In my pro-vax past, I have regularly referred to Andrew Wakefield's fraudulent study, the source of all anti-vax evil. The nefarious scientist who had set a whole movement in motion with his lies – at least that's how it was explained to me by people who could know, so I often played that trump card (I was still young). Until I heard him say sensible things, so sensible that I couldn't reconcile them with the reputation of that study. Please note: this was December 2020, we did not yet see what the vaccines caused.
Summary
In 1998, Andrew Wakefield published a study which described a new syndrome of intestinal problems and autism in children, which led to retraction and its removal from the physician register in 2010. His observation of a gut-brain connection turned out to be correct, that was not the problem. But the question was what triggered the complaints - or their worsening. Concerned parents suspected vaccinations and vaccine residues had indeed been found in the intestinal biopsies. Wakefield saw this as a possible lead for further research. He should not have made that suggestion because it led to his complete flaring. Now that we have experienced the disproportionate, not to say hysterical reactions to corona critics, together with the data manipulation, gaslighting, strange court rulings and omnipresent propaganda of acclaimed journalists, a new light is shining on that old affair.
A few days ago, a CDC nomination was withdrawn. The rejected candidate, Dave Weldon, MD, in an official statement relates to his position with regard to Wakefield's work at the time. The fact that this is still being carried on to him now goes so ridiculously far that it casts doubt on the fraud allegations of the time – everything seems to be allowed to protect the Holy Vaccines. This article (re)examines Wakefield's findings, the GMC response, Weldon's account, and the proportionality of his sentence, against the backdrop of persistent distrust of vaccines and health institutions.
In December 2020, Andrew Wakefield warned in a video about the risks of mRNA vaccines, which were then being rolled out globally. He predicted that these would disappear from the market within six months – a prediction that did not come true. Once again, he underestimated the ruthless push of the pharmaceutical lobby, just as he did in 1998 when, as a gastroenterologist, he published a study in The Lancet about twelve children with a new syndrome: inflammatory bowel disease paired with autism. That is the study that is now always cited as "claim that vaccines cause autism". Let's take another look at what exactly happened there.
He saw that syndrome well. That pointed to a connection between gut health and neurological symptoms, an observation that forms the basis of the modern gut-brain axis theory. 1Independent research later confirmed that 30-50% of autistic children have gastrointestinal problems ranging from dysbiosis to chronic inflammation (McElhanon, 2014; Kang, 2019). His study was a starting point, not an end point: did it start in the gut and affect the brain, or vice versa? Was there anything that triggered that interaction?
Parents reported that symptoms started or worsened after the MMR vaccination. This was consistent with the measles virus particles found in the biopsies taken by virologist O'Leary's PCR tests. Wakefield did not establish a direct causal relationship, but suggested that further research would be needed to determine whether the MMR vaccine could indeed be an external trigger.
What followed resembled the prosecution of doctors who wanted to assess the usefulness of a corona shot at an individual level: a witch hunt. It was not a scientific discussion but a series of events that culminated in the retraction of his paper, allegations of data fraud, unethical practices, conflicts of interest, his removal from the UK doctors' register, and a protracted, still-ongoing public crusade. He is lucky that transgressive behavior had not yet been invented, otherwise he would undoubtedly have been accused of it.
Brian Deer
What was really the scientific argument? Journalist Brian Deer coined the term "serious professional misconduct". He wrote on behalf of one of the Murdochs' newspapers, which are in pharma shares. Deer and the GMC (General Medical Council) stated that Wakefield had manipulated the timeline of symptoms in 9 of the 12 children, based on a comparison with original files (apparently not yet blacked out at the time). Deer pointed to post-dating. Constipation at six months was noted as after eighteen months, delayed at nine months to fifteen – and the GMC judged this to be 'dishonest'. However, the question remains whether this was pure fraud or an interpretation of clinical observations. Wakefield later stated that parents reported an aggravation, and that he recorded it (Callous Disregard (2010)). If these children were already burdened – with bowel problems or early autism traits – and an event worsened their condition, this may indeed have been a clinical observation. Independent studies do not rule out the possibility that a subgroup like this is more sensitive to triggers. This plausible possibility has not even been specifically tested.
