0:36 Intro. [Recording date: January 25, 2011.] Investigating claims that vaccination causes autism among children, 1998 study. Claims not just inaccurate, but fraudulent and corrupt. In 1998, Lancet, one of the most prestigious if not the most prestigious medical journal in the world published a study claiming a link between vaccination and both autism and bowel disease. Tell us what that study claimed and what the basis for those claims were. Published in The Lancet, which is a British based medical journal, comes out weekly. Reckoned to be secondary to the two most prestigious journals, which would be the New England Journal of Medicine and the Journal of the American Medical Association. But nevertheless, immensely influential. In Feb. 1998 edition, published a 5-page paper by a team of doctors at the Royal Free Medical School, Hampstead, led by a Dr. Andrew Wakefield, who at the time--former trainee surgeon, never finished training as a surgeon but had moved into medical research, with 12 other doctors including pediatricians and pathologists he published a paper claiming that 12 families had turned up at the hospital associated with this medical school in East London between July 1996 and February 1997. The children they brought with them were children with various kinds of developmental disorders, mostly described in the paper as regressive autism--a kind of autism where children appear to be making normal progress and then suddenly start to go backwards. They lose language and they lose skills. This usually occurs in the second year of life. In 8 of the cases the parents had said to the doctor words to the effect of: It was the measles-mumps-rubella (MMR) doctor. Our child had been developing normally, and in the first two weeks started to show the first signs of autism. These children were then admitted to the hospital for a battery of tests, including colonoscopies as far as the small intestine, which means inserting a tube all the way around the large bowel into the small bowel. They had lumbar punctures; they were put through brain scanners; drank radioactive drinks. Battery of tests that lasted 5 days. Dr. Wakefield claimed in this paper that he'd found in them inflammatory bowel disease. So, three things: regressive autism, inflammatory bowel disease, and the parents were saying the first signs of autism came on within just 14 days of the vaccination. The authors of the paper then went on to adopt those and claimed they had discovered a new syndrome of bowel disease and autism associated with the 3-in-1 vaccine.

4:50 Now, they did not suggest any causal connection other than this correlation. Twelve families presented; 8 of them had very recently from the onset of symptoms had had this vaccine; but they didn't make any claims about how the pathology might work. Not quite true they didn't make claims of causality. They didn't have a medical mechanism for how this came about. Not in that paper, but Wakefield produced another paper which he submitted to the Lancet at the same time where he did propose that mechanism, but that paper was rejected. Originally, the two papers were supposed to be published together, in his mind at least, but the Lancet rejected the second paper where he did propose a causal mechanism. What was that mechanism? Measles virus. He proposed that the measles virus, which is live, a normal part of the MMR vaccine, had infected the children's guts and persisted in their guts; it was this that caused the gut damage and went on to cause the brain damage. But this is a small number of children--8 children. Was there any other evidence among folks that there was an onset of symptoms shortly after the vaccine? No. In fact other people who studied this soon after found that there was no link. In fact, that link was very quickly abandoned. The paper was published--I'm wondering why it was but we'll come back to that; and it made quite a splash, I assume. Made the evening news on all the networks, though going back to 1998 we didn't have as many networks as we have now. Most of the national media covered it the next day. The medical school in Hampstead announced this paper with a press conference, televised; and actually distributed a 23-minute news release in which Wakefield appeared calling for the MMR vaccine to be suspended. A kit given to media by which they could create media products highlighting this allegation. They put a great deal of work into this; installed extra telephone lines into the hospital. Ready to push this on the British public. That's 'cause they cared about the children, of course--as we'll see turns out not to be so true. It also generated a large set of additional work trying to look at the link between vaccination and autism. What did that work find? This was a matter of great public interest. Here we had a suggestion, a snapshot if you like, of what could potentially be a hidden epidemic of catastrophic injuries to children. If this picture was being replicated at hospitals all over the world, that would be an issue of great public concern. So, not only was there the media response, there was also response by government. The British government, Department of Health, commissioned studies; U.S. Federal government commissioned studies; independent academic institutions began studying this. They did big number crunching to try and see whether there had been an increase in cases of autism that corresponded with an increase in vaccination levels. Looked to see whether there was bowel disease in autistic children that hadn't been discovered before. Looked at it in all kinds of ways. Every single study that anybody that anybody ever did on this subject found not only no support for Wakefield's claims but clearly rebutted them.

