In the late 1980s he co-founded Hackney Community Defense Association (HCDA), a group which worked on the defence of people assaulted, fitted up and wrongfully arrested by the police in north east London .
Throughout these years, he wrote four books about the police and crime. In 1990, he began investigating and writing about the ‘health fraud’ movement and vested interests in science and medicine.
His fifth book in 1993 – Dirty Medicine: Science, big business and the assault on natural healthcare, which took three years to research and a long time to write, was described by Christopher Bird, author of The Secret Life of Plants, as ‘a masterpiece of investigative journalism and attentive scholarship, elegantly written’.
Since then he has published further titles including Brave New World of Zero Risk: Covert strategies in British science policy and HRT: Licensed to kill and maim and most recently, Cultural Dwarfs and Junk journalism .
For five years up until 2006 he was one of the legal advisors to the BBC 1 drama series ‘Judge John Deed‘. Most of his writing can be accessed at: www.slingshotpublications.com .
Martin Walker Writes ….
Firstly let me thank Jabs for putting links to my work on their site. If you read me here on the Jabs site, you will know not just about my books, but about the shorter pieces that I write that tend to disappear down the cracks in the internet.
On January 2 nd 2008, I released my latest short book about the Guardian journalist, Ben Goldacre, Cultural Dwarfs and Junk Journalism: Ben Goldacker, quakbusters and corporate science . This book was ignored by the mainstream media despite the fact that it raised important questions about the Guardian , their journalists and vested interests.
I published the book free as an ebook so that there would be no impediment to people reading it, not because I consider it to be valueless! I am trying to work out a policy for my work, which gets it distributed widely but also returns me some money.
At the moment I am thinking about publishing everything I write or have written, as e material for free (with a small administrative charge for downloading), while hoping that enough people will order hard copy books, from the ‘print on demand’ company that we intend to work with.
I followed up Cultural Dwarfs , with a twenty page essay about the Guardian, it’s relationship with a group called the Social Market Foundation, and the work of the science lobby in relation to the censorship of medical and health news. You can download this essay, Guardian of What? The Guardian, the science lobby and the rise of scientific corporatism for free from both:
the Whale (www.whale.to/vaccines.html)
and
the One Click ( www.theoneclickgroup.co.uk ) sites.
In the next couple of months, I hope to bring out the first volume of The Hearing that contains my reports of the GMC prosecution case against Dr Andrew Wakefield, Dr Simon Murch and Dr Walker Smith. The hearing begins again after a six month break with the presentation of the defence case in the last week of March. My reports of the prosecution case can be found at www.cryshame.com
The prosecution have used the break to its utmost advantage and there has been lots of material about vaccination published in the hope that it will influence the Panel in Dr wakefield’s case. All the parents of vaccine damaged children who will be demonstrating outside the GMC the day the hearing begins again, are hoping that the Panel that is judging the case, see sense and ask why none of the parents were asked to testify against the doctors.
The answer, is of course, clear to any informed observer, all the parents of children treated at the Royal Free Hospital for gastrointestinal problems and related signs of regressive autism, are one hundred per cent behind the doctors whom they believed treated them and their children with sympathy and exceptional clinical experience.
I will be back to tell you about more of my writing especially in relation to the case of the three doctors, in the near future. In the meantime if you want to download anything relevant from my site ( www.slingshotpublications.com ) feel free to do so.
Denis Campbell was a sports reporter on the Observer newspaper, before he got the opportunity to write about health. In July 2007, he favoured a friend and interviewed Dr Andrew Wakefield, the consultant gastroenterologist at the centre of the MMR-autism controversy, the week prior to his GMC fitnessto-practice hearing.1 It was Campbell�s intention to present Dr Wakefield in the same way as any other pre-trial defendant, exploring his fears and feelings about slipping from a professional life into that of an infamous malefactor.
In creating the article, however, Campbell, who had never entered the territory before, made the most serious mistake. Hearing of a paper produced by a department of Cambridge University that cited a considerable growth in cases of autism spectrum disorder, he linked this to Wakefield�s research work, which described a number of specific cases where the parents had pointed to the MMR injection as being key in the onset of a very particular form of regressive autism.
