Are you claiming that the UK Sunday Times newspaper recieves money from
Merk?

A yes or no question for you, john: Do you accept that Wakefield (or
someone representing him) filed a patent application for a competing
measles vaccine PRIOR to his public news conference about his Lancet
findings?

--

From the Mirror (UK):

'NEVER ANY EVIDENCE OF AUTISM AND MMR LINK'

Nov 15 2004

By Alexandra Williams

THE doctor in the MMR-autism scare did not find evidence of a link,
claims one of his team.

Dr Nick Chadwick, hired by Dr Andrew Wakefield to test autistic
children during his research, claimed: "There really wasn't the
evidence there right from the beginning to justify those claims." But
he admits that Dr Wakefield queried if his tests were sensitive
enough.

And Dr Wakefield made his controversial claims while developing his
own rival vaccine with a patent application, Channel 4's Dispatches
alleges.A vaccine was not produced. But medical journal The Lancet
said it would not have published his research had it known of the
alleged conflict of interest.

The Royal Free Hospital in North London, where Dr Wakefield worked,
denied there was any conflict. He was under no legal or professional
obligation to make the patent public.

Johnny cannot stand it now that his hero's lies and deceit have come to
light. Wakefield is not better, and in fact worse, than all those good
doctor's Johnny has smeared over the years.

Can't say that he was not warned.

Johnny, grow up and find a new hero.

The same smearing af anything not endorsed by *organized medicine*.

Watch for a flood of replies from the *gang* who sole purpose here is to smear.

Jan

http://www.mmrthequestions.com/

Read this and then watch the Dispatches programme tonight to see the lies
and smears in action.

Issues Raised by the Sunday Times and the Channel 4 Dispatches Programme
A statement by Dr Andrew Wakefield
The Sunday Times and the Dispatches programme of 18th November raise a
number of issues in relation to MMR, autism and events at the Royal Free
Hospital. Since many of the claims by journalist Brian Deer have been
demonstrably false and there in no objectivity in the manner of their
intended portrayal, I declined to participate in any way in the making of
the Dispatches programme. In addition, vulnerable parents have complained of
being "tricked" into participating in the programme. I was not invited to
comment on the Sunday Times article prior to its publication.

----------------------------------------------------------------------------
----
The claim appears to be that, whilst at the Royal Free Hospital, I was
developing a new vaccine to compete with MMR and that I conspired to
undermine confidence in MMR vaccine in order to promote this new vaccine,
and that this represented a conflict of interest. This is untrue. The facts
are that:
 a.. no vaccine or anything resembling a vaccine was ever designed,
developed or tested by me or by any of my colleagues at the Royal Free
Hospital;
 b.. it has never been my aim or intention to design, produce or promote a
vaccine to compete with MMR;
 c.. my genuine concerns about the safety of MMR are wholly unrelated to
any desire or opportunity to develop a competing vaccine;
 d.. there was no conspiracy as insinuated by the Sunday Times article;
 e.. there was no conflict or interest, actual or perceived.
In contrast, it was our intention, at one stage, to conduct a formal
therapeutic clinical trial of a compound that might have the ability to
promote the body's immune response to measles in order to assess the effects
of this therapy upon the disease in children with regressive autism and
bowel disease. This compound is known as Transfer Factor and whilst there is
a large scientific literature on this subject, the nature and mechanism of
action of Transfer Factors are largely unknown.

The Transfer Factor that was intended for use in the trial was to be against
measles virus. I have urged and continue to urge parents to have their
children vaccinated against measles using the current vaccines. This would
be in direct conflict with the intentions that are part of the claim that I
was developing a new vaccine to bring onto the market. Whether a Transfer
Factor could ever protect children against measles is entirely speculative
and is something that was never studied or pursued by me or any of my
colleagues.

The Channel 4 programme implies commercial aspirations for personal gain. In
fact, the aim of the patent was to generate funding for the research
programme and a new Centre for Gastroenterology at the Royal Free Hospital.
This can be substantiated by contemporaneous documentation.

The patent application was motivated by two main factors. First, it was felt
that there may be difficulty in raising traditional grant funding for
cutting edge, controversial work that was vulnerable by virtue of the fact
that it might conflict with perceived wisdom and the commercial interests of
others. Secondly, there was, and is, a government-led emphasis on commercial
exploitation of discoveries within the medical school.

