 150 of these children, okay? So we can support you in that. We'll get behind you. So you'd have one of the UK's most prestigious universities backing him.
And as you say, he equivocated. And would he do it? Yes, he will. He went okay, and then he just said, no, he wasn't going to do it. He incited academic freedom. He said it was his decision and that of his colleagues, they would decide what they investigated and what they went forward with and not the university. And so they had a meeting of the most senior people at the university and said, well, this man has to go.
And, although it's very difficult with academic tenure, nevertheless, they eventually forced him out, paid him a big sum of money to leave. And that was the last time he would ever hold an academic position.
Ken: And he has not, to my knowledge, attempted to do any of this research ever since.
Brian Deer: No, well, I think he knows where it leads, it leads to nowhere.
Ken: Yeah.
Brian Deer: He's made very good friends with the man who is now sitting at the top of the Health and Human Services department. Robert Kennedy, in fact, says that CDC should have a statue of Andrew Wakefield outside.
Ken: Yeah.
Brian Deer: And I've got video of them having these very intimate conversations in which Kennedy is, is really simpering like a schoolgirl towards this man Wakefield as though he's some sort of guru.
No question at all. That behind the activities of HSS at the moment, Andrew Wakeford is lurking and using his influence and he’s very persuasive character. I mean, he's a much more persuasive character than I am. I mean, he comes from the English upper middle class and went to private school and he's an Englishman in America, you know, and the parents, all particularly young mothers, they think he's some kind of hero.
Ken: Yeah.
Brian Deer: And the anti-vax movement, famously one of their leaders said that they regarded him as a mix of Jesus Christ and Nelson Mandala rolled up into one.
Ken: Yeah.
Brian Deer: And the guy's a complete charlatan.
Ben: It is really, really shocking to me and so relevant to what we're seeing now, not just that Wakefield showed up at Trump's second inauguration and not just that he's undoubtedly lurking now amongst Kennedy's advisors somewhere, or at least his inspiration.
But I can attest to the fact I posted a few things negative about Kennedy early on when he was campaigning for Trump, and I immediately got feedback, including from people who knew me, but I didn't realize that they had this particular dimension to their thinking, who immediately asked me how much money I was getting from the pharmaceutical industry.
And my organization, Environmental Working Group, We've never worked on pharmaceuticals. I've never worked on pharmaceuticals. There's no reason why anyone would give us money. And by the way, we wouldn't take it.
But that was the first response. And it's interesting now that Kennedy is in charge, we also are seeing not just these allegations, and I'm sure, compared to what you've received, I've gotten off very lightly, I'm sure.
But we're not debating the issues that Kennedy brought forward and Trump brought forward at the White House yesterday and even last week at the CDC, the debate was really very limited over the science and the facts that they were using to make the changes.
Because Kennedy doesn't confront scientists now who have a different view. He fires them.
Brian Deer: Yes. I mean, his whole strategy for the last 20 years has been to shop around. For anybody who will assist him in his attitude as a lawyer to make a case. I'll give you an example. I mean, he's going around saying that, and he wrote in his book, basically demonizing and libeling, Tony Fauci, right?
He went back 30 years to the allegation that HIV doesn't cause aids, and that AIDS is in fact caused by the recreational inhalant poppers. Now I interviewed someone at CDC about that very subject, those two things.
Was it an infectious disease or was it this other theory popper in 1981? In 1981, and that's how far back Kennedy will go to try and if you like, get some dirt on somebody with the idea that Tony Fauci misled the world and if only we'd stop using poppers, among the communities around the world, where we wouldn't have aids, absolutely preposterous.
But that's what he does. He thinks he understands medicine. He doesn't.
Ken: No, it was very apparent during the hearings, although they turned into shouting matches, every time he appears now before Congress, the shouting is louder and louder, on both sides.
Although now Republicans, including Dr. Cassidy, the deciding vote that allowed Kennedy to become HHS Secretary, even Dr. Cassy is raising some very serious concerns. Of course, Kennedy's already in charge and the chances of removing him by any congressional action are absolutely non-existent. Even if they did have the votes, it would be very hard to remove someone, that's never been done, a cabinet official.
And, and to me, the scariest thing about this situation now in the United States is the fact that because Kennedy has control of these agencies and can get rid of scientists and describe that as curing the conspiracy. We have to get rid of these corrupt scientists who have been working at the behest of pharmaceutical companies or other forces.
I guess now they're working at the behest of the Tylenol company. I mean, I think it gets carried away at some point to the point where you cannot really imagine how someone would listen to this and think it made sense. And yet people do. But now it's backed up by his ability to deregulate, disregulate, the agencies that otherwise would've been held accountable.
And this is one of the things that worries me the most about the time that we're in. It's the sort of weaponization of these anti-science capabilities by conservative movements around the world, but certainly around the United States. This has become a tenant of conservatism. I think the decisions Kennedy is forcing us now to live with on vaccines, for example, are going to end up killing a lot of Republicans because they're the ones who don't take the vaccines.
I think at this point we have to acknowledge that we are in a very dire situation in this country.
Brian Deer: Yes, and it's paralleled right across government. Is it the same sort of phenomenon that Kennedy has been firing people and replacing them with people for their opinions, not for their skills or their abilities to do the jobs, but for their opinions.
That their opinions conform with his opinions. So you see the same thing in the Department of Defense where they fired all the senior defense generals. You see it in justice where lawyers who fail to find a case against somebody who the president wants to injure, get fired and they work their way down through the line removing people till they get somebody who will do as they're told.
That might be one thing in justice, might be another thing in defense, but in health, in medicine. That you would strip away layer after layer of expertise and memory that exists, vital that institutional memory within big organizations is vital. All that experience and knowledge and dedication really, because anyone who goes into the public health services is not doing it for the money.
