PART ONE: THE NEAR PAST
On May 24th 2010, Dr Andrew Wakefield, together with co-defendant Professor John Walker-Smith, was struck off the British Medical Register. The decision came at the end of a three-year GMC 'trial' that cost British doctors in excess of £6M. The campaign to character assassinate Dr Wakefield began soon after he first wrote to Dr David Salisbury of the NHS in 1996 warning of a public health crisis which might be caused by the MMR vaccination. The campaign has continued for a decade and a half and at its height has 'disappeared' at least 1,500 vaccine damaged children. The making invisible of the reality of vaccine damaged children and the casting into the mist of their parents tragedy, heralds the zenith of a propaganda campaign that the pharmaceutical companies have been working on for the last 50 years. The endgame is the absolute denial of responsibility for any kind of iatrogenic damage in contemporary society.
This essay has three themes. First, to explain the larger, extensive network of the science lobby that has supported the vaccine manufacturers in their anonymous campaign to deny any form of adverse reaction caused first by Urabe mumps strain MMR and then by those strains of MMR and MR that caused Inflammatory Bowel Disease and regressive autism in some children. The second theme is to explain the link between the first 'quackbusting' campaigns, in Britain and the US and the extensive contemporary pro corporate science lobby. Thirdly, the essay uses Evan Harris's political activities and elements of his father's career as a vehicle to explain the nature of conflicting and vested interests which should have been declared when Evan Harris began his involvement in the ambush of Dr Wakefield.
After giving a brief history of the 'healthfraud', 'anti-quackery movement', the essay discusses the identity and work of Evan Harris and places his beliefs, his actions and those of his associates and colleagues in the historical context of the growth over the last twenty years in the power and the organisation of beliefs not in science but in 'scientism' and the ideology of global corporatism.
Evan Harris the Bigger Picture
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