This article analyses what can happen when journalists blunder into the case of Dr Andrew Wakefield, without understanding the complex context of the media, health and New Labour. Increasing pressure is being brought to bear on the British media to report only stories that agree with corporate science. When training interpreters, teachers place considerable emphasis on the student�s all-round knowledge of the culture into which they are translating.
This is unfortunately not true of the post-industrial journalists, who tend to imagine that they are presenting titbits of disconnected information, rarely conceiving that their newspapers and others are pursuing ideological positions. Denis Campbell evidently had no idea that, by trying to present a broad social defense for Dr Wakefield, he was about to place his professional career as a journalist in jeopardy.
Like many other people involved in the media, although he knew that New Labour was somehow involved in spin, he did not know that a group of erstwhile revolutionary communist, corporate scientists, Liberal peers and members of the New Labour administration had banded together to draw up a censorship code for the British media.
In fact, Campbell was to find out on the publication of his Observer article, not only that the editors of the sister papers the Guardian and the Observer, both owned by the Scott Trust, had long been involved in an acrimonious argument, but that the Guardian was not the paper it had previously been.
Since 2003, it seems to have passed from the stables of the free press into some Orwellian stew, where the news is consistently rewritten to fit a corporate view of science held by a handful of corporately-funded lobbyists.
MMR, the mumps, measles and rubella vaccination, was introduced to Britain in 1988. Its original introduction was seriously marred by adverse reaction to the Urabi mumps strain in the vaccination.
It was not until 1992 that the Department of Health, downplaying the serious adverse events that had occurred using this particular strain, took two of the MMR vaccines off the market while making low-key and somewhat mumbled explanations to the public.
Following this major problem, the Department of Health and the successive governments were determined not to admit to any other problems in relation to this vaccination.
Dr Wakefield, a senior researcher in experimental gastroenterology at the Royal Free Hospital, was approached by a gathering number of parents, after 1988, who claimed that their children had been adversely affected by the triple vaccine. These cases were brought to the Royal Free because often the first signs of adverse reaction to the vaccination were gastrointestinal.
Initially, Dr Wakefield was sceptical about the department�s authority to deal with these cases. As well as reporting gastrointestinal conditions in their children, in the majority of cases that were brought to the Royal Free, parents reported signs of autism spectrum disorder.
Dr Wakefield�s main area of expertise had, until the early 1990s been Crohn�s disease, a gastrointestinal condition that had markedly increased in recent years.
Initially Dr Wakefield protested that he knew nothing about autism spectrum disorders, and suggested that perhaps the Royal Free was not the best place to bring these children.
However, as the rest of the team carried out more tests and observations on the gastrointestinal conditions presented by the children, superficial case review conclusions became inevitable; either the children had all developed autism spectrum disorders �naturally� and biologically inevitably, or the condition, together with the intestinal condition, had been triggered or exacerbated by an environmental factor.
After work over the next decade, Dr Wakefield came increasingly to the latter conclusion, and was convinced that it was the vaccine measles strain, in combination with the strains of mumps and rubella, that was responsible for the gastrointestinal condition and, in this relatively small subset of children, also for the regressive autism from which many of them suffered.
Although Dr Wakefield tried hard to interest the Department of Health in the condition that his research had uncovered, and begged them to be more cautious in their vaccination campaign, it was six years before Dr David Salisbury, the Principal Medical Officer of the Communicable Disease Branch of the Department of Health, deigned to meet with him to discuss evidence of a public health crisis.
Dr Wakefield continued to write up his research, and noted, as time passed, that even without a reasoned discussion about his research or the clinical work of the Royal Free Hospital, a campaign was being orchestrated against him.
In 1998, he was one of 13 authors who published a paper in The Lancet reviewing the cases of 12 children who had passed through clinical tests and treatment at the Royal Free. As well as reviewing all the clinical evidence, the paper noted the view of 8 parents, that there was a link between MMR and the onset of children�s illnesses.
From the time of The Lancet paper�s publication, a propaganda offensive of considerable power was turned against Dr Wakefield, and from this point onwards, the parents who had reported an adverse reaction to the MMR vaccination, were gradually made invisible.
Wakefield, his research and the clinical work of the department were roundly condemned. His identity and character were covertly attacked, and in 2003, an article by Brian Deer in Rupert Murdoch�s Sunday Times, accused Dr Wakefield of some criminal and much professional malfeasance.