10:15 All being done against a background of an apparent increase in the incidence of autism, so people were very eager to find correlates and ideally causal agents, and this was a possible one. There had been an increase in vaccination rates around the world. Appealed to people in a back-of-the-envelope way. Were there any studies done outside of the United Kingdom? Studies done in Denmark, United States. Medical science is very internationalized; when something occurs in one country you find people with similar interests in other countries will start studying it. Everybody drew a blank. As the years went by, more and more studies accumulated which showed no association. Yet there was Wakefield's work. He also did subsequent publications which also worked very much along the same lines. He continued to be a spokesperson for this theory and obviously he alarmed an enormous number of parents. Yes. If you search the internet, it's full of anxiety about autism and vaccination, correct? That's right. Here in America, the standard worry is the preservative used in vaccinations, which I think has mercury in it. Thimerosal, which has been removed from children's vaccines. But that has nothing to do with the Wakefield story. Well, it sort of does. Although the MMR vaccine has never contained Thimerosal because it's a live vaccine and Thimerosal would kill the components. Which vaccines do include it? Mostly it's been the diphtheria-tetanus-pertussis (DTP) vaccine; some flu vaccines. Back to MMR. Accumulating body of evidence that there doesn't seem to be a correlation; we have Wakefield continuing to make claims that it is. How did you get involved? When his original paper was published, I was involved in looking at the controversy of the earlier, DTP vaccine, because there had been a controversy over that which had led particularly in the United States to the drug industry saying they were not going to produce it any more because we're being sued so much. There was an epidemic of lawsuits going back to the 1980s following a program that was broadcast from the CBS network called "Vaccine Roulette," which also incidentally came out of the United Kingdom. I happened to be looking at that purely by chance when Wakefield's paper was published. I looked at his paper and thought there was something very odd about it, doesn't sit right just reading it on the page. Said at the time I was absolutely not going to get involved in MMR. Journalistically at the time, allegations against vaccines, if you want to do them in a responsible way rather than simply go to government experts or parents or people with interests and write down what they say and present the clash of opinions--if you want to understand what the story is really about, they require an enormous amount of work. Vaccine issues are multidisciplinary. They can involve epidemiology, big number crunching, statistics; in the MMR case gastroenterology, virology, developmental pediatrics. Really want to understand and get on top of all these areas. I said at the time I'm not going to get involved in another vaccine story. Professionally, if you are a journalist, you don't want to get too associated with one thing or you become the office expert. At the time people were already saying: MMR, Brian Deer, he's our expert, based on what I'd done in DTP. But in 2003, one of the editors was changing jobs, taking over some feature pages; wanted some stories. Said to me: Can't you do investigation? I said: Well, what? Three or four different ideas. One was MMR. Didn't want to get involved because there was a lawsuit coming up. By serendipity the lawsuit was cancelled and we'll just do a feature, spend 2-3 weeks on the outside on MMR. Three weeks turned into 7 years, though not the whole time. Did make a couple of TV shows about other things as well.