You've got your M.D., you know, CDC is not the place to go to make yourself rich. So the idea that they're all somehow into the pharmaceutical industry, payments or whatever, it's just absolute nonsense. These are decent people. They make mistakes. I mean, they have made a couple of quite big mistakes over the vaccine issue, and particularly during COVID.
I mean, you only have to read, anybody who's really interested in what happened during COVID, ought to read Daniel Defoe's, the Journal of the Plague Year, and you'll see all the same things in the Journal of the Plague Year written out there in the 18th century. All the same kind of mistakes or the same kind of controversies over plague as we were seeing during the COVID crisis.
Ken: What would you say the lesson is from what happened in the Wakefield Saga? For what is happening and unfolding now in the United States under HHS Secretary Kennedy, and frankly, President Trump seems to be all in on Kennedy's campaign now too. What do you think people should know other than to read your book, which I'm gonna tell him one more time.
Read this book. The Doctor who Fooled the World. What's your advice? What's your observation, Brian?
Brian Deer: My overall feeling about the Wakefield story is actually not quite as along the lines you are looking at. I'll tell you what it is. It's, as I say in the book, if he could do what he did and I show what he did in the book, who else is doing what in the hospitals and the laboratories that we may one day look to for our lives.
And there does need to be a cleanup in medicine, a cleanup in medical publishing, so that material that's being put out in front of the public is properly checked and is transparent. Because Kennedy himself has been showing that he doesn't trust medical journals because medical journals are not telling him what he wants to hear.
So what he's talking about now. The possibility of directing HSS staff to stop submitting to medical journals and to submit them to journals published by the American government through HSS. Now that is going in the absolute opposite direction to the direction I think that needs to be adopted.
The idea that journals like the New England Journal of Medicine, which is considered to be the number one general medical journal, it’s up there with Science and Nature as the ultimately difficult publications to get into if you are a scientist or researcher. If you don't even trust those, then you'd have to wonder, because once you go down through the pecking order of medical journals and some of the stuff that Kennedy was citing during his confirmation hearings, it was just. absolute junk.
Some of this stuff was just the most ridiculous. They were just websites. He was citing a website, an anti-vaccine website, as his refutation of the entire world literature showing that there is no evidence that the MMR vaccine causes autism. And he cites this website. And isn't taken to task over it.
Ken: And Cassidy did at least try and challenge him in real time during that hearing and raise, say that there might be some questions about the study that Kennedy was citing. I think he maybe had anticipated that, that there were some potentially some problems with it and wasn't in a proper peer review journal. But even then
Brian Deer: Yeah, he was doing it on his phone. He was sitting on his phone, during the hearing, looking at this paper. And yet you see, even he, a doctor, liver specialist, a great promoter of vaccines in his state, in Louisiana, did not feel he had the political capital to vote down Kennedy because he knew that that would upset Donald Trump.
And so he feared for being ousted from the Republican nomination the next election. So it's his situation was very much like other Republicans are facing right across the board. They're just sitting on their hands and keeping their mouths shut and not speaking truth to power.
Ken: Absolutely not. And that is above all what we should be trying to do now to the best of our ability. One last question. How do you evaluate a source of information on something having to do with public health or medical matters, how do you evaluate the authority of a source? How do you determine for yourself, Brian, who to trust?
Brian Deer: Well, to start with, I stick within my own area. So I could hold forth on the DTP vaccine, which in fact, that particular configuration of the vaccine is no longer in use. It's been amended. The MMR vaccine, the world's first AIDS vaccine that was supposed to have been released in the year 2003 or four.
Which was just a scam by a bunch of CDC people who started a biotech company. I know about those things. I deliberately did not get my head or even try to get my head around the intricacies of COVID because I was actually quite sick of the subject really, but it's a huge task to understand these subjects.
Vaccines is an enormously multi-specialist activity. And it requires going into all kinds of different areas of medicine, epidemiology, virology, molecular biology and clinical medicine, pediatrics, all this kind of stuff. And to get yourself to the level where you can seriously have a conversation with a doctor or scientist at their own level and evaluate what they're telling you is just a massive, massive task.
So I keep myself to that particular area and I think probably I am sort of number one in the origins of the modern anti-vaccine movement right up until the outbreak of COVID. I think after that I kind of just keep my mouth shut and observe what's going on.
But generally you start off with the very prestigious journals that are difficult to get into, that are properly peer reviewed, New England Journal of Medicine, Journal of the American Medical Association, the Lancet, and yet even The Lancet those years ago that I discovered is not the ultimate arbiter that you might think.
Ken: Yeah. Yeah. Well, thank you very much, first of all for your shoe leather, as we say here in the States, when journalists just don't stop working until they get to what they understand to be the truth and share it with the world and let the world reach its own conclusions about it in your case.
Thank you for digging into the Wakefield story and for discovering exactly what the underpinnings are of what we're dealing with today in large measure with the anti-vaccine movement and the impact that it's having now through Robert F. Kennedy Jr. on public health in the United States and for that matter around the world.
So. Brian Deer, thank you so much. I have nothing but admiration for your great journalism and really appreciate the time you've spent with us today.
Brian Deer: Well, thanks for sharing an interest, Ken, and thank you for your very informed questions.
Ken: Thank you to Brian Deer for joining us today and thank you out there for listening. If you’d like to learn more, be sure to check out our show notes for additional links to take a deeper dive into today’s discussion. Make sure to follow our show on Instagram @kencookspodcast.
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Today’s episode was produced by the remarkable Beth Rowe and Mary Kelly. Our show’s theme music is by Moby, thank you Moby, and thank you all out there for listening.
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