In May 2010, the GMC ruled that Wakefield was guilty of serious professional misconduct, and he was removed from the register. Although the data manipulation was part of the case, it was not the core of the matter. The complaint focused mainly on protocol and financial issues: no ethical approval for invasive tests such as biopsies and lumbar punctures, a payment of £435,643 from lawyers preparing anti-vaccine cases, and a patent on a competing single measles vaccine that he did not report – but that was a drug, not a vaccine2See the Highwire video with Del Bigtree, at the bottom of this article. Compared to the billion-dollar turnover of the pharmaceutical industry and the revolving door and entanglement practices that have come to light due to corona, the amount mentioned seems small for such a study, which makes the emphasis all the more striking. After all, it is widely accepted that vaccine research is paid for directly by the party that has an interest in it. But not now.
British Medical Journal, which publishes Deer's series(!) in which he accuses Wakefield of, among other things, undisclosed conflicts of interest, does not mention that they receive money from vaccine manufacturers Merck and Glaxo Smith Kline. That's how obvious this money scattering is.
The co-authors of the study were acquitted on appeal by the High Court. John Walker-Smith, chief of pediatric gastroenterology, was classified as clinical care and not research fraud. The whole ethical problem was thus off the table. Simon Murch was already acquitted by the GMC in 2010 because he worked under supervision and expressed doubts. Wakefield did not appeal, possibly because of the high costs or a weaker position, given his central role in the data manipulation and conflict of interest.
And to think that there are people who look up on Wikipedia whether something is correct or not.
Dave Weldon: Trump's CDC Director who was not allowed to come
Dave Weldon, American physician and former congressman, recently brought the issue back to the attention when his nomination as CDC director was withdrawn. In his official statement (March 13, 2025, see full EN and NL versions at the bottom of this article), he makes a connection between his rejection and his position on Wakefield's work and intentions.
Weldon, who researched vaccine safety around the 1990s-2000s, argued at the time that Wakefield's syndrome was legitimate and that O'Leary's PCR results – measles virus in gut biopsies – gave a real indication that MMR triggered a reaction in some children. He criticized the GMC delisting and Lancet retraction as a power play by Big Pharma, which forced O'Leary under pressure to retract his findings (read that piece!3I was surprised that O'Leary retracted his claims. I called O'Leary and asked him why he did this. There was a very long telltale pause. Then he said that it had taken him many years to get to where he was, in the scientific community, and after another pause, he said that he had four small children at home. I had small children at home and I understood what he was saying. If he didn't, he would be fired. He would be ruined. ). Weldon's nomination was panned by Senate resistance from Susan Collins and Bill Cassidy, who saw him as "anti-vax" despite the many vaccinations he administers weekly in his practice. He pointed to the pharmaceutical lobby, which spends millions on politicians and media, as the reason for his blockade – and saw parallels with Wakefield's fate. This reinforces the doubt: if the syndrome was real and Walker-Smith was acquitted, was the data fraud really that clear?
This interplay of forces extends beyond Wakefield's case. Bodies such as the Medicines Evaluation Board (MEB) or the Dutch College of General Practitioners (NHG) represent the status quo as it has arisen in symbiosis with the pharmaceutical industry, which represents billion-dollar interests – a scale that far exceeds Wakefield's £435,643. As far as the media is concerned, in the Netherlands we can follow on a daily basis how journalists know how to report selectively to support established narratives. Think raccoon dog. If our journalists and institutions distort numbers or simply pay their mortgages with them, why should the GMC or Brian Deer be beyond any doubt?
Science and journalism have themselves fueled this distrust through inconsistencies and dependencies that everyone has been able to see.
