Andrew Wakefield, thank you for joining me in the trenches.
Did the COVID era change you? You know, paradoxically it gave
me hope because so many people woke up and when I started in
this 30 years ago, 30 plus years ago, there were literally 5
people around the world who were prepared to engage in a
discussion about the vexed issue of vaccine safety.
It was the end of your career. It was forbidden.
We just don't go near that. And I did and you know, I
touched the third rail and so did a few handful of other
people. COVID changed everything.
I mean, certain things changed everything.
Film I found changed everything. In the clinic you can help one
child at a time and with a film you can educate thousands at a
time. So that was one thing.
And then COVID came and when people woke up to the
realisation that their lives and in their, their jobs and their,
their, their businesses had been destroyed and their health had
been destroyed and it was all based upon effectively a lie.
Then half the adult population of the world started debating
this and have come in many cases to the right side of this, this
argument. So COVID changed a great deal
for me in there is a silver lining to the COVID cloud and it
is the awakening of many people to the reality of vaccine
issues. I'll give you one example.
Peter McCullough, world's leading paediatric, sorry,
world's leading cardiologist, the most published cardiologist
in the history of this planet. When he got engaged in this and
lost his job, he, it was COVID vaccine.
This is a problem and we should not be using it, not been
properly researched, et cetera. But the childhood vaccines are
safe. But then like every good
scientist, he went down that rabbit hole and read and read
and read and came to the conclusion that no, actually
none of them are safe. They've not been through
adequate safety testing. So suddenly you had eminent
people like that joining in the debate in a very sophisticated
way and testifying before the American Congress, and it made a
huge difference. So you wouldn't want to go back
to 2019? No, no, I I tend to look forward
in life rather than backwards. I mean, history is crucial if
we're to understand why we got to where we are and and how to
approach the future. But no let's I look forward.
I was saying to you before we started recording that your work
and, and the, the, the, the podcast episode that we recorded
a number of years ago had a profound impact on, on me
personally and of course my wife and of course our child.
And for the right reasons, because we are a lot more
sceptical now of, of vaccines, particularly the MMR vaccine.
And that's kind of the Segway. Your background is around that.
And of course, we'll we'll chat about that now in a moment.
But for my UK column audience that might not know much about
you, Andy what? What is your general bio?
General bio Graduated in medicine 1981.
Mainstream gastroenterologist. GI Surgeon.
I don't know what mainstream means anymore, but there I was.
I had a big research team at the Royal Free Hospital in London
looking at the origins of inflammatory bowel disease,
Crohn's disease, ulcerative colitis, epidemic diseases in
Western societies, and I started looking at viruses as the
possible 'cause. And that led to looking at
measles and measles vaccines. We were interested in unusual
patterns of viral exposure and I'll explain that in a minute.
But 1995 I started getting calls from mothers, highly
intelligent, not not anti vax, had taken their children to be
vaccinated according to the doctor's recommendations.
And they said my child was fine. And then they crashed.
They they had speech, language, interaction with their siblings,
they were sleeping at night, they were growing.
And then suddenly that all went to hell and they lost their
speech and language, no longer socialised, didn't sleep.
They're in pain. I know they're in pain.
I'm their mother. I know they've lost the ability
to communicate, but I know they're in pain.
And they had all the signs and symptoms of an underlying
inflammatory bowel disease. But the doctors and nurses
they'd seen said, oh, that's just part of autism, Put them in
a home, forget about it, move on, have another child.
That was the sort of, it was a terrible situation.
So we investigated them as we should have done.
And of course the parents were right.
The children had an inflammatory bowel disease and when we
treated that, there was improvement in not only the
bowel symptoms but the cognitive symptoms.
The children started using words they hadn't used for five years.
It was fascinating. It was like that.
Lorenzo's oil. I don't know whether you
remember the film based upon a true story, but so when they say
this happened after a vaccine in close proximity to the MMR, we
have an obligation, professional and moral that to to take that
very, very seriously. People didn't want to.
My colleagues said as paediatricians, we can't be seen
to question the safety of MMR vaccine.
I didn't know what that meant. That just made me angry.
What I mean, you can't be seen to do it.
Why? Because your colleagues might
not think well of you. I that was astonishing.
Your responsibility is to the to the patient and their parents,
not to your, you know, you're standing in the Royal College.
So I, I, we, we parted company on that particular issue.