16:59 When you started looking into that Wakefield study, how did you proceed and what did you discover? Did routine journalistic work. At the start, put a phone call in to Dr. Wakefield. He always works with professional publicists; this time his publicist, within about 3 hours of me calling, his publicist had made a complaint against me to the paper. A bit of a strategic mistake on their part. The essence of the mistake is I am self-employed. But I have worked for the Sunday Times since 1981--that is my home. I was a staff reporter, a specialist, they sent me to the United States, and so on. But they imagined that this meant I was some sort of outsider. When they got onto the paper and started making complaints, they were making complaints against somebody who actually sat at the next desk to the editor, who had worked with the head of the legal department since we were all young together. So, it didn't work, the complaint. I was a known entity. Whilst I am regarded as being a difficult, mercurial person, I think it is true to say I am trusted. That was the first mistake they made. Right at the start I rung up some parents who had been in the original paper and interviewed them. Interviewed them in a way they had not been interviewed before. Produced important information within hours of beginning the story. Which was? I phoned a lady who had started a campaign group against the MMR back in the 1990s and she told me in the conversation that members of her group were in the Wakefield study; said: they are all members of our group and still in the group. So these parents who had turned up at the hospital, she told me they were all members of her campaign group. Immediately alarm bells started to ring, because nothing about that had been mentioned in the paper. They all just appeared to be routine patients of a big London hospital; but she was saying they were part of a group. A group that had been created before the study. It was the result of her campaigning. She put advertisements in newspapers and made approaches to a firm of lawyers. It's a long-established technique that lawyers will try to get articles into media highlighting the subjects over which they wish to litigate and giving their names in the papers. That's how they increase their client list. So, that was the picture that was beginning to emerge quickly, within days if not hours of beginning this story. That was useful to you because of course, in the original study, the 12 parents were anonymous, not identified. All of a sudden they fell into your lap. Wouldn't say the families fell into my lap, but the people we'd been seeing in media saying my child was vaccinated--Madonna and child photographs. Journalists love these kind of things, human interest. I began to realize that all these people who were popping up in media were one and the same people who were in the study which appeared to validate their claims. How did you interview them and what did you discover? The key one in the series of 12 was family 2. The mother, it came out over a period of time, had been a long-time collaborator of Dr. Wakefield's. I went to interview her; in fact, I used my middle name which had been editorially approved from my managers rather than my full name so they wouldn't google me and see I was an investigative reporter. I said I was Brian Lawrence, my middle name. How were you representing yourself? My friends say I'm a journalist you wouldn't want to write about you. You would google me. I asked her all the questions people ask, isn't it awful; who do you blame? I then went into exceptional detail as to what actually happened when she said her child was vaccinated and developed these problems. Went over her story in great detail. She'd already recently been involved in litigation; so the matter was very clear in her mind. She told me a very detailed story. You could say: People forget, matter of time; but this was the moment when she was saying her child's life had forever been destroyed. Have to expect she would have that in her mind. It was quite clear that the story she was telling me did not correspond with any case in Wakefield's paper. What it boiled down to in her case was that she had changed her story, told one story when she'd gone to the hospital and now telling another story; and the two stories couldn't be reconciled. The difference was when did the problems of autism first reveal themselves. In her story that she told the hospital, it was 14 days; but in her actual story, far from the case. In fact it was months. She'd given one story which suited the paper. She may have done so in complete good faith. Might have misremembered. But when she had the opportunity to study her child's records, it was a different story. That was one of the examples. You could say a few months is still causal. Can't think of why that would be the case. Then could say just about anybody. Children are all vaccinated about that age. That alone didn't refute the study. Over the course of time I spoke to other parents. I spoke to the father of a child from California. One of the 12 children had been flown 5000 miles from northern California to this London hospital and had been enrolled in this study. He came over one year for Wimbledon, tennis, and I showed him the Wakefield paper; he looked at it and said: That's not true. What was not true about that one? The time; the symptoms; he also complained--he'd done something extraordinary. He'd had Wakefield's tests for measles, got an extra sample of his child's biopsies, jumped into a taxi, driven across London to another laboratory and had them tested at another laboratory. Where Wakefield was saying there was measles virus, the other laboratory, very prestigious international center, said there wasn't any. How did you find him? Diligent journalism.