Reply
In 2011 (Natural News), Wakefield denied fraud, stating that Walker-Smith's 1996 independent report supported his findings, and pointing to the link between Big Pharma and Deer. In Callous Disregard (2010), he emphasized that parents of the children studied spontaneously mentioned MMR as a moment of aggravation, and that he took their concerns seriously. The specific timeline discrepancies are debatable4See also the Highwire video And he focuses in particular on his syndrome and the broader vaccine safety discussion. But all those arguments do not undermine the claim of the article because it was not even about vaccines, they played a supporting role. It was made scientifically plausible that vaccination was something to take a good look at with this syndrome.
Deer claims that in some children, symptoms start before vaccination. This leaves room for interpretation: were these children already burdened – with gut dysbiosis or early autism characteristics – and therefore more susceptible to MMR? Biologically, that is plausible. A leaky gut can enhance immune responses (Vuong & Hsiao, 2017), and MMR causes a response that can exacerbate dysregulation in a fragile subgroup. Large studies (Hviid, 2019; Madsen, 2002) may refute an MMR-autism link in the general population, but do not examine subgroups with pre-MMR gut or neurological problems. It is a very specific, small subgroup and you don't see that reflected in population research, except perhaps in increasing autism percentages. But they can't be because of the vaccine – we know that line of thought too. Weldon wanted to test this, as CDC director – but the powers that be didn't think that was a good idea. That gives you food for thought.
Fraudsters and their fate
The proportionality of Wakefield's sentence remains an open question, especially when compared to other fraud cases. Diederik Stapel fabricated data for 58 psychological studies. That is of a different order and certainly serious, although it is not about vaccines. He was fired, his papers were retracted but he was still published – OK, jokes are still made about him but that's about it. Yoshitaka Fujii falsified 172 medical papers(!); After his dismissal in 2012, retractions followed, further hardly any attention from the media. It was probably not about vaccines. Piero Anversa manipulated heart stem cell data including processed images; His lab was closed in 2018, 31 papers withdrawn, but he kept his license, strange right? Sapan Desai provided fake data for Covid-19 studies in The Lancet and NEJM; After retractions in 2020, his career ended without any fuss.
Data manipulation is serious and undermines trust in science, but the sanctions vary. Wakefield's delisting, combined with years of public humiliation, is disproportionate to these cases. Weldon's account and Walker-Smith's acquittal raise the question of whether fraud was the real problem, or should a dissident voice be stifled?
How do we protect ourselves against Big Pharma?
Four years after his mRNA warning, the case remains relevant. Excess mortality rates, variations in batch quality of vaccines, and inaccessible data are fueling the growing distrust in health institutions. Wakefield's syndrome – a link between intestinal inflammation and autism – was a real observation, later confirmed by independent research. His data manipulation may have been an ethical misstep, but the hypothesis that MMR vaccination worsened or even caused symptoms in a burdened subset has not been refuted or thoroughly investigated. Weldon's withdrawn nomination once again underlines that power determines who is heard, both in science and in politics.
It's not just something of today, it's been like this for decades. The Wakefiled crisis lifted a corner of the veil and Corona has brought it to the surface. That is now eating away at the willingness to vaccinate. Dave Weldon writes about the research he had wanted to conduct: "Maybe the public would be reassured, especially because they would hear it from me, and it could help to improve the current somewhat tarnished image of CDC and the pharmaceutical industry." They let that opportunity pass, why actually... It strongly suggests that things have not really been very different with vaccine approvals in recent decades.
Original AND statement by Dave Weldon
English translation of the statement
Very worthwhile: special of The Highwire: Andrew Wakefield, the real story
For the details, listen to Wakefield himself in this interview with Del Bigtree, who has also been digging. An hour and a half of explanation and answers to the most pressing questions.
References
- 1Independent research later confirmed that 30-50% of autistic children have gastrointestinal problems ranging from dysbiosis to chronic inflammation (McElhanon, 2014; Kang, 2019).
