On Tue, 10 Feb 2009 12:56:39 -0000, "JOHN" wrote:


Dr. Andrew
Wakefield has worked so hard to maintain his work and to help autistic
children and he (and his family) have paid the high price of leaving our
home country in order that this can continue.

The "high price" of earning more money and enjoying a vastly better
standard of living than he could ever have hoped for had he stayed in
research or in the UK?

it is clearly intended to destroy his reputation world-wide.

The only reputation he has world wide is hardly worth protecting.

Throughout the 1990's Dr Andrew Wakefield, a research scientist at the Royal
Free Hospital and his colleagues, were contacted by parents of a large
number of children suffering from a form of inflammatory bowel disease with
a regressive developmental disorder.

Actually he was contacted by the solicitors for a small number of
children trying to put together a compensation claim. He was paid
about $6-800,000 at the time for his work.

In February 1998, a press briefing was organized by the Dean of the medical
school at the Royal Free Hospital to coincide with the publication of a
peer-reviewed case series in the The Lancet.

One which was not attended by Professor Walker-Smith as he disapproved
of medical research being debated prematurely in the mass media. He
has recalled that the only enthusiasm for the conference came from
Wakefield.

At the press briefing, Dr
Wakefield suggested the precautionary alternative that there could be a
return to single vaccines whilst concerns regarding MMR were investigated.

I don't suppose this would have had anything to do with him having
patented a single vaccine some time before? His "precautionary"
recommendation was not included in the Lancet paper and not in any way
supported by it.

Not a single member of the team which produced the paper publicly
endorsed Wakefield's anti-MMR stand. Wakefields claim was repudiated
by Professor Zuckerman and by the paediatricians in his own team. Dr
Murch, Dr Thomson and Professor Walker-Smith subsequently wrote to The
Lancet to disassociate themselves from Wakefield's call for separate
vaccines

The GMC took more than three years to frame their charges against Dr
Wakefield, Professor Simon Murch and Professor Walker-Smith, none of which
questioned the underlying scientific and medical findings in the original
paper.

Others have discredited that paper so comprehensively that most of the
authors withdrew their names from it. The measles virus it claimed
was found was simply laboratory error, no one else has reproduced its
results.

In the attempt to discredit Dr Wakefield and the other defendants, the
prosecution, employed and paid for by the GMC, has suggested that none of
the children referred to the Royal Free Hospital were actually ill. In order
to support this suggestion, they have had to ensure that none of the parents
of vaccine damaged children appear at the hearing.

Probably because no such claim was made.

In the following weeks, the organisations endorsing this statement will join
together in providing clear documentation in support of the science to date.

That will be a change.