The Doctor Who Fooled the World by Brian Deer

Author:Brian Deer
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: MED039000, BIO017000, HEA050000, MED028000, MED036000, MED069000, MED115000, HEA039000, MED050000
Publisher: Scribe Publications Pty Ltd
Published: 2020-08-31T16:00:00+00:00

NINETEEN

Cracking the Coombe

With Richard Barr’s lawsuit crashed and burned, I assumed I was alone in the wreckage. Other journalists who’d spent any time on Wakefield had mostly either offered themselves as his mouthpiece or platformed a crossfire of “experts.” Nobody, it appeared, was out looking for a story: old-style newspaper reporting.

But, just five weeks after my visit with Ms. Two, came an investigation about which I knew nothing. At the Coombe Women’s Hospital, on the south side of Dublin, a lawyer and two scientists, retained to advise the drug companies, arrived at the front desk for a showdown with John O’Leary and his miracle measles-finding machine.

“The Coombe,” as locals called it, was in a rough part of town. With Holles Street to the east, and the Rotunda north of the Liffey, it was one of the Irish capital’s three maternity units. Not renowned for molecular biology. Ringed by thin-walled terraced cottages and gang-friendly public housing, it wasn’t really the kind of place you’d want to walk past at night, much less take your scientific riddles.

“This isn’t the Great Ormond Street of Dublin, trust me,” says a friend whose brother was born at the Coombe, and who knew the neighborhood well. “They’ve spruced it up a bit lately, so it’s not as much of a shithole as it used to be. An awful place, it is.”

It was, nevertheless, a place where fear of vaccines was reborn for the twenty-first century. Second only to the twelve-child Lancet paper, O’Leary’s cherished machine (“a thousand times more sensitive”) was as integral to the delivery of Barr’s Venus De Milo as any midwife or obstetrician on the hospital’s wards to the latest baby Patrick or Mary.

The visitors were led by Gillian Aderonke Dada. She was both a lawyer and a medical doctor. Aged forty, and praised as “confident” and “inspiring,” she worked for a heavyweight firm of commercial solicitors—which had earlier been retained in the DTP trials—that day representing the three vaccine manufacturers: SmithKline Beecham, Aventis Pasteur, and Merck.

The class action was dead. But a string of hopeless appeals kept its sweating corpse technically breathing. So the companies exploited this ventilated state, with their eyes on the United States. Spurred by Dan Burton’s congressional hearings, Lenny Schafer’s republishing of British media reports, and Wakefield’s appearance on CBS’s 60 Minutes, thousands of parents were being recruited, coast-to-coast, for a yet bigger lawsuit on the way.

This was where the story gets briefly complex, as I am obliged to pursue Wakefield, Barr, Kirsten Limb, and Ms. Two to the molecular level of evidence. When I learned of it later, it would prove the biggest challenge in mastering all those interminable -ologies behind which sheltered the real people and specific facts.

So while I plodded forward with my inquiries in London, waiting with Dada in the Coombe’s reception area were two top biomedical detectives. One was Malcolm Guiver, head of molecular diagnostics at the British government’s public health laboratories in Manchester. The other: Stephen Bustin, reader (later professor) in molecular science at London’s Queen Mary school of medicine.

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