----------------------------------------------------------------------------
----

Transfer Factor (TF)
 a.. A clinical trial of measles-virus specific transfer factor was planned
in order to determine whether there was benefit to children with regressive
autism and inflammatory bowel disease.
 b.. It is not known at this stage whether this therapy would work. The
purpose of the trial was to start to answer exactly this question as well as
to monitor the safety of TF in these children.
 c.. This was a treatment trial, not a vaccine trial.
 d.. A trial of TF was based upon an extensive scientific literature,
demonstrating safety and efficacy of TF in different diseases. I consulted
widely with experts in the UK and US on the history and scientific
background to TF both prior to and in the planning of the trial.
 e.. The protocol was extensively peer-reviewed with written endorsement
from experts in the UK and US. The trial protocol was submitted to, and
subsequently approved by, the Ethical Practices Committee of the Royal Free
Hampstead NHS Trust.
 f.. The trial protocol was approved by the participating physicians.
 g.. The trial was funded by charitable foundations after independent
peer-review.
 h.. The trial was cancelled due, in part, to my departure from the Royal
Free.

----------------------------------------------------------------------------
----

The Patent
 a.. A provisional patent filing was made for the use of measles
virus-specific TF in regressive autism and inflammatory bowel disease
(Regressive Bowel Disease; RBD).
 b.. The reference to the possible use of TF to protect children against
measles infection - the thrust of the Sunday Times' conspiracy theory - was
put in as an afterthought in the patent. It was entirely speculative and
never pursued in any shape, manner or form.
 c.. The provisional patent filing was entirely speculative and was for a
possible therapy; as such, it had no bearing on the 1998 Lancet paper. It
constituted no potential conflict until the patent was awarded. When the
patent was later awarded, this fact was communicated directly to the Editor
of the Lancet in order that it might accompany a letter, written in response
to a paper by Taylor et al that claimed to find no evidence of a link
between MMR vaccine and autism. The editor did not consider the patent
disclosure of sufficient significance to publish it alongside my letter.
 d.. Since it was awarded, the patent has been disclosed in relevant
publications. The claims have since been abandoned.

----------------------------------------------------------------------------
----

Drs Nick Chadwick (NC) and Ian Bruce (IB): measles virus detection in
intestinal biopsies.
NC was employed as a post-graduate researcher in my laboratory, studying for
a PhD. He investigated various technologies for measles virus detection
using gene amplification. Due to problems within the laboratory with
contamination and the need for additional expertise, we collaborated with IB
at the University of Greenwich. IB and NC developed a technique that
increased the sensitivity of measles virus detection over standard
methodology from approximately 1 million viral copies in a reaction to
10,000 copies. In other words, even with the enhanced technique, the
technology could not detect this virus when present below 10,000 copies.

We published the fact that we could not detect measles virus in Crohn's
disease using this technique. This publication went ahead on my
recommendation, despite some resistance to publishing negative data. I
considered that failure to publish negative data was inconsistent with good
scientific practice and proceeded to publication.

By the time we applied the viral detection technology to the intestinal
tissues of children with autism, new and more sensitive technology had come
to my attention. This includes the technique of TaqMan PCR and was
state-of-the-art technology being used by a few expert centres, including
that of Professor John O'Leary (JO'L), then at Cornell University in New
York. I went to New York to meet with JO'L. He presented evidence that his
technique could detect down to 2 viral copies, compared with NC's 10,000.
The advantages were obvious and the possibility that NC's results were
falsely negative (i.e. that the virus was present in the tissues but at very
low levels that NC's technique could not detect) could now be addressed by
the new technology.

Using JO'L's technology the virus was detected in controlled studies and
these results were published. They confirmed that our previous results were
falsely negative due to the limitation of the technique we were using.
TaqMan PCR, one of the techniques used by JO'L to detect measles virus in
the autistic children, is now the gold-standard and the technology used by
NC has been abandoned. On entirely scientific grounds I was proven correct
on this occasion. The facts stated above can be supported by contemporaneous
documentation.

AJW

MMR: OH DEER OH DEER

Private Eye 26 Nov, 2004

THE makers of Channel 4's MMR: What They Never Told You in the Dispatches
strand should perhaps have thought twice before engaging journalist Brian
Deer to present a hatchet job on Dr Andrew Wakefield.

According to Deer, Dr Wakefield, the gastro-enterologist at the centre of
the MMR controversy, was little more than a snake oil salesman who led a
Royal Free medical school conspiracy to discredit the MMR triple vaccine and
make money from a vaccine it was developing itself.

Deer also claimed that when Wakefield voiced his concerns about the triple
jab, he had already tested for and failed to find measles in the autistic
and gut-diseased children he was treating; and moreover that those children
were abused in the name of his flawed research. There were plenty of other
allegations thrown into the mix but those are the main ones and certainly
the ones over which m'learned friends are currently rubbing their hands.

What Deer failed to point out is that until Wakefield voiced concerns over
MMR, he was a high flyer at the forefront of advances in understanding and
treating inflammatory bowel diseases. Yet Deer made no mention of
Wakefield's previous career or credentials; no mention of the science which
preceded the controversial 1998 paper which Deer claims started the MMR
scare; no mention of the research since (including that which has found
measles virus in the guts, spinal fluid and in one case the brain of an
autistic child). Nor was there any acknowledgment that the controversial
paper in question - only partially retracted last year - did indeed identify
a new disease process in these children's guts.

