SUMMARY KEYWORDS people, autism, children, vaccine, mmr vaccine, wakefield, cdc, world, question, mmr, doctors, story, glaxosmithkline, reputation, medical school, age, texas, risk, mother, william thompson SPEAKERS Will Dove, Dr. Andrew Wakefield Will Dove 00:07 I have with me today, Dr. Andrew Wakefield. Some of you may recognize that name. I did when I first encountered him through the World Council for Health. Dr. Wakefield was accused back in the 90s, of scientific malfeasance, when he revealed a link between MMR vaccines and autism. And I'm very embarrassed to say that I was one of the people who bought the story up until a couple of years ago, when I got involved in this fight for our rights and freedoms against the COVID, tyrannies. And so I'm privileged today to have Dr. Wakefield with me. And I would like to give him the opportunity to clear his name in front of this audience to tell us his side of this story, because I have come to believe that he was an early example of a smear campaign, I guess, an ethical scientist and doctor who simply tried to reveal the truth, a truth that would have cost the vaccine companies a great deal of money. Andrew, thank you for joining us. A great pleasure. Thank you. So I'd like to do that. Andrew, please, if you would just tell the story from the beginning of what happened to you how you discovered this link, when you reveal the information, how they came after you, and smeared your name. Dr. Andrew Wakefield 01:21 Certainly, and thank you for the opportunity, although the caveat that actually this is this isn't about me. And I discovered that well into this, that it is actually about something far more important. And that enables me to continue doing what I do with it with a free heart and a free conscience. And so it starts back in 1981. I graduated in medicine from St. Mary's Hospital Medical School in London, and I was one of what is now six generations of my family to have practiced to have qualified in medicine from that medical school. St. Mary's is where penicillin was discovered by Alexander Fleming so it it has a wonderful reputation. And I became a gastrointestinal surgeon and ultimately ended up running a large research team, looking specifically at inflammatory bowel disease, Crohn's disease, and ulcerative colitis to epidemic diseases, enigmatic we didn't understand what caused them. And so they presented a wonderful, daunting challenge to a an investigative physician to try and unravel the mystery of these diseases. And so that's where it came from now, in 1995, it was late May in 1995, I received a call from a mother. And she said to me, Dr. Wakefield, I need to talk to you my child was perfectly normal. And he at the age of 15 months, he had a measles, mumps - MMR - Measles, Mumps, Rubella vaccine, and he regressed into autism. And I said, I'm terribly sorry, i You must have come through to the wrong extension. And because I'm a gastroenterologist, I know nothing about autism. And please understand for your listeners when I was at medical school, autism was so rare that we weren't even taught about it. We'd heard the name vaguely somewhere that we weren't taught about it. And it was perhaps one in 10,000 children. But it was so rare that even those numbers, that numbers is probably wildly wrong. And so she said, No, no, Dr. Wakefield, the reason I'm calling you is that my child has terrible gastrointestinal problems, diarrhea, wasting, failure to thrive,, abdominal bloating, pain, they've lost the ability to speak, to communicate, they've lost any language they had. But I know as their mother that they are in pain. They're leaning on things, pressing their abdomen on things. They're clearly distressed. And when I've told this to the doctors, and I said, I think there's something going on here in their intestine, the doctors have said, Oh, no, no, no - this is just part of autism. Put them in a home, forget about it, there's nothing you can do to help them and move on have another child. And this was the sort of attitude that pervaded child psychiatry at the time. The symptoms were clearly indicative of an underlying disease in the intestine until proven otherwise. This is the key thing until proven otherwise. We had a duty to do due diligence in our investigation of these children to exclude that they had inflammatory bowel disease. So we I put together a team of exceptionally talented doctors, including Professor John Walker Smith, who had come over from Australia was the world's leading pediatric gastroenterologist at the time. He wrote the textbook that currently teaches pediatric gastroenterologist and we investigated these children and the mothers were absolutely right. The children had In inflammatory bowel disease, it wasn't Crohn's. It wasn't colitis, it was something different, something distinct. But the mothers also said when I put my child on a diet that excludes gluten or casein cow's milk products, then there's marked improvement in the intestinal symptoms and in the autism, and we found exactly that. When we treated the inflammation with the standard kind of treatments, anti inflammatory treatments that we would use in Crohn's disease, for example, not only was there improvement in the GI the intestinal symptoms, there was marked improvement in the autism. They started using words they hadn't used for five years, it was extraordinary. It wasn't just that the child was feeling better. And some of your listeners may remember the film, Lorenzo's Oil, it was rather like a Lorenzo's Oil moment. There was a remarkable effect that was maintained as long as you had the child on the diet. Took them off the diet, they would go back again. If you