Dr. Andrew Wakefield Discusses his Controversial Work in New Book, "Callous Disregard"

Dr. Andrew Wakefield, author of the book Callous Disregard, was recently banned from practicing medicine in his native Britain for using unethical practices to carry out a landmark 1998 study that suggested further research be done on a link between the MMR vaccine and bowel disease and autism in children.

“We did our jobs as physicians,” Wakefield told Imus today. “We listened to parents of damaged children, we listened to parents who had been previously ignored by the medical profession, largely of kids who had received the vaccine, had previously been normal, had regressed into autism, and developed bowel problems.”

He took the vaccine issue very seriously, and defended his decision to investigate it. “I’m afraid calling into question the safety of vaccines it killing the sacred calf,” he observed.

A gastroenterologist by training, Wakefield knew little about autism when he began his work, but found himself treating kids with terrible bowel problems: diarrhea 12 times a day, bloating, and pain.

“In the U.K., what seemed to be the triggering factor was the MMR vaccine,” he said, using the common abbreviation for the measles-mumps-rubella shot that is administered at 12-15 months of age.

It does not contain the troublesome mercury preservative thimerasol, but the MMR shot is give after several vaccinations that do contain the toxin, which is known to damage the immune system and the brain.

“So the question is, is it a combination of the vaccines that children receive, culminating in, for example, an MMR vaccine at 15 months that just tips them over the edge?” asked Wakefield. “We don’t know, but that is a very reasonable hypothesis. It’s consistent with what we know about these toxins, and it is certainly something that has to be investigated, but has not to date been adequately investigated.”

Contrary to rumor, Wakefield’s Lancet study never claimed a definitive link between the MMR vaccine and autism. “The paper was a very simple paper,” he said. “It simply reported the history of the children according to their parents. It made no claims except for the fact that we had observed a new bowel disease in these children.”

He will defend to the grave the decision to explore those parents’ claims. “We found a bowel disease that was treatable, and that made the lives of these children very much better,” said Wakefield.

The point of his paper, as with any published study, was merely to put a new idea out there, something Wakefield said all journals should be doing. The vaccine issue blew up, he said, when a freelance journalist concocted “a most extraordinary” claim that the Lancet paper was funded by lawyers.

At that point, Wakefield continued, “in order to put clear blue water between them and the contentious issue of MMR vaccines causing autism,” Lancet argued for a partial retraction of the paper, a ludicrous notion, in Wakefield’s view.

“We never made that claim in the paper,” he said. “It was logically impossible to retract it.”

Wakefield defended the so-called “unethical” clinical practices that caused his medical license to be revoked, telling Imus the children with bowel problems were “diligently and appropriately investigated.” The only whiff of unethical behavior happened at a birthday party for Wakefield’s son, where parents gave full consent for their healthy children’s blood to be drawn and used for comparison to the unhealthy children in the study.

“The essence of ethical medical practice is fully informed consent, and that is what we had,” he said. “We did not have ethical approval, and that was naïve on my part. That does not make it unethical.”

In reading the medical board’s review of his case, it was clear to Wakefield that his guilty verdict was determined long before any evidence was offered to the contrary. And unlike other studies that aim to establish a connection between vaccines and health problems in children, Wakefield’s 1998 study has been replicated five times: in Italy, the United States, Venezuela, and twice in Canada.

Rather than dwell on his own problems, Wakefield is ardently encouraging a policy of safety first when it comes to vaccines. “The American public needs to think critically about vaccines,” he said. “Do not take what your doctor says or what the CDC says as just fact.”

He emphasized that he is not anti-vaccine, just pro-safety. “No one can aruge with that,” he said. “When you’re going to give millions of children around the world all these vaccines, then you need to be absolutely certain that what you’re doing is safe.”

Naturally, after nearly 15 minutes of cerebral discussion, Imus was stuck on silly minutiae. “When you were taking the blood from the kids,” he said, referring to Wakefield’s son’s birthday party. “Were you in a clown outfit?”

Note to the I-Man: one needn’t wear a clown outfit to be deemed a clown. A cowboy hat will suffice.

-Julie Kanfer