And yeah, when we started to look at the vaccine issue,
that's when my career in particular completely
unravelled. I came to America because
America, even though the argument is equally polarised
here. Or was there is the opportunity
to do to set up a private clinic where you can do research and
continue the work and help these children?
That's what I did. They came after me there.
They accused me of, well, you know, of, of fraud and the
mainstream media got their teeth into it.
I was accused of all kinds of things.
And there was me, there was me, and then there was them.
And they, them, you know, they were the World Health
Organisation, UNICEF, the drug companies, the governments of
the world, the Royal College of Paediatrics and Child Health.
I mean, I was just went on and on.
So I was never going to prevail in that particular situation.
They eventually, you know, the, the clinic, they came after
that. And that was difficult.
So I thought, you know what, I've got some extraordinary
stories to tell. I'm going to become a film
maker. And so in 2004 I started screen
writing and I've now made 6-7 movies.
The last one, Protocol 7, has won 34 Film Awards.
Not that that means too much, It's certainly not why we went
into it. And it's almost dangerously
respectable. It's not not not a place I'm
familiar with. But film is a wonderful way of
communicating with people. And I had these stories from
whistleblowers and I decided to tell them.
Yeah. But let's go back to that, that
incident because it it, it's mind blowing.
It's very obvious to me, Andy, that you were over the target
because I mean, if it is just a normal science paper that got
retracted, there wouldn't have been such a a huge sort of
artillery coming after you. That paper, if I'm correct, it
was in 1998 and it was peer reviewed and published by The
Lancet and you had done a study, you and your team.
By the way, you had Co authors. I mean let's not forget that.
Also, you studied 12 kids, is that correct?
Yes, by the time when we we decided to write a paper after
the first 12 children here. OK, so just take me through that
just briefly. Sure.
So The Lancet paper was a case series.
It's very important to stress what a case series is.
A case series. This is the way in which human
disease syndromes are almost invariably described in the
literature when they're found for the first time.
You have a group of individuals, in this case children, who
present with a consistent and unusual pattern of injury.
In this case, it was regressive autism and bowel symptoms,
gastrointestinal symptoms, following in many cases the MMR
vaccine. And So what you do is you report
those. And what you report in that in
The Lancet paper is what the parents told you, what the
medical records show, what you found on clinical examination of
the child and what you found on investigation, for example,
colonoscopy or laboratory analysis.
And you can make no conclusions about causation, can't say MMR
causes. Ultimately you can't do that.
It's just an observation that leads to hypothesis testing
studies down the line. Does do these children have a
unique bowel disease? Is it different from other bowel
diseases? So you can do control studies to
answer those specific questions. And we made the point in the
paper at the end, we said this study does not confirm an
association between the MMR vaccine and the syndrome
described. More work needs to be done.
That was it. That's that's as far as it can
go. It's a very sober
interpretation, but it was taken by the media to be MMR vaccine
causes autism. And and that's when it really,
you know, kind of went into meltdown.
There was a journalist called Brian Deer, I think I if I got
his name right, and he seemed to have had a chip on your shoulder
and he really decided to come after you.
But it does appear that he, from what I can tell, that he, he
looks like a pharmaceutical hack basically.
But what was your interaction with him like?
Very little, Very very little. As little as possible.
Very, very strange individual. And as you say, he was bought in
by pharmaceutical companies when they encountered a problem like
this. He did it.
He did this with the pertussis vaccine and a Doctor Who from
Great Ormond St Hospital who reported the association between
neurological injury and pertussis vaccine.
And then he did it with me and he was kind of hit man.
I think James Murdoch, who Rupert Murdoch's son and they
have a big interest in vaccinations.
He was put onto the board of Glaxo Smith Kline, the U KS
biggest manufacturer of MMR, in fact Europe's biggest
manufacturer. And his aim was to protect the
reputation of that, that company in the media.
And my I was his target and he came after me and he recruited
or Brian Deer was recruited as a consequence of his involvement.
And, and what an interesting story is that we ultimately sued
Brian Deer and the British Medical Journal for defamation
because what they'd said was so wrong, so outrageous.
And my question to your audience, why would you do that?
When you sue someone, all the facts, every single word gets
laid out in the public domain for anyone to scrutinise.
If you would committed fraud, unless you were totally insane,
which I don't think I am quite yet, why would you do that?
Why would you spend, for example, raise $3,000,000 to
fight this kind of litigation merely to have what Brian Dear
said confirmed worldwide? You wouldn't do it.