- 2See the Highwire video with Del Bigtree, at the bottom of this article
- 3I was surprised that O'Leary retracted his claims. I called O'Leary and asked him why he did this. There was a very long telltale pause. Then he said that it had taken him many years to get to where he was, in the scientific community, and after another pause, he said that he had four small children at home. I had small children at home and I understood what he was saying. If he didn't, he would be fired. He would be ruined.
- 4See also the Highwire video
Thank you for paying attention to the Wakefield case. I saw a podcast of him with doc Malik in 2023 and then started looking further and also came to the conclusion that Wakefield had only committed 1 sin, which was to recommend further research that could potentially result in the kicking down of the sacred vaccination house.
I recently heard Jonah Walk say that in the medical world, any criticism of vaccines is forbidden (or words to that effect).
What many physicians do not sufficiently realize is that in two hundred years' time, current knowledge will be viewed very differently. It was not so long ago that leeches were used and the surgeon always had a bloodletting kit with him.
Now in physics, which I know a little bit about, it is already difficult to get a new explanation for a phenomenon accepted. But in medical science, you don't just have colleagues who don't like to admit that they have been performing pointless or perhaps even harmful interventions for twenty years. There is also an entire medical industry in which a lot of people work with huge financial interests and to make matters worse, there is a huge impact on the population if there were to be really big changes in medical insight. When Einstein showed that Newton's laws were correct but not complete, he was welcomed like a rock star, but if you show that certain vaccinations also have unpleasant side effects, then the treatment is different.
Which makes sense in itself. Perhaps it is not opportune to publicize that children die from youth vaccinations. In the US, there are about a hundred per year in the first year of life (https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC8255173/). In the Netherlands about five (my estimate). After all, you (maybe) save tens of thousands of (by definition other) children with it.
It is the well-known trolley dilemma and the solution is utilitarian. You sacrifice five scouts to keep an entire army from falling into a trap.
It is a pity that this phenomenon prevents a real evaluation of certain medical interventions such as mass vaccination campaigns.
Or they realize it but they think the people will not understand. Only experts can do that – generals, to stay in your analogy with the military.
The choice to sacrifice five children, can you leave it to the people? (On the other hand, it would not be the first time in history that child sacrifices have been made...)
But when you know you're saving tens of thousands of lives by sacrificing five, you don't want to give it up because a lot of people "don't agree." Then it's better to keep it to yourself.
You can't afford to lose your self-reflection and that's difficult when you have the power to play with lives and no one can check whether you are still making the right decisions. In addition, personal responsibility is taken away by institutionalization, which makes it even easier to persist in blunders made.
Maar het is nog veel erger! Er worden niet tienduizenden kinderen gered. Er gaan namelijk nauwelijks kinderen dood aan de bekende kinderziekten.
ik haal de volgende passage uit het RIVM-rapport 213676008 pagina 21 :
´Mortality decreased from over 2500 in the beginning of the century to a level of 1 to 14 just before vaccination was started in 1976 .´
(het gaat hier over mazelen)
Hoe zou dat nou komen, denk je dan. Wel, misschien door betere levensomstandigheden, schoon drinkwater, etc. ,maar NIET door de prik!
Dat maakt het extra wrang. Er worden wél kinderen opgeofferd, maar géén kinderen gered.
https://www.rivm.nl/bibliotheek/rapporten/213676008.html
Autism and also congenital epilepsy (rather epilepsy without trauma to the brain because scars in the brain can also be the trigger for a seizure) I have seen develop in the intestines for over 40 years. During my training (care) for insane wore out because there would be no (nerve) connection between intestines and brain. No idea when that was scientifically proven, but what is the point of being right afterwards if people still do almost nothing with it to help people and especially children. ADHD can also be greatly improved with a diet, but society is not designed for an (individual) healthy lifestyle. I advocate critical injections, so my children only had a few and I made sure they had optimal gut health before and after the injection. Whether I did the right thing I will never know. My children do the same with their children now, but the discussions and nasty letters they now receive are many times more intense than I used to have to endure or actually the storage of data on paper was lost sooner than it is now... A grandchild of 12 years old had to get their own DigiD from the health insurance with the announcement that the child can now decide everything for himself. A binder full of letters from that can still be caught up... deeply sad. Many doctors also do not turn a blind eye to file falsification to put you in a bad light and to commit fraud. So we avoid every doctor but live a healthy lifestyle and occasionally someone has to go to the emergency room due to an accident. We are obliged to pay (way too much) for that. The broom through!
