The fall | Dr Anti-vax Ep 1

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Speaker 8 Tortoise.

Speaker 8 We're in the middle of an anti-vax storm.

Speaker 9 Kennedy is challenging President Biden for the party's nomination.

Speaker 8 He's also an anti-vaccine activist, a world of garbled science and outlandish claims. You are five times more likely to get sick, more than 10 times more likely to die if you've been what?

Speaker 8 V-va-va-va-va-va-va-va-va-va-va, vaccinated. Where one in four Americans believe vaccines cause conditions like autism.

Speaker 11 You've said in the past that there is a correlation between vaccines leading to autism that's totally been debunked. Wait a minute, who debunked it?

Speaker 11 The CDC, the World Health Organization, the National Act. Those organizations are captive agencies, Lynn Smith.
And so you think they're all in cahoots? Yeah.

Speaker 8 Once on the fringes of public life, anti-vaxxers have reached the top of politics.

Speaker 9 In Florida, we reject the biomedical security state. Florida has defeated Fauciism.

Speaker 8 Today, vaccines are part of the culture wars dividing America and other countries like the UK, and people are dying as a result.

Speaker 12 200,000 Americans needlessly perished because they believe the anti-vaccine disinformation and refused to take a COVID vaccine. So the point is, now it's a lethal force in the United States.

Speaker 8 Science is supposed to move us forward to benefit the public good. But with vaccines, it seems like we're going backwards.

Speaker 8 Why are so many people turning against a scientific miracle, something that has saved literally millions of lives. How did we get here? How did the anti-vax movement get so big?

Speaker 8 To try and answer that question, I want to tell you a story about a doctor. A doctor who 25 years ago caused a worldwide scare over vaccines and is still peddling misinformation today.

Speaker 8 His story teaches us a lot about why the anti-vax movement is growing so fast, because what happened to him happened in a bigger way to millions of Americans.

Speaker 13 You've been doing this almost 30 years. What is it like to start seeing mainstream America waking up to this issue?

Speaker 8 If the anti-vax movement today is a fire that's burning out of control, this guy is the original fire starter. He's patient zero.

Speaker 14 You are the only person speaking truth to power.

Speaker 15 He's so charismatic, he's so on your side.

Speaker 10 He has had a massive, massive impact.

Speaker 10 I'm Alexei Mostris, and from Tortoise, this is Dr.

Speaker 8 Antifax, episode one, The Fall.

Speaker 8 Oh, hi, is that Andrew Wrightfield?

Speaker 8 There's a good case that vaccines are the most effective public health intervention of all time. The numbers are pretty astonishing.
Take just the US.

Speaker 8 During the 1920s, diphtheria killed more than 13,000 people each year. Today, that's zero.
In 1950, around 2,000 people died from polio and many more were left with lifelong disabilities.

Speaker 8 That number today, zero. It's the same story with smallpox, rubella, hooping cough, and others.
Vaccines got them all.

Speaker 8 And yet, in the last decade or so, at least some of that progress progress has been reversed.

Speaker 8 In the UK, the number of kids being vaccinated against measles, mumps and rubella has fallen to the lowest level in a decade.

Speaker 8 In the US, 20 years after vaccines eliminated measles, about 1,300 cases of the disease were reported in 2019.

Speaker 8 The World Health Organization says we're experiencing the biggest sustained decline in childhood vaccinations in three decades. Where did it all go wrong? The answer is complicated.

Speaker 8 There are lots of threads, and they don't all lead back to the same place.

Speaker 8 But if you pull on one, you'll find this thread leads back to London in the late 1990s, to a small room in a certain hospital, and to an almost unknown doctor called Andrew Wakefield.

Speaker 16 The story really begins in that week, February 1998, with the Lancet press release.

Speaker 8 That's Jeremy Lawrence. In 1998, he's working as the health editor of the Independent newspaper.

Speaker 8 He's assigned to cover a new medical paper being published in The Lancet, a highly reputable medical journal in the UK.

Speaker 8 In the days before publication, Jeremy notices that something strange is happening.

Speaker 16 So the

Speaker 8 The Lancet had good reason to be anxious.

Speaker 8 The paper, written by an obscure gastroenterologist called Andrew Wakefield and 12 other researchers, raised the possibility for the first time that the MMR jab could be linked to autism.

Speaker 16 The paper had gone to four peer reviewers. It had been looked at by three panels at the Lancet.
They were worried about it. They knew it was going to be controversial.