I mean, you'd have to be literally off your rocker.
And so we didn't, we, we lost that case not because we, it
never went to court, we were denied jurisdiction.
So it never got tested on the merits of whether they'd been
defamatory or not. It just someone very high up,
despite all legal precedent said you don't have jurisdiction and
so we never got to take Brian Dear to court.
But he knows, and the rest of them know, that they would have
lost if we had done that. But there's something obviously
weird about that whole thing. I mean, firstly, The Lancet did
publish the paper and then they're attracted it, which
means that they they were pressured by the Pharmaceutical
industry. You know, it it, it was a threat
to the vaccine market. It opened up the possibility of
huge liability and for injuries already incurred, children
damaged. It was a mass and it was the
future of the Pharmaceutical industry was vaccines.
It was vaccines. There were vaccines for
everything. They were throwing new vaccines
into the market all the time. And that's where the future was
for them. And so they had to grow, they
had to satisfy their stockholders.
And so it it was unthinkable that vaccines could be causing
this and therefore it wasn't allowed to be.
But I mean, if you look up this particular story, every website
comes up saying that this led to a decrease worldwide in
vaccinations and an increase in measles.
Yes, I mean people have analysed this back and forth, I said at
the time. And I make this very clear.
I would suggest that parents have the option of the single
vaccines because we didn't see this to anything like the same
extent with the single vaccine. Parents reported an association
with MMR. Was there some effect of the
combination that was idiosyncratic and we we didn't
know, but it was a reasonable hypothesis.
And at the time, in the UK and in the US, the single vaccines
were available so a parent could opt to take one or the other.
They were protecting their child, but they were just
choosing how to do it. And the British government then
in that year took away the importation licence for the
single vaccines. Merck in America withdrew,
unilaterally withdrew the availability of single vaccine.
And I said to them, I said to the British, the girl from the
Public Health Laboratory Service in the UK is responsible for
this. I said, why would you do that?
Why would you? If your concern is protecting
children from measles principally, why would you take
away a parent's options for how they do that?
And she said because if we allowed parents the choice, it
would destroy our MMR programme. That's astonishing.
Her aim, her wish, her desire was to protect the programme and
not children. That was what they were trying
to protect and it was a real revelation.
Elizabeth Miller was her name. Vaccines are one of the largest
pharmaceutical products in the world, something like $85
billion annually, I think. I think the only other thing
that's bigger than that is I think oncology or something.
But I mean the vaccine market effectively is almost the size
of Hollywood. I mean, that is huge money and
it's growing, which which is a, which is a big red flag.
Yeah, it's growing massively and they they want to introduce more
and more and more vaccines, different strain vaccines.
I mean, it's, and the problem is this, the problem is that in
this country, in the US, there is no liability for death or
injury caused by vaccines that are on the childhood schedule.
And there are many, there are now 74 plus vaccines before you
graduate from high school. And the problem with that is
that so you have a mandatory market, the children have to
have these vaccines in many states to go to school.
And so it's there's a mandatory market and no liability.
You can't be sued. So they've got the perfect
business model. They got a mandatory capture
population and no liability for death or injury caused by the
vaccine. All they can do is make a profit
because in 1986 they introduced the National Childhood Vaccine
Injury Act, which protected the industry from liability.
They said the industry held the feet of the government of the
fire and said if you want us to go on producing these vaccines,
then you're going to have to indemnify us because it's not a
big profit margin for us and we're going to pull out of the
market and children will die of pertussis.
How do you feel about that? That's the kind of blackmail
that was exercised on the government.
And so a huge mistake in my opinion.
The government introduced a no fault compensation system where
there's a tax on every vaccine. So the individual, the people,
the public pay for it, not the the industry, not the government
pay for it. And they and then if children
are injured, they're compensated from that fund.
And it just gave the industry a get out of gaol card.
They had, you know, like I say, mandatory market.
All they could do is profit. What a great business model.
But I'm not following Andy, because if vaccines are safe and
effective, why do you need protection?
Why do you need liability protection?
Absolutely. Because they're not.
And they know they're not. And that's the truth.
And when we say vaccines, we are referring to all vaccines, not
just MMR. Yeah, all vaccines because the
safety studies for all vaccines have been wholly inadequate.
They have not tested the safety of the vaccine in populations of
completely unvaccinated versus fully vaccinated children.
So called vax on vac study, they've not done that.