27:52 Study seems to have some problems with it. How did it develop into a scandal? At an early stage, February 2004 firstly and then in November 2004, I published first in the Sunday Times a very big piece revealing that Wakefield had been employed to do this research by a firm of lawyers, and secondly that the children recruited into the study had in some sense been marshaled, gathered together, some solicited, brought to the hospital. So in fact the study had been contrived for lawyers. Then later that year I did an hour-long prime time television program on the U.K.'s channel 4 network, nationwide semi-public, where we revealed that Wakefield had taken out a patent for his own single measles vaccine just before he announced to the world that they should boycott this triple vaccine and vaccinate with single vaccines. The tests being carried out in his own laboratory had shown there was no measles virus in these children. As a result of that, Wakefield made his second big mistake. His first was to have complaints made against me to my employers. Second was to begin litigation. He sued for libel. What evidence did you have that he had taken money from lawyers in advance of the study? That's an enormously damaging claim. We only had a little of it then. He couldn't have expected--maybe this was his second mistake and suing me was his third mistake--in late 1996, early 1997, going back to when Princess Diana was still alive, that the incoming Labour government, the Tony Blair government, with a commitment to produce a Freedom of Information Act. America's had a freedom of information act for so long no one can remember when it began. We had one introduced by the incoming Blair government. Enacted in 2000, started to take effect in 2004. Because the government had told government bodies to act as if the Act was in force, I was able to get from public bodies the fact that Wakefield had been paid. Funding Authority, in Britain called the Legal Aid Fund. Kind of like public defender system except the government doesn't provide the defenders--it provides the money. So, it was a government fund to allow access to poorer people to litigation which had funded Wakefield's lawyer. He could never have expected when he was doing this research that all of a sudden his funding would be exposed to scrutiny, and also the Ethics Committee. In America called Institutional Review Boards. Bodies of doctors, scientists, others associated with medical centers which give permission for research to take place. The paperwork of that body of the Royal Free Hospital also moved into the public domain by the Freedom of Information Act. I think I was the first person ever to get hold of these kinds of papers. What did those tell you? That the work that had gone on, ileal colonoscopies, lumbar punctures, MRI scans, radioactive drinks, EEGs, did not have ethical approval. Clearly was a mismatch between the documents that had been generated by the Institutional Review Board and the work that had been done. Which itself gave probable cause to investigate further. The public didn't matter the interests, but it gave probable cause. So, he sues you in 2004 after the TV show and newspaper piece: you had accused him of cooking up a study for profit. Ugly. Were you a little bit scared? The lawsuit began in the beginning of 2005, and he immediately applied to the courts to have it frozen so he could go around telling people he was suing but not actually sue. Litigation in the United Kingdom is immensely expensive. Losers pay everything. But we went to court for the television company and got a court order to compel him to continue suing. Put up or shut up. He then with financial backing from the British doctors in fact continued to sue. In the course of this litigation which went on for 2 years--well, from a personal level might be quite scary. There were occasions. He also sued me for my website, for which I have unlimited liability, would have lost my home had it been true. I would be sitting at my computer doing some work and there would be a ring on the doorbell and there would be a man dressed in black leather with a motorcycle helmet on and he would present me with an envelope. This happened to me twice. I opened the envelope and there's an [?] for Wakefield's legal costs for the hearing that was going to take place the next day in court. The figures were about $30,000 U.S. dollars, that kind of money just for one hearing. That was the kind of pressure they were trying to put on me. The next stage which was very unfortunate for him was that we got a court order against him requiring him to hand over to our lawyers the hospital medical records of the children. I never took possession of them. The judge balanced the issues of the confidentiality of the children as opposed to the fairness of the litigation in front of the court. Ordered that I be allowed to read the unredacted--with their names and all their details--of the 12 children. There were just 11 at the time--the American wasn't involved in this. So under strict supervision of my lawyers, with a lawyer sitting at the end of the table throughout, I sat and read the medical records of the children. Did it make your hair stand on end? I cannot even say that. I have never said anything about what I read in those medical records. The position is that they were disclosed to me in the course of litigation and I may make no use of anything I saw in those records or disclose anything. As I was sitting there reading them, Dr. Wakefield's lawyers were in a taxi travelling across London to the High Court to disband the lawsuit against me. When I got home that night--and I hadn't taken any notes with me or documents--I went home, phone rang, and it was my lawyers saying: It's over. They've thrown in the towel. So I'm in the position where I have read the medical records of these children but can make no use of the content of them. However, I have to say--I've talked to my lawyers about this--it is a fact that it's impossible to un-know something. Once you know something, you can't stop knowing it. Unrealistic. So, what I did was to ensure that I presented myself at the next opportunity where these medical records would go on display. And they would go on display at a Disciplinary Hearing which arose from my original stories. British General Medical Council, the body representing like a medical board for the whole of the United Kingdom, initiated disciplinary hearing. Between July 2007 and May 2010 they had a public hearing which lasted 217 days. Among other things, but mostly, these medical records were read into the public domain over and over. So, I was able to be present throughout. The picture began to build up. The true stories of these children could not be reconciled with what was published in the Lancet. Mismatch so enormous you would begin to wonder whether you were talking about the same children. Laid out in public by Queen's Counsel--senior trial attorneys. Five of them, plus junior lawyers, and a disciplinary panel of 5 who were doctors, would go through these records over and over looking at what was wrong with these children, dates, etc. I was able to sit there as a reporter and scoop up that information and present it to the public.