Als we het moeten hebben over vaccins en geneesmiddelen is Dick Bijl wel een goede bron.
https://www.hetpillenprobleem.nl/Medisch
Maar waarom gebruiken we dan zoveel `geneesmiddelen`?
https://www.gezond-wereldnieuws.com/post/geschiedenis-farmaceutische-industrie-ontstaan-rockefeller-foundation
Het is puur business en het komt er op dit moment op neer dat de voedingsindustrie mensen ziek maakt en de medische industrie maakt mensen niet beter.
Nu ik toch lekker radicaal bezig ben, de volgende link:
https://www.frontnieuws.com/dr-trebings-vaarwel-kiemtheorie-ontketent-debat-over-vaccins-ziekte-en-moderne-geneeskunde/
Waarbij ik mij wel afvraag waar ik dat debat precies kan volgen want ik zie het nergens. Tegenwoordig wordt met een plechtig gezicht ieder debat dat niet strookt met het narratief gevaarlijk genoemd. Gevaar werkt op de emotie angst en we hebben gezien waar dat toe leidt.
Dick Bijl is geweldig. Dat zijn geluid maar zo weinig rimpelingen kan veroorzaken is veelzeggend.
Het ‘ziektekiem’ en ‘virussen bestaan niet’ debat boeit mij niet. Het is voor mij een ‘zwarte gaten bestaan niet, ze zijn eigenlijk paars’-discussie. Het gaat om het besmetten, het vermenigvuldigen, het ‘virale’ besmettingsvermogen. Omdat dat wordt ontkend, ben ik afgehaakt.
Wat u met informatie doet interesseert mij niet zoveel wat ik duidelijk wil maken is dat er maar een verhaal lijkt te bestaan.
Ik heb anders sterk de indruk dat er nog een verhaal bestaat. Dat interesseert mij dan weer niet zoveel. We kennen immers het belang van het bioom, voeding, lifestyle, stress, van onze afweer. Het ontkennen van immuniteit en van elkaar besmetten komt op mij flat earth-achtig over. Kijk naar mazelen bijvoorbeeld, of serial passaging, of https://virusvaria.nl/pokeren-met-besmettingen/ . Een kritische reactie op het pokerexperiment was ‘het kan geen virus zijn geweest want die bestaan niet. Het was misschien wat anders.’ Kan zijn dat het geen virus was, prima. Maar besmetten kan dus wel degelijk. En niet iedereen is even ontvankelijk. Zolang dat zo blijft, snap ik de hele strijd om virussen niet. Het is een werkbaar model; helaas is het gekaapt door de farmaceuten. Het is nauwelijks nog wetenschap te noemen.
Germ- en terraintheory zijn 2 uitersten. De waarheid zal er ergens tussen liggen.
Of beide zijn waar. En de ene theorie sluit de andere niet uit. Ook kunnen er nog meer theorieën zijn. Helaas is voortschrijdend inzicht met echte wetenschap afgeschaft (duurde/duurt mij toch al veel te lang…) en vervangen door zogenaamde wetenschappelijke consensus met het meeste geld. En heeft men de mens opgeknipt in onderdelen met voor elk onderdeel een witte jas met een protocol.
Ha ha, of geen van beiden. Het zogenaamde pathogeen is misschien een drager waarmee we dna informatie uitwisselen t.b.v. een snelle evolutie.