That's done for every drug that goes on the market, but not for
vaccines. No vaccine.
No vaccines. Now, isn't that what RFK is
trying to do? Absolutely.
That's what he's trying to say. He's trying to say for any new
vaccine there should be a long term random oldest clinical
trial, control trial and you know, people getting the vaccine
and not getting the vaccine, not getting an alternative vaccine
as a control. That's not a control.
That's not a placebo, not getting the excipients in
vaccines as a control. Again, that's not an inert
control, but getting no vaccine. And, and so that's what he's
doing at the moment. It should apply to all vaccines,
old and new. But of course they consider that
unethical and it would I've no doubt, expose problems they do
not want exposed. What I don't understand though
is it's become almost like a cult.
It's very interesting. I mean, people are far more
willing in my experience, to talk about this now than they
were. COVID has really bought it into
the public time. Like people know that there are
problems. Everyone's got a relative or a
family member or whatever who has suffered some kind of
injuries, you know, sudden death, cardiac death after the
vaccine, 3rd or 4th dose. It's invariable.
It's, it's the truth will come out.
The truth is coming out, but as you say, it's it's been a very
painful process. And there are people who've had
all the shots and don't want to even begin to acknowledge that
they might have been duped, that they did the wrong thing, that
they would have done something differently.
And people were very reluctant. There's a sort of dissonance
that guides people's thinking and but it's been very
destructive because as you say, family units are falling out
because some didn't, some didn't get vaccinated and same in my
own family. But.
Post your Lancet moment in history.
You went into forms and then you did vaxxed.
Vax after In early 2000, I think I went to testify before the US
Congress on this issue. And afterwards I met with the
CDC at the Centres for Disease Control and Prevention
scientists in, in Cold Spring Harbour laboratories and they
said to me, Doctor Wakefield, every child gets MMR, only a few
get autism. How do you explain that?
And I said, well, you know what, that's medicine.
A lot of people smoke, some people get lung cancer.
Who does? Who doesn't?
We don't know why cofactors, genetics, we don't know, but we
believe that one of the cofactors in vaccination and
autism is the age of exposure to MMR.
The younger you get the vaccine, the greater the risk.
Why? Because the younger you get
measles, if you get measles, natural measles under one, then
the chances of a serious outcome are much worse than if they're
you're over 1, intuitively, because the immune system's more
developed or whatever it may be. So we think, I think that age of
exposure is very important. And they went away, and they
tested that hypothesis, and they found it to be exactly true.
Children who got the MMR vaccine younger were at much greater
risk of autism than those getting it after 24 and 36
months. And what did they do?
They spent the next 14 years covering up the data, putting
alternative data in its place, destroying the documents and
publishing a paper that said MMR vaccine was safe.
It was a absolutely appalling scientific fraud that had
enormous and far reaching consequences for American
children and by proxy, children of the world.
This is what the CDC says it's safe to go back in the water.
No, it's not. And then in the end, the senior
scientists on that study, Doctor William Thompson, who was really
the key figure in in Vax, the documentary Vax, William
Thompson, who had designed that study at the CDC, collected the
data, analysed the data, written the paper, came forward and
said, I can't live with this anymore.
We've done a terrible thing. Here is all the data.
I kept it. My colleagues destroyed it,
threw it into a dumpster. I kept it because I knew that
was illegal. And so we discovered the
greatest fraud ever in the history of childhood vaccine,
and we decided to make a documentary about it.
And of course, the critics said, oh, that's true, you've just
made that up. That's just typical of you,
Wakefield. Well, let me tell you this.
If we'd made it up, if there'd been one word of a lie, one
mistake in that movie, we would have been sued to the moon and
back. It was not a whisper, not a
single whisper. Why?
Because they knew every word was true.
And it went right to the top of the CDC hierarchy.
So that movie really had a dramatic impact worldwide, not
least of which is it got into Tribeca Film Festival, one of
the great film festivals in North America.
And it was then censored. It was pulled up the first time
ever in Tribeca history. The movie was censored.
A few days later, Robert De Niro went on television saying we
shouldn't have done that. Everybody should see this film
and it exploded worldwide. We could how do you couldn't
even pay for that kind of publicity.
It was amazing. It was extraordinary with a
censorship backfired on the in the biggest way that this movie
exploded globally and played everywhere and people woke up.
Many, many people woke up to what was really going on.
I remember that, that incident with Robert De Niro, did he ever
make contact with you? We were in touch.