40:18 When using the Freedom of Information Act, the High Court ruled you were able to see those. So you are looking at them with the lawyers making sure you are not stuffing them in your socks, and the lawyers for Wakefield are racing across town so you won't be able to see them, presumably. What their motive was we'll never know. Uncanny coincidence. It raises the question: Why did Wakefield produce those records? He had no choice. Why didn't he destroy them? Why did you say they were lost--that was 6 years ago, 8 years ago. Because the Disciplinary Hearing, which the General Medical Council had brought, was already in play. They had already started doing the work for that. So his lawyers were in possession of these documents. They didn't have to go to him to get them. They'd already got them for the General Medical Council proceedings and already in their offices. You may find it hard to believe, but lawyers do work generally to an ethical code. Could lose your career forever. So they turned over to us--I think he was very surprised. I don't think he quite realized that they would have to turn over those to us. And indeed they turned over many documents, extraordinarily incriminating documents, that would again be read into the record of the General Medical Council. So, we learned he'd been contracted for 2 years at the rate of £150 pounds an hour, which was a lot of money then and a lot more now. And ultimately he accumulated £435,643 pounds plus his expenses, which at the prevailing exchange rate we reckon was about ¾ of a million U.S. dollars he was actually paid by the lawyers. So that information came over to us as well, but again, it wasn't information we could immediately use. So, we have a Disciplinary Hearing, and he loses. So, what happens to him? In January of last year, he was found guilty of a raft of most extraordinary charges. There were four counts of dishonesty. One was dishonesty in his research--research fraud--in his aspect of the way the children had been recruited for the study. One was a finding of dishonesty in the financial aspects of the study--financial fraud. And then there were two counts of common lying: dishonesty and lying to other doctors who had asked him. People saw this paper, and asked him: Where did you get the money for this and he lied about this. Another doctor had a big panel where a whole group of professors and experts had been convened in London to discuss his research. One of the specialists there asked: Where did you get the children? And he lied about that. So he was found guilty of four counts of dishonesty. Then a dozen counts of causing children to undergo this extraordinary battery of invasive and actually quite hazardous tests for no clinical reason and without any kind of ethical approval. He's not a pediatrician and he had no relevant background in clinical care. In fact his contract said he was not allowed to involve himself in the care of patients. So this great raft of charges was found against him in January. Then in May of last year he was ordered to be what we call struck off, which is lose his license to practice medicine; and then on December 21, just last month, the final stage occurred, when it was found he was not appealing the decision. Because doctors being what they are, if you lose your license in the United Kingdom you are entitled to appeal to the High Court; and he went round telling all his supporters that he was appealing to the High Court, this was outrageous, he never did any of these things, the General Medical Council are working for the drug industry, I'm working for the drug industry; it's all an evil conspiracy against him and he was appealing. But on December 21 the General Council recorded that he had not pursued his appeal, and he is what we call "erasure"--like the word: he was erased from the medical record and he is no longer a medical doctor. And I don't think he ever will be again.