Speaker 8 If the Lancet shied away from media attention, the Royal Free Hospital where Wakefield worked took the opposite approach.

Speaker 8 They arranged a press conference to tell journalists about the paper and to answer any questions.

Speaker 16 We were ushered into this room, I think, on the ground floor in the basement. It was a small room.
It was not big. We were not a big gang of reporters.

Speaker 16 I should think there must have been a dozen of us. The panel, as I say, was sat behind a table.
There was a lectern.

Speaker 8 On one side of the room, 12 journalists, including Jeremy.

Speaker 8 On the other side, on a raised platform, were five doctors, Wakefield at one end, and on the other end Professor Ari Zuckerman, the dean of the Royal Free Medical School.

Speaker 8 Zuckerman wasn't an author of the study, but he'd been brought in to provide reassurance.

Speaker 8 Zuckerman was determined that the message given to the press would be, don't stop taking the MMR vaccine, it's safe.

Speaker 16 This panel had agreed. A consensus.
They wanted to publicize their paper, but at the same time, they wanted it to put it in proportion.

Speaker 8 Unfortunately Andrew Wakefield had other ideas.

Speaker 16 What happened when they let us in was that that carefully crafted consensus completely fell apart under questioning from His Majesty's press

Speaker 16 and

Speaker 16 what I vividly remember about that press conference was that it got steadily more heated as time went on.

Speaker 16 And at the end, you had Andrew Wakefield sitting at the left-hand end of the panel, coolly declaring that, in his opinion, parents would be advised to give their children the vaccine separately, the three vaccines, separately at yearly intervals, while stood at the lectern at the other end, Professor Ari Zuckerman, a virologist who was not involved in the paper and who was chairing this press conference, thumped the lectern with his fist, saying, this vaccine has been given to 25 million children around the world and it is safe.

Speaker 8 Zuckerman's fist thumping didn't work. The next day's headlines were all about the potential risks of the MMR jab.

Speaker 8 Newspapers like the Daily Mail spent the next few months interviewing parents who claimed their children had been damaged by the vaccine. The impact was significant and sustained.

Speaker 8 In the UK, national vaccination rates for MMR fell from above 90% to below 80% in 2004, and in Ireland it was even worse.

Speaker 17 This latest outbreak of measles in the Midlands follows outbreaks in southwest Dublin and the west of Ireland. It's almost three years since the last major measles epidemic.

Speaker 17 This occurred in the eastern region in March 2000 when over 1,200 children got measles. Hundreds were hospitalised and three children subsequently died from complications.

Speaker 8 What I hadn't realized was how quickly Wakefield's claim had an impact beyond Britain in the US.

Speaker 18 As soon as Wakefield publishes this study and as soon as media attention ramps up, we see a sharp, sharp spike in adverse event reports, one which has not gone away.

Speaker 18 And so what has essentially happened here, we think, is that Wakefield has kind of brought public attention to this issue and fundamentally altered the way that Americans think about vaccines.

Speaker 8 Let's fast forward to 2010. The medical establishment in the UK finally starts to take action against Andrew Wakefield.

Speaker 8 It's taken 12 years, but the doctor's regulatory body in Britain, the GMC, strikes him off, finding that he's acted dishonestly. In the same year, the Lancet retracts Wakefield's paper.

Speaker 8 But by then, Wakefield's moved on to Texas, and it's in America that he really starts to light the fire of what is to become the modern-day anti-bax movement.

Speaker 8 He tours the country, speaks at autism conferences, and starts meeting parents whose kids have developed autism. Parents who desperately want an explanation for what's happened to their children.

Speaker 8 To these parents, Wakefield is extraordinarily compelling.

Speaker 15 The way he appeared to me and many others, he's so charming, his eyes look so compassionate and he always connects with people.

Speaker 8 Francesca Alessi worked with Andrew Wakefield for 10 years. She filmed him interacting with hundreds of mothers and their autistic children.

Speaker 15 He always seems to give that vibration that he really gets you no matter who you are. And for the mothers of autistic children, they treat him like the messiah.

Speaker 15 Once you tell him that, yes, you're right, I believe in you, then you become part of this like greater good and we're in this together. It becomes sort of like an army and a family at the same time.

Speaker 8 An army and a family. That's powerful.

Speaker 8 To these parents, Wakefield offered hope. Hope that the mainstream medical establishment couldn't provide.

Speaker 8 Actually listening to parents is something that a lot of doctors are surprisingly bad at.