He has a vaccine injured child himself and and so he was very
sympathetic, but he was led by his colleagues at Tribeca Film
Festival and told that in fact, they were told this is a really
interesting story. They were told that other
directors of other films that had got into Tribeca were so
furious that our film was in that they'd offered, they
didn't, they'd threaten to pull their own film from the
festival. Let me tell you this, if you're
a film maker and you get into Tribeca, you are never, under
any circumstances going to pull your film from that.
Those people do not exist. And so it was just a complete
lie. And De Niro knew it was a lie.
And, and so, you know, so it unfolds.
But it did have this paradoxical effect of of exploding the film
worldwide and getting a lot of people to watch it.
It's not common for a list celebrities to speak out against
vaccines like De Niro. I'm I'm trying to think now they
but they are a handful. I think there was somebody that
you knew back in the day. I think the the model what's
named Elle Macpherson. I think Jim Carrey also or or
he's ex. Jim Carrey was very good.
He, he, Jim Carrey was actually the first person to call me when
I came back from England having lost my medical licence, which
was very touching, yeah. So I mean, and he he had a thing
Once Upon a time with his ex girlfriend or wife.
I don't even remember the story anymore.
And they, I think they spoke to Oprah about it back in the day
when you could still speak on TV about it, but.
When when they were together. Jenny McCarthy.
Yes, yes. Are there any other big names
who who take a sympathetic position?
There are not, not so many, but it's a growing #1 because it's
become self evident. And two, because so many
children are now injured that their relatives, their
grandchildren are being harmed. And so people are bored,
particularly in the wake of of COVID.
So it's a very, very much larger group now than it ever was
before. Why does the MMR vaccine matter
so much? I mean, there are, there are
loads of vaccines, Andrew. Why does it matter so much?
It matters because it's an interesting story.
It matters to Merck, who developed the MMR Maurice
Hiliman from Merck, the late Maurice Silliman Merck had There
was no unique licence on the measles vaccine.
There were a number of manufacturers.
It was open season in the marketplace.
Maurice Silliman developed a vaccine for mumps and Merck had
a monopoly in the United States on that vaccine.
So Maurice Silliman decided corporately a very smart
decision to combine 3 live viruses, measles, mumps,
rubella, owning the patent on the mumps vaccine and get that
to be the preferred vaccine of choice, one shot rather than
three. And that's what happened.
So in the, in the, in the American market, it became MMR
became the preferred vaccine and that put all of the other
measles manufacturers out of business.
And Merck cleaned up and they cleaned up because they owned
the patent on the mumps vaccine as part of the MMR.
Very smart move, but that really closed the marketplace down.
And then in the UK we introduced the MMR and we used a strain of
mumps which was very dangerous, caused meningitis.
It had been withdrawn in Canada, withdrawn in Japan.
The British were warned don't do this, this is a dangerous
vaccine. They went ahead and did it
anywhere they didn't care. And of course, four years later,
it had to be rapidly withdrawn because it was causing
meningitis. And so they went to Merck and
said, Merck, can we make up our stocks with your vaccine?
And Merck cleaned up in, in Europe as well.
So it, it, it's it there are commercial forces at play here
that determined why MMR is so important to the pharmaceutical
company. It's not important to, to
families any more than the single vaccines would be.
I mean, it's just it was mainly a commercial reason.
How did humanity survive for thousands of years up until
what, the 1700s? It's a, it's, it's a very
interesting sort of evolutionary argument.
We if you look and they never show you this graph, but if you
look at what happened to measles, measles mortality, it's
a measure of how severe measles is mortality, death rate from
measles before the vaccine was introduced, so in up until 16.
20 that was 1968 or something when it was introduced.
Wasn't. Yeah.
So up until 1920, measles was a major killer of children in
Western societies. During epidemics, 1200 per
million were dying of measles. After 1920 there was a dramatic
fall in the case fatality rate. In a very short period of time,
50 years, it had fallen by 99.6% and it was continuing to fall.
And we introduced A vaccine. All of that decline in
mortality, the decreasing severity of measles, that was
nothing to do with the vaccine. It was due to a whole host of
factors, like a change in the virus, change in host immunity,
better nutrition, better sanitation, all kinds of things.
Nothing to do with the vaccine. Now the question is, if we'd
never introduced the vaccine, what would have happened to that
mortality curve? It would have continued down,
very likely. We can't say that for sure
because we intervened with the vaccine.