45:57 I think not. Like both erasure and struck off. Nice ring to it. Finality. On this program, we like to talk about the seen and the unseen. So, the seen are those poor 12 kids who got punctured and poked and all those things. But the unseen are the children who didn't get MMR. Their parents had anxiety about their vaccine. What was the impact of the study on vaccination rates? Do we have any idea? That's the one people focus on--U.K. vaccination rates fell from 92%. Started just before this paper, because Wakefield was going around telling everybody appearing on a television program saying that the MMR caused inflammatory bowel disease. He subsequently went on to abandon that, but anyway he was saying that. And then this paper appeared. The vaccination rates fell from 92% of children at age 2 had received the vaccine down to 80%, and that was sufficient to--generally it's felt that 9 out of 10 children have to be vaccinated to stop measles returning to the population. It fell well below the rates necessary to keep measles at bay. And there were sporratic outbreaks of measles. In fact, measles was declared to be endemic again in the United Kingdom, as a result of this couple of children died. Which in the scheme of things is not a lot of dead children. Around the world, 300,00 children die of measles, so the fact that two of them were British is perhaps not necessarily a headline except in Britain. But people talk about infectious disease, but I think there is another group of people who continue to be horrendously victimized as a result of this scare, and these are the people who believe that their child is autistic because they had them vaccinated. Or who have guilt. Horrifying. That group of parents--my heart goes out to them that they have been told this story. Because--and I've come across this a lot over the years, and I can't speak from first-hand experience, I can only speak from telling to me by parents--when people have a child and it's the most precious thing in their life and it is so life-transforming and central to their thoughts and their feelings, and the parents find perhaps their child can't hear them when they are calling them, or perhaps the child can't start looking at their fingers all the time or perhaps recoils from being touched or starts to behave in an unusual way--parents go on what I call the desperate quest. They go to their pediatrician. They go to specialists. Here and there. Initially, the pediatricians are very reluctant to say: Your child may have autism. The response normally is: We just have to see; children develop normally at different rates. But when those reassurances are not born out in fact, you find quite often parents become angry towards their pediatricians. They become suspicious, and they start to think: What's to blame? And then along comes Dr. Wakefield with it's the facts seen, you've been subjected to some sort of conspiracy by government. Centers for Disease Control, the drug companies are knowingly behind it. Wakefield attended a Washington Rally in Washington, D.C., where he not only said the MMR was causing autism but the public health doctors in government and elsewhere knew that the vaccine was causing autism and were covering it up. A most extraordinary allegation to make against members of the medical profession, borne out by nothing in terms of evidence. No whistle-blowers have ever come forward ever produce. Doctors throughout the world confronted with autism or agents have done anything but their best to try to get to the bottom of these things. So, he has gone to the parents and told them they are the victims of a wicked conspiracy which has injured their child; and that makes some of these parents very angry, guilty, hurt; and all of them bewildered about how they can find a way out. The good news perhaps is that sometimes children who first show signs of autism and other developmental disabilities actually improve and go on to live perfectly satisfactory lives. But unfortunately, some don't; and the parents of those children are desperately vulnerable; and I think have been desperately preyed on by this man's false research.

51:45 So, the law firm that paid him roughly $2 million dollars in advance of the study--what happened to them? They did start a lawsuit, but then after about £18 million British pounds--a lot of money--after they shared that among their experts which is Dr. Wakefield and people he recruited, and their lawyers, the lawyers said: We can't make a case that the MMR vaccine causes autism. They abandoned the lawsuit and went off into the distance. The lawsuit was then exported across the Atlantic and there was then a lawsuit heard in the Federal Vaccine Court in 2007 I think the hearing was. That again found no evidence that the MMR vaccine causes autism. That went to the U.S. court of appeals just last year--August of last year for the Federal Circuit upheld the rulings that the MMR vaccine does not cause autism or bowel disease. So, despite this investment, the law firm that created this scandal--they just lost a lot of money? No, they made a lot of money. How? The government's legal aid fund. In the United Kingdom, the government's legal aid fund picked up the tab. They gave them £18 million British pounds to develop this case--to employ Wakefield, other doctors. Then in the United States, in the Federal vaccine court system, even if the claims fail, the attorneys bringing the case get paid. So in both systems, in both Britain and America, you've got government systems which pay lawyers alleging vaccine injury. So, they didn't need it to be a great study. They just needed it to be good enough to get the thing started. Having a study in The Lancet--that'll do. I talked to people behind the legal funding and they made it very clear: the internal advice they were getting from Wakefield was the same. So, what Wakefield was able to do was to get 12 other doctors to sign up to the proposition--what was the expression he used--apparent precipitating event. Precipitating means cause. So, the event was the MMR vaccine; and that caused the money to be released. And how has The Lancet responded? My final piece was on this subject. I didn't have the clear pieces we have now. But I raised this with The Lancet back in February 2004; and within 48 hours they denied it and hoped it would all go away.

