For those wishing to support this work financially

To Encourage the Others

Martin J Walker MA

 

 

 

Chance is a word void of sense;

Nothing can exist without a cause.

Voltaire

 

There are no accidents.

Master ShiFu in Kung Fu Panda.

 

 

When police and paramedics arrived at the house of the distraught Fisher family, on the morning of January 19th 2006 they found two-year-old George Fisher dead and were unable to resuscitate him. He was declared dead exactly 10 days after his MMR vaccination. His lungs and blood examined during the autopsy, showed measles virus, while his enlarged spleen showed he was fending off a virus.

 

 Over three days, two and a half years later, in November 2008 Coroner Alan Crickmore presided over the Inquest into George Fisher's death. Apart from the bereaved parents, the amphitheatre court was full of pharmaceutical company representatives and vaccine and immunological department apparatchiks, including Dr Liz Miller, formerly of the Public Health Laboratory Service and more recently head of the Immunisation Department of the Health Protection Agency.

 

Crickmore, a solicitor with a one-man-band practice in a small black fronted office resembling a funeral director's on the High Street in Cheltenham, deals with everything from divorce to licensing and conveyancing and civil partnership to cohabitation. Qualifying as a solicitor in 1980 he became the Coroner for Gloucestershire a decade later. Making a formal complaint against him following the Inquest the Fisher family described him as 'a man without any social skills'. The Fishers maintain that he was brusque and rude to them throughout the hearing and acted with a condescending and authoritarian abruptness to their female counsel.