Speaker 8 Plenty of parents of autistic children tell stories of being fobbed off by busy medics whose basic message is, bad luck, these things happen.

Speaker 8 So for a doctor to say, I hear you, I believe you, well, that's a big deal.

Speaker 8 And this tactic of Wakefield's, it's still a major part of today's anti-vaccine movement, still a major reason why it's so popular.

Speaker 8 It was Wakefield's contention that the parents' views should be paramount, that they should come first above everything.

Speaker 8 But of all the parents whom Wakefield met during this period, there's one who I think is particularly important.

Speaker 8 This mother goes through something which by rights should have been the final nail in Wakefield's coffin. This mother's story isn't that well known.

Speaker 8 It isn't nearly as famous as Wakefield's Lancet paper. I'd never heard of it before making this show.

Speaker 8 But it's a story that should have got Wakefield cancelled in the United States in the same way as his controversial research canceled him in the UK.

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Speaker 8 In 1994, Teresa Sedillo gives birth to a baby girl called Michelle. Michelle is a healthy child, happy and robust is how Teresa describes her, and the first 15 months of her life are unremarkable.

Speaker 8 She has all the routine childhood vaccinations, including, in December 1995, an MMR jab.

Speaker 8 One week later, Michelle develops a fever and a rash. By the morning of January the 6th, 1996, her temperature is 105 degrees.

Speaker 8 She's prescribed antibiotics and the fever dies down, but a few months later, a pediatrician notes that Michelle has developmental delays.

Speaker 8 A year on, and Michelle is formally diagnosed with severe autism, as well as profound mental retardation.

Speaker 10 For Teresa and her husband, it's really tough.

Speaker 21 They did not have doctors near them that were either very supportive or able to give them a lot of help. And they had a daughter who was

Speaker 21 in such

Speaker 21 excruciating pain, would sometimes be awake for 18 hours at a time, hitting herself.

Speaker 21 And some of her doctors felt like because she was in so much pain, she was trying to attack the pain, would have bouts of diarrhea that would last for hours and hours and sometimes days, followed by bouts of constipation, needed essentially two around-the-clock caregivers at all times.

Speaker 8 That's Seth Manoukin. He's a professor from MIT who spent years researching the anti-vaccine movement and he's followed the Sadillo case closely.

Speaker 21 And they started going online and found examples of other parents saying, my child also had gut problems and

Speaker 21 had a vaccine and started showing signs of autism. And we think that the vaccine caused this and that's what's going on.
So they then fell in with this, with an anti-vaccine group.

Speaker 8 and that leads her to attending an autism conference in San Diego in 2001, where she meets Andrew Wakefield.

Speaker 21 The Sadillos had been told by every specialist that they had been to that we do not know what to do. We don't know how to help your child.
We don't know how to help her pain.

Speaker 21 We don't know how to help her GI issues. And what Andrew Wakefield said was, yes, I believe that we can help your child.

Speaker 8 By the time they meet, Teresa has already applied to a body called the National Vaccine Injury Compensation Program.

Speaker 8 Set up in 1988, the program pays out money to US citizens who've been injured by vaccines. Side effects from vaccines are rare, but they do happen.

Speaker 8 Claims are decided by a special vaccine court, which uses a lower standard of proof than a standard trial.

Speaker 8 Effectively, if you can show that you suffered one of a recognized list of injuries after taking a vaccine, you're likely to get a payout.

Speaker 8 Teresa's claim on Michelle's behalf is asking for compensation for brain injury. Brain injury or encephalopathy is one of the recognised injuries, so it should have led to a quick payout.

Speaker 8 But after meeting Wakefield, something important changed.

Speaker 8 Teresa amended her claim to one which alleged that Michelle's autism was caused by the vaccine, not a brain injury, but the condition of autism itself.

Speaker 8 This was brand new territory. The vaccine court had never paid out for such a claim.
Autism was not on the list of conditions that the court recognised. So making the claim was a big risk for Teresa.

Speaker 8 In 2001, there were only a handful of other parents who've submitted claims that vaccines caused their children's autism.

Speaker 8 But as Wakefield toured the country, that didn't last long.

Speaker 21 Previous to Andrew Wakefield, previous to his publishing his paper, previous to his going on these huge PR campaigns, anti-vaccine PR campaigns, there were almost no claims in the vaccine, national vaccine injury program, that vaccines cause autism.