Deer's personalised documentary follows his allegations earlier this year in
the Sunday Times that when Dr Wakefield's paper was published, he had not
yet declared that he had been become an expert adviser to the children in
the UK litigation against the vaccine manufacturers. Although the issue of a
conflict of interest was actually raised in the Lancet six years ago, its
resurfacing in the Sunday Times has led to Dr Wakefield and two others from
the Royal Free research team now defending the charges in an unprecedented
hearing before the general medical council.

Deer's most recent demonisation of Wakefield and his theory was based on the
fact that nine months before publication of the 1998 paper, Wakefield and
the Royal Free sought to patent a treatment, called Transfer Factor, with a
spin-off vaccine and that this had been kept secret until now. The team at
the Royal Free were indeed at one stage intending to carry out a treatment
trial of a method of boosting immune response to measles virus using cell
lymphokines, part of the body's defence mechanism.

In the event this was never pursued by the Royal Free: there was no trial,
no treatment, and  no vaccine. A patent was, however, granted in 1999. But
contrary to Deer's suggestion, Wakefield did declare it. The Eye has seen a
letter he wrote to the Lancet in 1999 informing the editor of the patent.
The Lancet decided not to mention it. The patent is also mentioned on at
least three subsequent research papers.

Wakefield voiced general concerns about the combined measles vaccines as
early as 1992, many years before the Royal Free patent application was filed
in 1997.

Perhaps the most disingenuous part of Deer's programme was that viewers may
have been left with the impression that not only was there no reason to
believe measles virus present in the Royal Free children's gut at the time
the paper was published, but that that is still the case today.

This is untrue on both counts - unless one of the world's leading
pathologists, Professor John O'Leary, chair of pathology at Trinity College,
Dublin, is seriously in error. Before publication of the 1998 paper,
researchers had already found measles virus protein in the gut tissue,
although not the virus itself. Further, at the site of the inflammation in
the gut there were clusters of cells ?j that are typically seen in chronic
virus infection.

On the programme, both of Wakefield's former collaborators told Brian Deer
that if the measles virus was there they would have found it. But at the
time they shared Wakefield's concerns that the method and equipment (now
obsolete) used to detect the virus DNA was not sensitive enough. They put
their names to the negative finding research paper which Wakefield himself
insisted was published even though it went against his own hypothesis. It
concluded: "These results show that either measles virus DNA was not present
in the samples or was present below the sensitivity limits known to have
been achieved."

And so it proved to be. Shortly afterwards the samples were sent to Prof
O'Leary. Using state-of-the-art viral detection methods and equipment, he
found measles virus in the guts of children with autism. It has since been
found in the spinal fluid and brain. That work does not prove a link with
autism, but it should at least raise alarms.

The response has always been that the O'Leary tests have not been
replicated; but then other methods have always been used. Only now in the US
are researchers seeking to properly replicate the work in what both sides of
the debate are looking to as a definitive study. Prof Ian Lipkin, of
Columbia University, NY, who is leading the research, is internationally
renowned for his work in immunology and viruses.

Deer's allegation that Wakefield "abused" the Royal Free children by
subjecting them to invasive procedures might have carried more weight if it
had come from parents. But they consented to their children's treatments as
part of the ongoing clinical investigation. Those children were being
treated for appalling and painful gut disease - many had impacted bowels or
persistent diarrhoea. Doctors at the Royal Free were diagnosing and
treating, and in many cases alleviating, symptoms. They were not merely
using the children for research.

Deer focused exclusively on Wakefield's past and did not consider any of the
other relevant science. For example, in the week of his Channel 4 attack, a
team from the John Hopkins University School of Medicine in Baltimore,
looking at brain tissue of autistic patients, found chronic inflammation
triggered by an abnormal immune response. Although it was a small study of
11 autistic people who had died, they also found similarly high levels of
inflammatory cytokines (messengers that run between cells) in the spinal
fluid from six autistic children. The researchers found an immune reaction
similar to that found in dementia associated with HIV virus.

These sort of studies suggest Dr Wakefield is not the lone lunatic that Deer
would have us believe. Despite allegations to the contrary, Private Eye is
not anti-vaccine and has never said Dr Wakefield hypothesis is right. We
have merely maintained that his work deserves proper investigation and that
single jabs, used long before MMR, should be made available as a
precautionary measure to keep up herd immunity. That proper investigation is
finally taking place in the US; but until Prof Lipkin and others report, the
jury is still out.

Interestingly, in Lancet editor Richard Norton's book on the MMR
controversy, he disclosed how "one of the protagonists in the affair had
said openly and publicly that his intention was to 'rub out' Wakefield". The
"protagonist" in question? Step forward Brian Deer.