But the point is that man and microbe man and measles were
coming to terms with each other. A successful parasite doesn't
kill people, it keeps them alive so it can spread from one to
another. And measles was becoming a more
successful parasite because it wasn't killing people.
But we introduced A vaccine and that confused the entire
situation. And you could argue and, and
experts at the time did argue, there is no need for this
vaccine. Don't interfere.
Ask yourself what is different about that one in a million
child that makes them susceptible rather than
universal vaccination. Approach it from that individual
child's perspective. But no, they saw profit at the
end of it. They wanted to emulate what they
perceived to be the successive polio vaccine, and so public
health took over and made the decisions.
But they never talked to you about that mortality curve
because it really undermines their entire argument.
That curve you're talking about, I think, is in Roman Bistjanic
and Suzanne Humphrey's book Dissolving Illusions.
You'll see the US data there, but if you look, if you look at
Thomas Mccown's modern rise of population, you'll see exactly
the same for the the United Kingdom.
So basically in a nutshell, and you what you're saying is that
plumbers were a lot more successful at eradicating
measles than the vaccine they. Were they cost more?
The plumbers always cost more, but yeah, they were.
They did a fine job. Yeah.
Measles isn't eradicated, and you can't eradicate a disease
where the vaccine itself causes measles.
So in way back when there was a Disney outbreak in the States,
there were, I think, 100 and, gosh, 180 cases.
I can't remember the precise number in this country.
And it turned out that 43% of those were caused by the
vaccine. They didn't tell you that at the
time. They didn't want you to know
that. They wanted you to think it was
all unvaccinated people getting measles. 43% were caused by the
vaccine. When you have a situation where
the vaccine is causing the disease, you will never
eradicate the disease. The same thing happened with
polio. The The polio vaccine caused
polio. Yes it did.
Absolutely the biggest it killed.
People. The biggest cause of paralytic
polio worldwide now is the IS escape.
Escape mutants from the vaccine. And then after a few movies, you
ended up doing a movie, not a documentary, called Protocol 7.
And as I was telling you before we started recording it, it was
it came up in conversation when I applied for my my US visa.
That was based on a true story. It was because of the position
I'd taken over the years. People came to me from the
Pharmaceutical industry and from regulatory agencies like the CDC
and said, you know, we've done a terrible thing.
Here's the evidence. And so I became a kind of
repository for whistleblowers and I used to hand them off to
special interest lawyers, you know, Public Interest Lawyers to
sue or not sue according to their merits.
But I just thought, you know, these would make wonderful films
like Erin Brockovich and The Insider and so on and so forth.
So I started screen writing in 2004 and wrote this story.
Gosh, in 2012, I think Protocol 7, I wanted to let it play out
in court because it was going to court that took decades and
decades. So in the end, I just said the
public need to know. And we got on and made the movie
and it, it was a lot of fun. It was such fun making a a movie
rather than a documentary. I just, it was just great.
I love working with actors and, and it did really well.
It did really well. It, as I say, it won 34 Film
Awards so far and and it's playing to audiences worldwide.
It's available streaming and yeah, you can have it written
down here. Is it Wakefield mediagroup.com.
You can see it there at wakefieldmediagroup.com.
So now it's done very well, and it could have done better if
there hadn't been suppression, censorship.
But that's the way of the world, I'm afraid.
Just keep making those movies. When you look back, Andy, do you
have any regrets or or was the attack by the Pharmaceutical
industry a blessing? You know, it, it, it was very
difficult. I won't pretend it hadn't been
very, very difficult, particularly for my family and
for my children who have all been very, very supportive and
loyal. But I spent far too much time
away from my children. And so if I have one regret,
it's that. But it, I do hope that
ultimately they will look at their children and their
children's children and say they're safer and they're
healthier because people ask questions about something that
was assumed to be safe and turned out not to be.
I, I, I really, and I hope they can forgive me for the time
spent away from them. That's my one misgiving about
it. But I did realise halfway
through when things were really, really bad, I realised, you
know, I had a sort of reflective moment and I thought, you know
what? This isn't about you.
Forget about your you. This is not about you.
This is about something. Far more important than that is
the health of children who have no voice.
They've lost their voice and someone needs to be able to
speak for them. So shut up and get on with it.
