By Peter C Gøtzsche, Institute for Scientific Freedom
The smallpox vaccine has saved millions of lives, but vaccines also take some lives, e.g. the Covid-19 vaccines can cause thrombosis and myocarditis.
I explain in my book, Vaccines: truth, lies, and controversy, why vaccines are an emotional topic where the lines are sharply drawn and I give many examples of misinformation, both from vaccine deniers and from our authorities, e.g. the FDA and the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC).
Together with my filmmaker, historian Janus Bang, I shall deal with these issues in our upcoming documentary about vaccines. We have started applying for funding for our film, and if you wish do donate, you can do so via my GoFundMe account where we write:
“Scientific freedom is constantly under attack, particularly in healthcare, which is dominated by the drug industry and other vested interests. People who speak truth to power, e.g. about serious harms of vaccines and suicides being doubled by depression drugs, may become removed from their posts.”
We are currently finishing our documentary about the lack of scientific freedom and the moral and scientific collapse of the Cochrane Collaboration, a once highly respected institution, founded in 1993 with the aim of helping people make better decisions about healthcare interventions.
In our vaccine film, we will explore many issues in a historical perspective. Why are people asked if they are for or against vaccines, which depends on the specific vaccine in question? Why do only a third of healthcare professionals accept the offer of being vaccinated against influenza? Why did we not recommend the Covid-19 vaccine for young children in Denmark, unlike the USA until recently? Why did many countries introduce vaccine mandates, which are highly unethical and violate informed consent?
Why do some people think there is nothing to discuss when the childhood vaccination program in the US is far larger than in Denmark?
Why are people, e.g. the current Secretary of Health and Human Services, Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., subjected to character assassination in scientific journals and in the press when they merely point out – correctly – that we do not know the harmful effects of our childhood vaccines because they were not compared with placebo before they were approved?
Why did the major media fail miserably when reporting on the evidence-based decision that it would no longer be recommended to give all newborns in the United States a hepatitis B vaccine? Why did the media denigrate the scientists behind this decision and why did they give prominence to people who only talked about their feelings or beliefs with no evidence in their support, and who were often wrong when they, unchallenged, contradicted the facts?
The purpose of our vaccine film is to tell what we know and don’t know about vaccines and to contribute to the debate becoming more evidence-based and nuanced, so that people to a greater extent can choose or reject vaccines on an informed and rational basis.
Neurological harms of vaccines and the Wakefield fraud
Strangely, as I describe in my vaccine book, the British doctor Andrew Wakefield is portrayed as a hero in vaccine denying circles in the United States even though his research was rigged right from the start. He claimed he had discovered a new syndrome, which he dubbed “autistic enterocolitis” in a paper later retracted by the American Journal of Gastroenterology.
Wakefield also claimed that the live measles vaccine causes both autism and inflammatory bowel disease, which was a result he never found. He published a paper in The Lancet in 1998 claiming a sudden onset of autism within days of vaccination with the MMR (measles, mumps, and rubella) vaccine. This was a total sham built on unverified, vague, and sometimes altered memories and assertions of parents who were bound to blame the vaccine when they came to the hospital because that was why they had been brought there, which Wakefield denied.
There was widespread falsification of patient selection criteria, clinical histories, and neuropsychiatric diagnoses. In not one case in the series of 12 children could the Lancet paper be reconciled with National Health Service records, and in not one case could the purported diagnosis of inflammatory bowel disease be confirmed. When the results of the pathological examinations were shown to others, they said they were overwhelmingly normal and might be found in almost anybody’s gut. The original slides were claimed to have been lost, which is the standard excuse when people face trouble in fraud cases: “Sorry, the termites ate my data!” as an Indian researcher once claimed.
The UK’s General Medical Council (GMC) ruled that key elements of the Lancet paper were intentionally dishonest. The authors had omitted the children’s principal gastroenterological problem. Almost all had severe constipation, and standard blood tests for inflammation were normal, but this was also unreported.
Wakefield said he had nothing to do with the pathological findings, although the paper stated that he assessed the biopsy specimens with the pathologist and a trainee.
Some vaccine sceptics claim that Wakefield is innocent and was subjected to an unfair trial and a conspiracy involving the drug industry. They have also tried to denigrate the journalist, Brian Deer, who uncovered Wakefield’s fraud in a series of excellent articles in the BMJ.
But the facts are crystal clear. A panel of three doctors and two lay members hearing the GMC case handed down verdicts that wholly vindicated Deer. Branding Wakefield “dishonest,” “unethical,” and “callous,” they found him guilty (against a criminal standard of proof) of some three dozen charges, including four counts of dishonesty and 12 involving the abuse of developmentally challenged children. Furthermore, his research was found to be performed without ethical approval. Five days later, The Lancet retracted the paper as “utterly false.”
Wakefield had emigrated to America, and three weeks later, he was ousted by the directors of his Texas business, and he was later erased from the UK doctors’ register.
BMJ’s editor-in-chief called Wakefield’s research “an elaborate fraud” and accused the Royal Free medical school and The Lancet of “institutional and editorial misconduct.” The BMJ is very worried about possible litigation and it is extremely rare that this journal is so frank and direct about fraud, but in this case, it was justified.
Some vaccines can cause serious neurological harms, which my research group documented for the HPV vaccines. As an expert witness in a court trial against Merck, I uncovered – by reading 112,000 pages of internal study reports – that Merck had committed scientific misconduct on many counts, which included concealing serious neurological harms of its Gardasil vaccine for the FDA.
The influenza vaccine, Pandemrix, caused narcolepsy, a very serious neurological disorder for which there is no cure.
In science, we need to be open. The unexpected often occurs, and as we cannot exclude the possibility that some vaccines other than MMR might cause autism, it has recently been proposed by two outstanding researchers affiliated with the CDC, Christine Stabell Benn and Martin Kulldorff, to study this issue in the United States.
They also suggested to do a randomised trial of the extensive US vs the more limited Danish vaccine schedule for infants and toddlers, with five-year follow-up and meaningful outcomes: All-cause hospitalization, nontargeted infectious disease hospitalization, autism, asthma, allergy, autoimmune diseases, neurodevelopmental disorders, and obesity.
This is prudent because vaccination is associated with the development of atopic diseases, and the extensive US vaccine schedule could very well be harmful.