took them off the anti inflammatory, they would regress again. But there was a clear link between what was happening in the bowel and what was happening in the brain. So I thought it was my duty to...to investigate the vaccine issue as well. Here are the parents they were right about this disorder. They were right that their children had underlying intestinal inflammation. They were right. But there was a reversible element to it when they went on the diet, or they went on the inflammatory, anti inflammatory, there was improvement. What we had been taught by the professors of psychiatry, child psychiatry, the experts in autism is that it was the mother's fault, that it was genetic, that it was irreversible. There was nothing you could do it had nothing to do with gastrointestinal disease. They were completely wrong. They also said that it has nothing to do with the vaccine. Well, my training and medicine was invested in listening to the patient, or the patient's parents, particularly the mother because the mother knows her child better than anyone else. Better than the man in the white coat, even though pediatricians have tried to usurp that authority and say, Oh, no, no, no. I'm a pediatrician, I trained at Harvard, I know more about your child than you even know No, you do not. And so here's another example of par excellence, the mother being absolutely right. And so when they said, My child was injured by an MMR vaccine, I wasn't anti vaccine. I went on time had it done. This is what happened. Then I had a clear, moral and professional obligation to investigate that. It was distressing that when I presented this to my colleagues, they said, Andy, as pediatricians we cannot be seen to question the safety of a vaccine. That didn't make any sense to me. That wasn't -- Will Dove 07:57 -- I'm sorry. to interject to interject, because you're talking about a story that started in the early 80s. What What time are we at now? What year are we at now? Dr. Andrew Wakefield 08:05 We're in the in around 1995. So we started, we started the my involvement in autism specifically started in 1995. Will Dove 08:18 So when all I can conclude from what you've just said, is that the big pharma companies protecting their profits, this has been going on for a lot longer than just the last few years. 1995. And you're being told, we as as pediatricians, we cannot question the efficacy and safety of vaccines for kids. Dr. Andrew Wakefield 08:43 That's right. And this was not a medical perspective, or a scientific perspective. This is how will we be viewed by our colleagues? How will our reputation suffer if we do our job properly, and I became very cramped. So he said, Look, you know, your duty or responsibility is to these children, to the patients sitting across the desk from you, your reputation is neither here nor there, your reputation is invested in you're doing your job properly. So we had a falling out on this issue, and I decided that I had an obligation to pursue it and the Dean of the Medical School Professor Eric Zuckerman, who was heavily involved with GlaxoSmithKline, who was the biggest manufacturers of MMR vaccine in Europe, said this will not be good for your career if you continue this vaccine safety work. And that kind of made me redouble my efforts. I couldn't believe what I was hearing, that what about the children? Listen, it's not gonna be good for your career. And while he was right, it wasn't good for my career - doesn't matter. And so I pursued it and at that stage and this - people need to remember that at that stage, and I tell this as this is merely for historical fact it isn't, you know poor old Wakefield, but at the time that the castle culture was new it hadn't been heard or hadn't been perfected hadn't been. We now all recognize it for what it is we have 17,000 doctors coming out against government policy on the COVID shot. And then facing loss of licenses you're seeing in Canada, people who are prescribing ivermectin, this cancel culture is pervasive now but at the time, it was brand new, and they were cutting their teeth on this. And so at that time, when I brought this to people's attention, when we published the first paper, there was me on this side, and the other side, there was Merck and GlaxoSmithKline. There were other vaccine manufacturers, there was British government, there was the American government, there was the World Health Organization, there was the American Academy of Pediatrics, the CDC, the NIH, Tony Fauci. It wasn't necessarily a fair fight. I thought, what they'll find this interesting, I was wrong. And but nonetheless, I pursued it. And what happened next is that they decided to go all in and Rupert Murdoch, son of James is James Murdoch, his son was put on the board of GlaxoSmithKline, as a non Executive Director, to protect the industry's reputation in the media. And his first target was me. And they came after me. And I faced all kinds of allegations, 28 pages of allegations of misconduct and abusing these children and all kinds of things. And it was fanciful, it was fanciful, but it was and it was conducted, the research was conducted by a sociopathic journalist called Brian Deer who was one of those people who, and I say this not in a pejorative sense, he truly was he fitted all the characteristics of a true sociopath. He, he came after me in the biggest way and made up these stories, but it didn't seem to matter, because they controlled the narrative, they controlled the headline. And the opportunity to respond to this really was smaller. So I decided that that's fine. In fact, I'd already decided that it was time to move to America. And there are two reasons for that. One is