Deer followed up his Sunday Times article with a Channel 4 television programme, on 18 November 2004. It always appeared to those who were knowledgeable about Dr Wakefield�s work, that Brian Deer�s reporting was based upon incomplete information.
Included in the first Sunday Times article was a call by the then ex-Communist Minister for Health, John Reid, ordering a General Medical Council (GMC) hearing of Dr Wakefield and his colleagues.
Deer had drawn in part upon the research capability of Medico-Legal Investigations, a firm of private investigators, who carried out most of their work for, and were mainly subsidised by, the Association of the British Pharmaceutical Industry.
This agency had in the past prepared for the GMC a number of cases that might have been said to help pharmaceutical industry competitiveness.
In 2004, Deer became the sole complainant to the GMC about the conduct of Dr Andrew Wakefield and his colleagues, Dr Simon Murch and Dr John Walker-Smith. After an almost four-year wait, this case was brought before a GMC fitness to practise panel in July 2007, and, having been designed for procrastination, it is unlikely to finish before September 2008.
While the hearing to determine the future of Dr Wakefield’s professional career has continued at a snail’s pace, the media have continued with their onslaught, without proof or evidence, on the basis of off-the-cuff, industryinspired hearsay, to illustrate Wakefield’s bad science and criminal intentions to sink the Government’s combined vaccine programme.
It is perhaps of value, even at this late stage, to examine one of the major strategies used by the science lobby to discredit Wakefield’s work in the public mind, as well as to link the campaign against him to New Labour’s spin tactics and the entry into the post-industrial political world of the armies of PR clones and the robotic risk-communication company voices.
While attention in this respect has always been pointed at Alastair Campbell, who served as Director of Communications and Strategy for Tony Blair from 1997 to 2003, such exposure has always been a part of the ‘laddish’ terrain of male politics in Britain.
The use of similar armies of disinformation in defence of Big Pharma and corporate science, and against alternative medicine for example, has been tackled by few journalists.
The sword upon which Denis Campbell fell when he strayed onto the vaccine field; the most powerful weapon of the science lobby, has been that of hyperbole. Dr Wakefield and his colleagues at the Royal Free were always conscious of the fact, and always made clear, that those parents who had brought their children to the hospital were part of a relatively small and idiosyncratic population.
At the same time, clinical work at the hospital, and research by Dr Wakefield, showed the science peculiar to these cases in exacting detail. No one at the Royal Free, nor anyone connected with Dr Wakefield, has ever said bluntly that there is scientific evidence that MMR has been responsible for the substantial rise in cases of child autism in Britain over the past decade.
Further, it is easy to see what it was that Dr Wakefield did say, which so unnerved the government and the pharmaceutical industry, who were determined on a future model of increasingly combined vaccines.
Wakefield actually said bluntly, at a press conference that preceded the publication of the case review in The Lancet, that parents should be given the chance to choose single vaccines until the post vaccination scientific research had been conducted into the triple vaccine. He was encouraged to voice this opinion by the then head of the university department joined to the Royal Free teaching hospital.
In a classic defence of the Government and Big Pharma, against the measured criticisms voiced by Dr Wakefield, the first thing that the science lobby did was to distort and misrepresent his research results. In this crude version of the Royal Free’s complicated clinical work, Dr Wakefield was made responsible for claiming that the considerable and continuing rise in classic autism in children was entirely due to the introduction of MMR in 1988.
To argue against this simplified and distorted perspective was easy. Such a colossal cause and effect had not been observed by anyone else involved in the study of either autism or gastroenterology, and none of the large epidemiological studies carried out on the causes of autism.
Nonetheless the cause and effect supposedly claimed by Dr Wakefield (whilst stated explicitly not to be the case in the paper itself) was to be frequently trotted out over the coming years.
By making it appear that Dr Wakefield was making worldwide claims on the basis of 12 cases reported in The Lancet, his detractors can readily conclude publicly that Dr Wakefield and fellow academics are deranged and subversive and that their claims cannot possibly have a rational foundation.
There is a lesson here for everyone involved in unpopular causes, up against the PR industry and New Labour spin: always ensure that you keep your eye on the small picture.