Speaker 21 Literally almost no claims. Then, once he started pushing this, and then once especially lawyers started getting involved, you saw an explosion of cases.

Speaker 21 And so in the early 2000s, you went from having basically no claims that vaccine caused autism in this court to thousands and thousands of claims.

Speaker 8 By 2007, when the vaccine court was finally ready to hear Michelle's case, there were more than 4,800 claims from parents, each one accusing vaccines of causing autism in their children.

Speaker 8 The court decided to hear three test cases, and Michelle's was the most important.

Speaker 8 The result would determine whether she and thousands of other children would receive compensation. What's more, if Teresa won, it would be a huge victory for Andrew Wakefield.

Speaker 21 It would have been interpreted as proof positive that Wakefield was right, that he had been vilified unfairly.

Speaker 21 In many ways, the stakes really could not have been higher, not only for him, but for the perceptions of the vaccine program and vaccine safety moving forward more generally.

Speaker 8 It's a cold morning in February 2007. Michelle's case takes place in a wood-paneled courtroom just across the street from the White House.

Speaker 8 Michelle is brought into the courtroom by her parents Teresa and Michael.

Speaker 8 The case has taken so long to get to court that she is by now 12 years old, strapped into a wheelchair and wearing a helmet to protect her in case of seizures.

Speaker 8 Unusually, these proceedings are recorded and you can hear how Michelle's involuntary cries punctuate the silence of the courtroom.

Speaker 8 As the hearing begins, thousands of other petitioners follow along intently via a live link. Their fate also depends on the judge's decision.

Speaker 22 Today and over the next three weeks, we will hear not only about Michelle's own condition, but also extensive expert testimony concerning the petitioner's first general causation theory.

Speaker 22 That is, the general theory that MMR vaccines and thimerosol-containing vaccines can combine to cause autism.

Speaker 8 After the lawyers make that opening statement, the court hears from Teresa Sedillo herself.

Speaker 23 When did you first have concerns about Michelle's development and her behavior?

Speaker 24 It would be

Speaker 24 following the fever.

Speaker 23 So sometime in mid-January of 1996?

Speaker 24 Around that time.

Speaker 23 And what was your first concern?

Speaker 24 That she no longer spoke.

Speaker 23 Did anybody else in your family share your concerns?

Speaker 24 Yes, my husband and my

Speaker 24 parents.

Speaker 8 Even though Wakefield isn't called as an expert or as a witness, his name runs through these proceedings like a stick of rock.

Speaker 23 Now, you testified yesterday that you met Dr. Andrew Wakefield at a 2001 Defeat Autism Now conference.

Speaker 24 Is that correct?

Speaker 23 Yes. Had you heard of Dr.
Wakefield before that conference? Yes, I have. How did you hear of him?

Speaker 27 On the internet and from other parents.

Speaker 23 Have you ever exchanged emails with Dr. Wakefield?

Speaker 26 Yes, I have.

Speaker 23 Approximately how many?

Speaker 24 I, boy, I don't have a number.

Speaker 8 It's...

Speaker 23 More than 10?

Speaker 25 Yes, more than 10.

Speaker 23 More than 50?

Speaker 24 Probably more than

Speaker 24 100, but less than

Speaker 26 150.

Speaker 23 I'm guessing. More than 100, but less than 150? I'm guessing.

Speaker 23 Are you still in contact with Dr. Wakefield?

Speaker 26 Yes, I am.

Speaker 8 Once Teresa is cross-examined and every step of Michelle's traumatic medical history recalled and described and probed, it's the turn of the experts.

Speaker 8 Many point out that major studies have effectively ruled out any link between the MMR and autism.

Speaker 8 But it's the testimony of one expert that proves decisive.

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Speaker 30 So I trained as a child and adolescent psychiatrist in France where I started my clinical and research career. I joined the National Institute of Research.

Speaker 8 This is Professor Eric von Bon, one of the leading autism specialists in the world. On day six of the trial he takes the stand.
In October we called him up to ask him about the case.

Speaker 8 He remembers studying home videos of Michelle as a child including one recorded on her first birthday months before the MMR vaccine.

Speaker 30 So I said to the judge, we all have had children, I've seen children, babies who are one year old and we know what are the ingredients of a birthday party.

Speaker 30 So I'd really like you to portray in your mind before I show you the video what a typical child's behavior with 12 months old during a birthday party would do. And then we looked at the video.

Speaker 30 And then you see that child is completely non-responsive, nothing, no communication, no affect, no interest

Speaker 30 for any human presence in the room, even her mother.