America is the attitude is entirely different than in England, you are constrained in medical research, really, by the government funding or by a small number of charities, the philanthropic approach to private medical research is nothing like it is in the United States. And the other thing is, even though the argument was equally polarized in both countries, the Americans have a sense of freedom that we didn't have in England, and you need to come from another country to appreciate the merits of that freedom. And so I continued to work in America in Austin, Texas, and they came after me here, and eventually, you know, I had my license taken away and, and moved on, it was a great shame. And we could have answered so many questions about the origins of autism and how these vaccines were or weren't causing the disorder. How to make children better, how to help them, but it was all sabotaged at a very early stage. And that was the dimension. And so that's when I became a filmmaker. Will Dove 13:28 So before we continue on that journey, I have a couple of questions for you based on everything you've just said. I know that you did a great deal of research. So I have to assume that you have charts, data, statistics, showing a clear correlation between the administration of the MMR vaccines and an increase in autism. Dr. Andrew Wakefield 13:47 Here's a very interesting point that you bring up, and thank you. So in 2000 2001, I went to testify before the US Congress, the Oversight Committee on Government Reform. And I went to a meeting at Cold Spring Harbor on Long Island, to meet with the CDC and I met the senior members of the CDC and we talked about this issue. And that was a time when we were still talking and they said, Okay, every child gets MMR, only some children get autism. Now you're saying why, why don't they all get it? Well, not only is that the way that disease operates, but often it's pattern of exposure. And what I mean by that? Our belief, my groups' theory was that it was age of exposure was one variable. The younger you get the MMR vaccine, the greater the risk. Now, why do we put that hypothesis forward? Because with infection we now know with COVID, there's an age specific profile of risk. Older people are at much greater risk than younger people. Younger people having zero risk of mortality from COVID, whereas it's higher and older people so now people are fully aware of this age specific profile of risk. Same with measles. If you get measles under the age of one you have a man much greater chance of having a more serious infection than if you don't if you get it after one, when intuitively your immune system is more developed. And so is it possible that getting the MMR early, say 12 months compared with getting it later in life - 24 months or 36 months, that you have a difference in risk. And the CDC said, okay, and they went away. And that's exactly the hypothesis they tested. In at the Atlanta metro area, they did a study looking at age of exposure, comparing autism risk in children who had the vaccine between 12 and 18 months, and then comparing those with after 18 months, after 24 months and after 36 months. And that's exactly what they found. They found that the children who got the MMR on the recommended CDC schedule, were at the greatest risk. Highly significantly increased risk of autism, and they found it precisely in the target group. And those were children who are developmentally normal to 12 months of age, and then something happened. They hadn't got any developmental problems in advance of 12 months, and then something catastrophic happened. That's exactly what they found. What did they do with that information? Will Dove 16:18 The very question I was going to ask. Dr. Andrew Wakefield 16:20 What they do with that information is conceal it, to ultimately destroy it, to go in at one weekend into the CDC itself, to get all of the offending documents that prove this case, to throw them into a trash can and have them destroyed They published a paper which said something completely different, there is no link between MMR and autism. Even in that paper, they couldn't completely erase the link. And so they had to come up with an excuse as to why it wasn't anything to do with the MMR. It was an appalling episode in public health history. And what happened was 14 years later, William Thompson, the Senior Scientist of that study, the man who had designed the study, collected the data, analyzed it and written the paper came forward to Dr. Brian Holker, a friend and colleague of mine and said, I can no longer live with this. This is what we've done a terrible thing. We put millions of children at risk of serious permanent neurological injury, in order that we can protect the reputation of the MMR vaccine program. Their interest was protection of the program, not of children. And he's confessed to us he not only did that, but he gave us the documents. He said all my colleagues destroyed their documents, but I realized that was illegal. And so I kept mine and here they are. So we made the documentary "Vaxxed" and "Vaxxed" told the story of William Thompson's confession and its consequences. And in that film, we presented him confessing in recorded telephone conversations, all of the data, the actual documents that prove the case that he was making. And people said from the CDC and elsewhere, oh, you've just made that up. That was false. Let me tell you, our listeners, one thing we accused, senior scientists from the CDC right up to the top of the CDC, of one of the worst crimes against humanity ever. Why? Because their job was to protect the children of this country. They did exactly the opposite. They