In the weeks following the articles publication, Denis Campbell was carpeted and criticised by staff at the Observer, as well as interlopers from the Guardian and beyond.
Months later, after the chastisement of the paper by the Guardian, the Observer’s most able editor, the hugely popular and ebullient Roger Alton, responsible for overseeing Campbell’s interview with Wakefield, was forced to resign.
Campbell’s interview people think, was just one brick in the wall that had begun being built when Alton and the Observer had backed Blair’s decision to invade Iraq, a question upon which the Guardian editor Alan Rusbridger had maintained a principled dissent.
In a country with an apparently free press, this little story of how New Labour corporate apparatchiks enforced censorship on one of Britain’s most notable papers, should have created the most terrible public storm.
But so low has the press sunk in Britain, and so powerful has the corporate science lobby become, that not a whisper of the scandal entered the public domain.
Ten days after Campbell’s interview with Andy Wakefield, Ben Goldacre in his ‘Bad Science’ column in the Guardian, publicly discredited something; although, as is usually the case, it is difficult to tell what it was that he discredited.
Despite the hundreds of emails posted on the Guardian’s Comment is Free site by PR company associates and friends of Big Pharma, which lauded Goldacre for writing the most erudite and beautiful pieces of prose since the Second World War, all his piece actually did was to destroy the straw man put up by his crisis management PR colleagues.
While the original article had principally been about a competent medical research scientist whose work had helped hundreds if not thousands of parents, facing a GMC fitness-to-practice hearing, Goldacre’s apparent deconstruction of it simply made the point that Campbell had suggested that MMR was responsible for a massive rise in autism across the board over the past decade.
In fact, Goldacre dispensed with this idea in the article in a perfectly well considered, opening paragraph.
Whatever you think about Andrew Wakefield, the real villains of the MMR scandal are the media. Just one week before his GMC hearing, yet another factless ‘MMR causes autism’ news story appeared: and even though it ran on the front page of our very own Observer, I am dismantling it on this page. We’re all grownups around here.
As with the great majority of Goldacre’s writing, this paragraph, though ostensibly good journalism, is completely disingenuous.
While of course he was interested in showing that there was presently no proof that MMR or any other vaccination had caused a rise in autism, his prime task was to disassemble the idea that Dr Wakefield was a good scientist who had tried to forewarn the government of a public health crisis, while at the same time denying that children had suffered adverse reactions from MMR.
Campbell’s article had, after all, reinforced the view that some children had suffered dreadful adverse reactions to the MMR vaccination, and given a voice to Dr Wakefield, who made it more than clear that he had been truthful about his research, and about the clinical work carried out at the Royal Free on behalf of hundreds of unhappy parents.
Neither the New Labour government nor the pharmaceutical companies, the medical establishment nor, certainly, the science lobby, was going to admit that MMR, or any other drug or vaccination, provoked adverse reactions.
Nor was any one of these going to admit that Dr Andrew Wakefield had a defence of any kind.
Perhaps most spectacularly of all, from the beginning of the GMC hearing, the parents and their children simply disappeared.
This is almost supernatural!
In a major social public health crisis, to which, as always, the public are the first, only and best immediate witnesses, from this time onwards, no journalist would consider the unscientific and ‘anecdotal’ views of any of the parents of vaccine-damaged children.
The story from now on was simply that no children were damaged by MMR, and anyone that said they were, was being unscientific and possibly suffering from Munchausen�s Syndrome by Proxy, or the famous False Illness Belief (FIB) syndrome coined by Professor Simon Wesseley.
How had the profit-promoting agents of corporate science managed, not only to enable the GMC to conduct the second-longest legal prosecution in British history, but also to wipe from the blackboard all the evidence and names of those citizens whose children had been adversely affected by MMR?
As soon as New Labour came to power in 1997, spin became a major part of government. The liberal axis that steered New Labour policy was determined to create a society in which considerations of big business, science and advanced technology were at the forefront of policy.
It the late 1990s, multinational corporate science suffered one of its most serious defeats, when environmentalists organised against Monsanto’s plans, supported by a number of British scientists, to unilaterally introduce GM crops to Britain.
The campaign resulted in a kind of plebiscite that finally decided publicly against the introduction of GM crops.