Speaker 8 Eric tells the judge that even at this point, Michelle is already showing early signs of autism and he's gathered other clips too.

Speaker 30 But there is one clip which was particularly telling

Speaker 30 which was a clip like I think it was one week before she received the MMR vaccine where she is with her grandparents in a big room with her like toys and activities for the children And then you have her grandparents calling her, telling her something.

Speaker 30 She never looks at them. And in several occasions, she engages into a behavior.

Speaker 30 This behavior, which is what we call a repetitive hand and fingers movement, is a very typical behavior of autistic children.

Speaker 30 They are fascinated by the flicking of the light through their fingers and they can do that like in sort of in completely inappropriate place. It's all absorbing.

Speaker 30 It's a fixation and uh and so you could see that she was doing that which is really the the almost dynastically specific of autism and you see that two weeks before the the mmr shot

Speaker 30 eric's evidence is a turning point in the audience you you could have seen people were

Speaker 30 completely silent. You could see the judge reaction say, wow, yes,

Speaker 30 he's right.

Speaker 8 The hearing continues for another few weeks. Wakefield's name crops up again and again.
He's even mentioned by Teresa's lawyers in their closing arguments.

Speaker 31 And then the final point I want to make is

Speaker 31 what this case is about. And it is not about Andy Wakefield.

Speaker 8 It's not.

Speaker 31 It's about Michelle Sedill.

Speaker 31 It's about 4,800 families. looking for justice.

Speaker 8 Finally, on June the 26th, 2007, the hearing finishes. But the parents have to wait another two years for a decision.
Eventually, the lead judge George Hastings hands down a 200-page judgment.

Speaker 8 His conclusion for Teresa Sedillo and for the other parents who brought the claim is devastating.

Speaker 14 Unfortunately, the Sedillos have been misled by physicians who are guilty, in my view, of gross medical misjudgment. I feel deep sympathy and admiration for the Sedillo family.

Speaker 14 However, I must decide this case not on sentiment, but by analyzing the evidence. In this case, the evidence advanced by the petitioners has fallen far short of determining such a link.

Speaker 14 Accordingly, I conclude that the petitioners in this case are not entitled to a program award on Michelle's behalf.

Speaker 10 The vaccine court was categorical.

Speaker 8 There was no compelling evidence that the MMR vaccine caused Michelle Sedillo's autism. Wakefield was wrong.
And really, this should have been the end of the story.

Speaker 8 By 2010, not only had Wakefield's findings been denounced by the British medical establishment, but he'd been trashed in America too, by a US vaccine court that spent almost a decade looking at the evidence and finding no link between MMR and autism.

Speaker 8 In a rational world, that might have been that. But it wasn't.

Speaker 8 Because Wakefield seems to have learnt something from the Sidio case, something that he passed on to the modern-day anti-vax movement. Criticism from the establishment,

Speaker 8 it doesn't matter.

Speaker 8 If the medical journals are controlled by big pharma, if the courts are corrupt, then getting trashed by them is not only to be expected, it's to be welcomed.

Speaker 8 It's proof that they're part of the problem. In the years after the Steo case, Wakefield sees donations to his group soar, his supporters rally, and he gets bolder and bolder.

Speaker 8 For the modern-day anti-vax movement, and for Wakefield himself, the Sadillo trial isn't the end, it's the beginning.

Speaker 8 In episode two of Dr. Anti-Vax, Andrew Wakefield discovers the power of celebrity.

Speaker 20 Robert De Niro made headlines last week when he appeared on Today with me and Savannah.

Speaker 8 He starts to rake in some real money.

Speaker 21 And And so they raise millions and millions from it and just wire the money to themselves.

Speaker 8 And he makes some enemies along the way.

Speaker 15 You sued me for $450,000?

Speaker 8 Who does that?

Speaker 8 Thanks for listening. You can get early access to this and to all our Tortoise investigative series, plus ad-free listening by subscribing to Tortoise Plus on Apple Podcasts.

Speaker 8 Or for the best tortoise listening experience curated by our own journalists, download the Tortoise app.

Speaker 8 And please leave ratings and reviews.

Speaker 10 They really help.

Speaker 8 Dr. Antivax is written and reported by me, Alexey Mostris, and Ilan Goodman.
The producer is Ilan Goodman. Sound design is by Tom Birchall.
The editor is David Taylor.

Speaker 8 Tortoise.

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