are their sworn duty was to protect these children, they did the opposite. And if there had been a word of a lie, any mistake in what we had said in that film, they would have sued us to the moon and back. And there wasn't a whisper, not a whisper, because they knew it was true. So that was "Vaxxed". And it really changed the entire dynamic of this argument. And it brought people to the realization that there was something very, very bad going on. And I then met up with Bobby Kennedy, and his interest had been in the mercury preservative in many of the other vaccines. I met with Chris with Chris Exley and other people, scientists from England whose interest was in the aluminum in vaccines. And we realized that it wasn't one vaccine, but it was this toxic soup this this agglomeration, if you like, of the massive numbers of shots that were being put into children simply exceeded their ability to detoxify. And then there were catastrophic neurological consequences to that. And so the groups who had been disparate, if you like, for some time on different theories came together in a way that had never happened before. And it was an extraordinary time and really set the scene. to where we are now. And it put the public health authorities the vaccine manufacturers on the backfoot in a way that had never happened before. One amusing story, which you may be aware of is that when Vaxxed came out, it got into the Tribeca Film Festival, which is one of the preeminent film festivals in the world, run by Robert De Niro. Robert De Niro has an autistic vaccine injured child. And so we were delighted. Just before the festival, we were censored, we were pulled out of that festival. And that occurred because some one of the major sponsors of that festival was a Wall Street hedge fund that was involved with pharma. And so we were distressed for a few days until Robert De Niro went on live television, the morning news program. The Today Program, a Good Morning America and said we should never have done that everybody should see this film, it was a big mistake for us to withdraw it in the way we did. And with that di Nero effect, it exploded worldwide. And so the wonderful irony is that the censorship backfired in the biggest way. And it became a worldwide phenomenon for that reason, if it had played at Tribeca. It may have been seen by 100 people and within but they shot themselves they blew their foot or they blew both feet up - it was magnificent. And, and so they've learned from that, that mistake. But nonetheless, it was a fascinating sort of benchmark. And this this whole story. Now gone. Well, one other thing I wanted to say is this, and that is that. We did try to sue for defamation, the journalist Brian Deer, and the British Medical Journal that went out and accused me of fraud. And it was again an extraordinary story. But we tried to sue them in the state of Texas, which is where I was living and where my reputation was damaged. And we were denied jurisdiction. Now, bear in mind, when you go into a defamation case, you not only do you have a huge amount of work that you face in putting that case together, it costs you at least $3 million. Okay, so people say why don't you Sue? Sue them sue them? What people don't realize is the cost of doing that. Nonetheless, we did it. Because it was such an important issue that the truth should come out, Now, in doing that, in filing a defamation case, in trying to take it before the public, all of the facts, laying them out bare. Why would a fraud do that? I would someone who had committed fraud, seek to do that to have the truth laid out before the public for their own scrutiny. You wouldn't you would be entirely and spend $3 million doing it. And most of your life, you wouldn't do that you would only an insane person. I maybe a little off the rails, but I'm not entirely insane that you wouldn't do it. And so when people say Oh, you are guilty of this, ask yourself the question. Why would we attempt to get them before a court of law with all of the facts produced and presented to the public if it were fraud? You wouldn't do it. We were denied jurisdiction. The Texas court against all legal precedent denied us jurisdiction over the BMJ and Brian Deer. We had jurisdiction by all manner of law, and not least of which was the BMJ sells its product to Texas Medical schools. It profits from the state of Texas. And that allows what is called a long arm statute for people in Texas to sue a British Journal. But the appeal court denied that jurisdiction and there was some what was going on there, we will never know. But they took a long time coming to that decision and I think some very powerful people intervened on behalf of Brian Deer in the British Medical Journal, they did not want the story to be told. Will Dove 24:09 Andrew, before I get to my final question, I want to ask a question based upon something that you said a while back in this interview, you referred to your reasons for leaving Britain and moving to Texas moving to America. And you said that is much freer there. And I think while I've never lived in America, myself, having paid some attention to what's going on in the world throughout the course of my life, up until at least recently, that was likely true. What about now? Because you're hardly you're an early example, of someone who tried to bring out the truth. And we use this term Cancel Culture, which personally I think is an awfully polite term for intentionally destroying someone's career to silence them. And you're a very early example of this. A couple of weeks ago, I interviewed Dr. Peter McCullough, who is the world's most published scientific author of all time. And