It resulted in something else as well, the organisation by the British state, something that so far had only been toyed with, of a propaganda offensive against all and any kind of criticism of corporations for damage to the environment or the health of the population.
This propaganda offensive has been on a Soviet scale and has left in its wake a number of serious intellectual dissidents.
From the turn of the 21st century, corporate scientific interests organised hard and unrelentingly to promote corporate science and to argue publicly against new technology having any adverse effects on public health.
The two Liberal Democrat peers most involved in the battle to push through corporate science and new technology were David Sainsbury and Dick Taverne. Both were made Lords after New Labour won their first election in 1997.
While Sainsbury was made head of the Department of Trade and Industry, in control of all matters medical and scientific, Lord Taverne began championing corporate interests through the Science and Technology Committee in the Lords. He gathered PR personalities and ex-revolutionary communists together, and began the task of regulating the media’s response to corporate science.
With his background in libertarian think-tanks and anti-environmentalist US organisations, together with his friendship with David Sainsbury and his background in PR and consultative companies ‘not to mention the power-broking Bilderberg group and the Trilateral Commission’.
Taverne was ideally placed to set up Sense About Science, which he did in 2002. Ludicrously, he secured the emergent organisation charitable status, and from the beginning was its chairman.
However, before founding Sense About Science, Taverne’s first objective was to create new rules for all media, in which science news and information were given the right of way.
All stories about science, including those about health, presented in the media, were to be written or presented only by scientists. In this kind of journalism, ill health could only be written about in relation to it being cured by pharmaceutical drugs and other therapies offered by allopathic doctors.
The idea was to block all personal stories about health, which was to be turned into an aspect of life science and have nothing to do with the individual’s understanding or control of his or her own body or feelings.
All stories about the use of alternative medicine, and all stories about the adverse effects of environmental factors on human health, were to be forbidden.
It was to enforce these new rules about science and health, and to teach only the correct information about the right kind of science, that the two new lobby organisations, Sense About Science and the Science Media Centre, came into being.
The plan to guide the media began in March 2000, when the Royal Society published its Scientists and the Media: Guidelines for scientists working with the media and comments on a press code of practice.
The House of Lords Select Committee on Science and Technology subsequently endorsed this document in its report Science and Society.
Martin J. Walker (born 1947) is a graphic designer who, for the last twenty years, has authored several self-published books and articles investigating medical politics in the United Kingdom.
His book Dirty Medicine is about British medical politics. While documenting the licensing of AZT and what he describes as an assault on alternative medicine, he also reports on various groups such as the American National Council Against Health Fraud, the American Council on Science and Health, the Committee for the Scientific Investigation of Claims of the Paranormal (CSICOP), and the British Campaign Against Health Fraud (CAHF).
In Dirty Medicine, Walker alleges that the techniques used by these organizations involve the character assassination of alternative medicine practitioners and researchers, manipulative planting of press stories, removal of critics from professional registers, bringing people before disciplinary boards, bogus scientific trials, and undeclared work with large corporations. According to Walker, “All these things were linked to a kind of regulatory ground clearing exercise.”
- 2006, Brave New World of Zero Risk: Covert Strategy in British Science Policy (self-published online text)
- 2005, Skewed: Psychiatric Hegemony and the Manufacture of Mental Illness in Multiple Chemical Sensitivity, Gulf War Syndrome, Myalgic Encephalomyelitis and Chronic Fatigue Syndrome, ISBN 0-9519646-4-X (self-published on Slingshot Publications)
- 1993, Dirty Medicine: Science, big business and the assault on natural health care, ISBN 0-9519646-0-7 (self-published on Slingshot Publications)
- With Extreme Prejudice: a study of police vigilantism in Manchester
- Frightened for my life; an account of deaths in British Prisons, with Geoff Coggan
- State of Siege: politics and policing in the coalfields. The miners strike 1984, with Jim Coulter and Susan Miller
- 2000, America Reborn: A Twentieth Century Narrative in Twenty-Six Lives.
- AltHeal.org – ‘An Interview with Martin J. Walker‘, Louise Mclean
- Zero-Risk.org – Brave New World of Zero Risk: Covert Strategy in British Science Policy, Martin J Walker
The Whale Site information is here