55:49 We talk a lot on this program about science and about the challenges of overcoming biases--self-deception, confirmation bias very present in economics and in all endeavors of human existence. A story like this--salute you, extraordinary achievement. Also deeply depressing. You could have said when it first came out it was junk science--a story based on 12 sample points, without much understanding of how they were generated. It makes you wonder--and people have looked into this--just the tip of the iceberg. Now, of course, not all studies are corrupt as this one turned out to be; but many are fraudulent. Where does this leave us with our understanding of medicine, epidemiology? What is your assessment of the field, having gotten into the kitchen as it were? Most people in this subject have seen it in terms of vaccines, measles, infectious disease, autism, or things like that. From the start, I've always seen it as being as being an issue of the integrity of science. Whether this paper was true or not and how he could get away with how he got away with. I think it is a depressing picture. It's been in the region of $10 million dollars to crack a case series of 12 patients. The money involved with the General Counsel hearing, the litigation involved, journalistic fees, and all the staff gone around this to get to the bottom of this little case series of 12 patients. The great bulk of science is not that interesting to the general public and therefore would not create the cause for a newspaper reported to be funded by a newspaper or television station to go after this for such a long period of time and get all this investigative work done with government regulators and what have you. So, you really would have to wonder what else is going on in laboratories and medical centers. The fact that Wakefield thought he was going to get away with it, and the casual way he went about it leads me to think he was working within a culture within which that wasn't far from unusual, wasn't far from extraordinary--the kind of misrepresentations he made were far from remarkable by common standards, I suspect. Part of it the nature of human beings; part of it the elusive nature of truth. Part of it is the nature of the publication process. When I was googling around trying to get background for our conversation, I came across a recently published study that showed a relationship between autism and living near a highway, a major highway. If you lived within a certain number of feet of a major highway, I think you had a 10% higher chance of getting autism. The authors were at least honest enough to report that their results didn't hold up if you lived near a busy city street. So, here's an awkward thing. They find a correlation and they are happy to opine on the source of the correlation. They say: There must be some chemicals in gasoline and pollution and cars that cause autism. Could be. But it's awkward for their theory that in their results they don't find a correlation with major city streets. So the authors explain: There must be different chemicals near those streets. Well, that would be one hypothesis. The other would be their initial theory is wrong. There is no relationship. It's just a statistical anomaly, as we know, a few percent each time. In a large enough sample, you are going to find relations that are not causal. Ed Leamer podcast. People shopping around and then painting a bull's eye around the hole. Very difficult to get clear evidence in that field of autism. If there are environmental factors at work, there could be so many. I don't know how many years to test the hypotheses we've got now. The simply hypothesis is we've gotten better at testing. My lesson--what I try to teach my children--is to be skeptical of scientific findings. Hard for us. A lot of us are vulnerable. We like good stories. We like to be scared. We like to think the scientists have the answer. A lot of us in the street think: well, if scientists don't have the answer, what's the point of them? That's what we have them for. To discover that scientists actually don't have the answers but are all just putting forward ideas for testing and maybe eventually one or two of them will prove to be correct is kind of a bit of a dispiriting view of the nature of science. A lot of romance about it; Caldwell podcast, scientism, use of language of tools of science.