While Wakefield held himself out to be a dispassionate scientist, two years before the Lancet paper was published – and before any of the 12 children were even referred to the hospital – he had been hired to attack MMR by a lawyer, Richard Barr: a jobbing solicitor in the small eastern English town of King’s Lynn, who hoped to raise a speculative class action lawsuit against drug companies which manufactured the triple shot.
Unlike expert witnesses, who give professional advice and opinions, Wakefield had negotiated an unprecedented contract with Barr, then aged 48, to conduct clinical and scientific research. The goal was to find evidence of what the two men claimed to be a “new syndrome”, intended to be the centrepiece of (later failed) litigation on behalf of an eventual 1,600 British families, recruited through media stories. This publicly undisclosed role for Wakefield created the grossest conflict of interest
Barr [audio] paid the doctor with money from the UK legal aid fund: run by the government to give poorer people access to justice. Wakefield charged at the extraordinary rate of £150 an hour – billed through a company of his wife’s – eventually totalling, for generic work alone, what the UK Legal Services Commission, pressed by Deer under the freedom of information act, said was £435,643.
In addition to the personal payments, Wakefield was awarded an initial £55,000, which he had applied for in June 1996, but which, like the hourly fees, he never declared to the Lancet as he should have done, for the express purpose of conducting the research later submitted to the journal. This start-up funding was part of a staggering £26.2m of taxpayers’ money (more than $56m US at 2014 prices) eventually shared among a small group of doctors and lawyers, working under Barr’s and Wakefield’s direction, trying to prove that MMR caused the previously unheard-of “syndrome”. Yet more surprising, Wakefield had asserted the existence of such a syndrome – which allegedly included what he would dub “autistic enterocolitis” – before he performed the research which purportedly discovered it.
One Wakefield business was awarded £800,000 from the legal aid fund on the strength of (later discredited) data which he had co-authored. And, even as the Lancet paper was being prepared, behind the scenes he was negotiating extraordinary plans to exploit the public alarm with secret schemes that would line his pockets. “Disgraced doctor Andrew Wakefield plotted to make £28 million a year from the MMR jab panic he triggered,” was how the British tabloid newspaper The Sun, for example, reported in January 2011 on this disclosure from Deer.
A key finding of Deer’s Channel 4 investigation was that, even as the public alarm caused by Andrew Wakefield and the Royal Free medical school gathered pace, he had filed a patent claiming to have discovered his own, allegedly safer, measles vaccine.
Following the programme, Wakefield published a statement denying this – a denial he repeated often. The secret 1997 document below was obtained exclusively by Deer and, with a 1998 published application, conclusively prove not only this shocking conflict of interest, but that Wakefield has lied about it ever since.
A thorough discussion of the patent history can be found on Brian Deer’s website. Brian Deer is the journalist who uncovered much of what the GMC was later to pronounce as ethical violations.
The patent is very clear in that it covers both the use of the transfer factor as a therapeutic agent and as a prophylaxis. In other words, Mr. Wakefield patented a treatment and a vaccine. Even though this is painfully clear, Mr. Wakefield has continually denied that the invention was a vaccine.
Day 31 of the hearing went into great detail about the patent. I was surprised to read (or had forgotten had I read before) that Mr. Wakefield applied for the patent without his hospital’s knowledge. This is very odd since the Royal Free was named as the applicant.Emphasis added.
Recally, Mr. Wakefield contended that the MMR was causing inflammatory bowel disease. He had plans to test his transfer factor to prevent IBD, not just to treat it.
Originally Posted by Katman
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