I think that sentiment, though, shared by a lot of people now,
Andy, and I mean, you know, my, my mom was just saying to me a
few days ago, you know, if she knew what she knew now, thanks
to people like you and and others, she wouldn't have
vaccinated me when I was a baby with the MMR.
And I think we now have the opportunity to, to apply that to
our, our next generation and, and hopefully their, you know,
their generation after that. And we keep hearing though that,
well, we're going to see an increase in all these diseases
again because of people who are going against the vaccine thing.
And I, I don't think that at all.
I mean, I think that that's just propaganda from the pharmacy,
from the, from the Pharmaceutical industry.
But I mean, I think there is hope, isn't there?
I do. I think the first thing to say
is that whatever happens it they've only got themselves to
blame. They can blame you and me for
having this discussion, but that's not where the root of the
problem lies. They are to blame.
They have created this situation to do with COVID.
We've seen this. They have created a permanent,
unforgivable mistrust in public health because they've been,
they've lied, they've used propaganda, bullying, whatever
they've and they've lied. And they will never regain that
trust. Never.
I think Bobby Kennedy and the states will go a long way to
restoring the integrity of public health.
But I'm afraid that the people who've perpetrated this, who've
allowed this to happen. Will not be forgiven and have
only themselves for to blame for you and I having this
conversation right now, it's because it's a very necessary
conversation to have. So we live in interesting times.
I do I do have hope for the future.
I think that with the right people in the right places,
we're going to make a lot of progress.
We're going to get some information, I think in the last
quarter of this year from Bobby Kennedy studies as to what the
precise role of vaccines and autism is.
I think it'll take a while to unravel a very, very complex
scenario given the fact there are so many vaccines being given
to children now, but I remain optimistic.
But the the battle is also a little bit more complex.
It's not just about which vaccines are safe and effective
in, in my view, I don't think any are, but it's also the fact
that the Pharmaceutical industry is in bed with governments
everywhere. And so, you know, you have
mandatory vaccines, you know, and so like, schools won't let
kids in unless they have certain vaccines.
And so now it becomes a a very big challenge just to live.
Yes, and they make it as difficult as possible.
I think Tony fact she said something to the effect in in
the COVID era, He said when you make things difficult for people
in their lives, then they lose their ideological bullshit and
get vaccinated. What an appalling situation.
If you make things difficult for people in their lives, you've
lost your job, you've lost your income, your family are going to
starve. We're going to force you, we're
going to coerce you with any weapon available to us to make
sure you comply with our diccat that you're going to get the
vaccine. This is the kind of person that
has destroyed public confidence in public health And and it's a
fact. And and I there's nothing
nothing good about that man is science.
Broken. Yes, I think the world science
itself knows. The true science is not the
ability to freely ask questions and answer them in a proper
scientific setting is not. But that's not science.
Vaccine science isn't science. Pharmaceutical industry science
isn't science. That is not the appropriate
application of of the scientific method.
So science itself, pure science with a capital S remains as ever
as it ever was a, you know, a, a laudable goal to seek to attain
the corruption of science delivered in a small with a
small S is, is, yeah. And even you look at the
journals now Bobby Kennedy has said anyone with the National
Institutes of Health grant is cannot publish in the following
journals because they're corrupt.
The BMJ, The Lancet, the whatever the American.
I don't know whether the BMJ was in there, but the the New
England Journal of Medicine, these kind of things.
So yeah, there's the system is broken.
I mean even multiple editors of multiple journals themselves
have said the whole peer review process of journals that
everything is just all corrupt and broken.
Yeah, they've become a mouthpiece for the
Pharmaceutical industry. Were you on your own in this?
Were you a Lone Ranger? Or did you have scientists,
perhaps even in secret, supporting you and and and being
on your side? In secret, yes, very few were
prepared to stand up and be counted.
There were some, I mean they've a few come to mind, outstanding
people like Marcel Kinsborne, late Marcel Kinsborne from Tufts
University, who would represent children, brain injured children
in vaccine court in America, people like that.
But they were a small handful. The Pharmaceutical industry now
knows that more and more people this this, it's almost like a
critical mass now. I think that's right.
I think it's become unstoppable. It's become a major force and it
is a testament to perseverance. I think that people have kept
pushing and pushing and parents have kept insisting, insisting.
And, and in the end you can move mountains and occasionally it
takes something like COVID to really mobilise a very large
number of people, a number of very good scientists.
