BMJ and Brian Deer left High and Dry Over their Fraud Claims

By John Stone, UK Editor for Age of Autism, April 22, 2011:

“The case we presented against Andrew Wakefield that the 1998 Lancet paper was intended to mislead is not critically reliant on GP records.” So wrote Fiona Godlee (Editor-in-Chief, BMJ) in February, in effect conceding that Brian Deer’s scrutiny of GP notes which had apparently formed the main s basis of his and BMJ’s fraud allegations could not be used to support such a claim.

Back in February Age of Autism and its readers scored a great victory with it letter writing campaign, forcing editor-in-chief of British Medical Journal, Fiona Godlee, to respond to our criticisms both in our columns (HERE) and in the on-line columns of BMJ itself (HERE ). Remarkable though this was we have perhaps not analysed carefully enough how desperate the defence she presented was.

In both versions of her response we find the sentence:

“The case we presented against Andrew Wakefield that the 1998 Lancet paper was intended to mislead is not critically reliant on GP records.”

So, in fact she conceded then and there that a fraud claim could not be based on GP notes, as originally pointed out by ChildHealthSafety (HERE ) as Andrew Wakefield and the other authors of the paper simply did not have access to them. While, we continue to contend that the data in the notes is entirely reconcilable with data in the paper (as Martin Hewitt began demonstrating yesterday HERE ) it was simply not possible for anyone to alter data from material they could not see.

As we have seen Deer responded with seething contempt on the BBC radio programme ‘Science Betrayed’, broadcast in late March, to the cogent explanation that the records referred to in the paper were the Personal Child Health Records of the children (or so-called red books) (HERE ), but by that stage Godlee – who also had a cameo appearance on the programme - had already admitted as much.

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Meanwhile, BMJ have ducked out of publishing my recent letter which bore on several relevant issues including the shifting opinions of doctor-journalist Ben Goldacre, the anomalous and unexplained fusion by Deer and the GMC of the Lancet paper with a protocol for a Legal Aid Board funded study, and the offensive misrepresentation of myself and this matter by Brian Deer in a comment on Orac’s ‘Respectful Insolence’ blog, which I append for interest: Read more>>