now the American Board of Internal Medicine is threatening to revoke his hospital privileges if he doesn't stop telling people the truth. And so what's your perception of America now? As opposed to when you move there? Is it still a country where you have freedom of speech? Dr. Andrew Wakefield 25:19 I think we're going through a temporary hiatus. What people need to appreciate, including Peter, because Pete has come to this recently is that when I got involved in this 30 years ago, there were a handful of people worldwide, who were prepared to talk about the thorny issue of vaccine safety. Now, it is more than half the world. What people need to understand is where we were, and where we are now, on the issue of vaccine safety. And vaccination for anything should be a matter of fully informed consent, all the risks, all the benefits that are known, and it should be based on good science. It should be an entirely voluntary decision based upon that information. When public confidence in the vaccine policymaker fails, as it has failed comprehensively, all they have left is force. And that force manifests as threatening parents, propaganda, coercing doctors, bribing doctors, threatening doctors with loss of their license, taking children away from their parents, stopping children from going into public or private school and getting an education, all of these things. That is a measure of the failure of the system, not its success. When you have to use force, this is an admission of failure, and it's going nowhere. We now in this country, apparently in California, they're threatening doctors with loss of their license, if they criticize Tony Fauci, Tony Fauci is somehow beyond criticism. I don't think so. So that kind of strategy is a road to nowhere, it is going to fail, it is failing very, very badly. Public confidence in vaccine policymakers is at its lowest ever, and it will never recover. And it's entirely their own fault for their dishonesty and their greed. And so people need to understand that they may think that in this modern world where we're losing, we're losing terribly. No, we're not. We're winning, what you're looking at, are people on the other side, who are failing miserably. And with every new threat, with every new coercion, with every new form of belief that they bring to bear on this is just another measure of their abject failure. And people need to bear that in mind. And people need to take heart from that, and be reaffirmed in their determination to see freedom prevail and we will win. There's no question in my mind, we will win. So study the history, study where this came from, and you will realize that this is a temporary aberration, we will get there. But under Tony Fauci's of this world will be gone. They will be remembered for the terrible things they did. And nothing more. Will Dove 28:27 Andrew this is my final question. And I have to say that I think honestly, very honestly, I have done now some 200 interviews since I started doing this last August. I think this may very well be one of the most important questions I have ever asked of a guest. Because I've listened to you not just in this interview, I've listened to things that you've said, online, I've watched some of your interviews, some of your statements. And you've said it's not about you. And I know that what weighs on you the most is that you are genuinely trying to save children and they shut you down. And who knows how many children has suffered as a result. But you were an early example of this. And you and I are both in touch right now with doctors and scientists around the world who are being canceled, who have had their licenses revoked or being threatened with it, who are trying very hard to spread the truth, to help their patients to do what is right. And they're struggling. And I know that you have somehow managed to come to be at peace with what's happened to you. What would be your advice for those other doctors and scientists who are currently being attacked and discredited for nothing more than telling the truth? Dr. Andrew Wakefield 29:43 You are doing the right thing. Stay with it. There is life after this. I promise you there is life after this. I became a filmmaker and people had come to me from industry and from regulatory agencies and told me extraordinary stories of misconduct and malfeasance and I decided it was time to turn that listen to stories, turn your talents to other things this will pass but do not, do not quit. Do not be put off, do not be feared, because you are doing the right thing and you are saving people, you are helping people and you know it. And so continue. Continue with that. Be stronger. Be reaffirmed in your belief in yourself and the rightness of what you're doing. Never lose your enquiring mind your scientific integrity or compassion, but do not be intimidated. Because you are doing the right thing. And for every child you protect, every life you save, every person that you bring back from death's door, then you're doing your job properly. So remember what it is to be a physician to what you signed up to in the first place. And and you will be able to say to your grandchildren on your deathbed, I did the right thing. Will Dove 31:05 Indeed, Andrew, I want to express my own personal thanks for your courage for your integrity, for your persistence. You are a true example of quite frankly, in my opinion, a hero. And I know you don't think of yourself that way. But you stuck with it. You've persisted in telling the truth. And hopefully, that example is going to set a path for many others to do the same. Thank you for everything you've done. Dr. Andrew Wakefield 31:35 My pleasure. Thank you