Yes, they've lost their jobs. Yes, they've suffered the same
fate as I have in many ways. But they've been resolute in
their commitment to answering this question, testifying before
Congress and writing papers. And they've they've survived,
they've thrived, they've continued their work.
And that's very, very encouraging.
What's the moral of the story? What is of the story?
I guess the story has to be has to be written.
The moral of the story for me goes back to the clinic, it goes
back to the clinical arena, goes back to the parents story,
principally the mother's story. And the golden rule of medicine
is to listen, in particular to listen to mothers.
Mothers understand their children far better than anyone
else on the planet. Most certainly more than
paediatricians who may never have seen them before.
Mothers have an intuitive insight into the well being of
their children, What ails them, what makes them better?
Are they suffering? Are they in pain?
Whatever it may be, mothers have to trust that instinct.
Doctors, the men in white coats, the men and women in white coats
have tried to usurp that extraordinary power, the power
of maternal insight. Don't let them do it because
mothers know best. That is what's really kept us
alive for thought since the beginning of life on this
planet. And so mothers need to trust in
their own innate instincts and fathers need to trust in that
gift in in in their wives or the mothers of their children.
So that is for me, it's a very, very simple message.
It's not a complex overarching. It is just what is at the core
of all of this. And I've met so many mothers who
said I just knew. I just knew.
In that clinic. I had this feeling in my gut.
It wasn't intellectual, it was visceral.
I had this feeling that this was wrong.
I knew it was wrong. I wanted to say no and I didn't.
When you hear that voice, trust it because it's there for a
very, very good reason. It's a good point that you're
making there because you're talking about trust, and more
specifically, trusting mothers. The last few years all we've
heard is trust the science, trust the doctors, trust the
experts. God save us from experts.
Remember when Fauci was on TV and he said if you question me,
you question science? The arrogance of that statement,
it's exquisite. It says everything you need to
know about Tony Fauci. I think, you know, he's a kind
of almost a villain on the run in this country.
Now, the way to push back is to arm yourself with knowledge.
And the way to do that is to I, I don't give advice about
whether to vaccinate or not. I, I, that's not my job.
My job is to now to make them films that do the heavy lifting,
that take all of the information and condense it into an
entertaining, coherent whole, that do the heavy lifting for
parents. So I say watch facts.
Watch 1986, the act. And you and I know that once you
start that process, once you go down that rabbit hole, you go
down and down and down and down, and you keep digging and you
keep reading and you educate yourself.
And then and only then are you in a position just like you did.
Only then are you in a position to go to your doctor and say,
actually, doctor, I have the following 350 questions.
I'd like you to answer these starting from #1 and do the
research because the information is there.
Read the CDC website. Watch facts.
Look at the conflicting arguments and then come to an
informed decision because that's what it all is about at the end
of the day, an informed decision about whether to vaccinate or
not. If you go to your paediatrician,
they'll say Oh yeah, they're safe and effective.
That's not good enough. That's not an informed decision.
So that's what I say, please get educated.
The information is there. A lot of people have worked very
hard to provide that information to you, including, for example,
the wonderful book by Suzanne Humphreys, Dissolving Illusions.
The information is there. Read it and then challenge your
doctor and you will find actually that he knows very
little because he's not read those books or watched those
movies. And when you expose his lack of
information, you will be appalled and you will leave the
clinic until he's informed himself.
But Speaking of being appalled, I'm constantly appalled at
friends who do more research on the next car that they're going
to buy than on what is going to get injected into their child.
Yeah, it is an astonishing situation.
And largely it's come about because we've been reassured by
the men in the white coats. We've been LED down, We've
allowed ourselves. Let's be honest, we're
consenting adults. We can make decisions.
We've been, we've allowed ourselves to be LED down this
path in the, in the sort of in the, the trust that we hold
inappropriately in this case for men in white coats.
Doctors don't do always know best.
Doctors often often make mistakes and we need to
recognise that and challenge it and do our own research.
OK, Andy, how can I follow your films?
Well, the films are like I say, available are Wakefield
mediagroup.com. Wakefield Media is quite a
mouthful, but there it is Wakefield mediagroup.com and if
you want to get in touch with us at all, info@wakefieldmedia.com.
The other one is to go to Yao TV, send people to Yao TV.
That's our TV channel, streaming channel for independent films,
and the films are available there as well.
Yao is a hybrid Eastern word for freedom.
So freedom, TVY, ow.tv, there you are.
And on that note, Andrew Wakefield, thank you for joining
me in the trenches.