Wakefields MMR colleague innocent of professional misconduct

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BBC:

A doctor found guilty of serious professional misconduct over the MMR controversy has won his High Court appeal against being struck off.

Prof John Walker-Smith carried out research with Dr Andrew Wakefield claiming there was a link between autism and the combined jab for measles, mumps and rubella...

The judge quashed a GMC finding of professional misconduct.

Mr Justice Mitting called for changes in the way General Medical Council fitness to practise panel hearings are conducted in the future saying: "It would be a misfortune if this were to happen again."

Prof Walker-Smith, who retired in 2001, said: "I am extremely pleased with the outcome of my appeal.

"There has been a great burden on me and my family since the allegations were first made in 2004 and throughout the hearing that ran from 2007 to 2010. I am relieved that this matter is now over."

The former head of department at the Royal Free Hospital in north London lost his licence to practice in May 2010, along with Dr Andrew Wakefield.

A GMC panel found both guilty of misconduct over the way research into autism and bowel disease was conducted.

A third doctor, Prof Simon Murch, then a junior consultant in the department, was cleared.

The disciplinary case against the doctors centred on how they conducted their work.

The judge said the GMC panel failed to address whether Prof Walker-Smith had been doing research or simply investigating symptoms to help treat children. There had been "inadequate and superficial reasoning and, in a number of instances, a wrong conclusion", he said.

The GMC said reforms to disciplinary hearings were being considered.

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/health-17283751

Gladness. Has the Witchfinder General made comment?

Heyyyy here's part of their response:

‘Today, Mr Justice Mitting has overturned the decision to find Professor Walker-Smith guilty of serious professional misconduct. We will now study the detailed judgement carefully to see what lessons we can learn from this complex case as we continue to reform our fitness to practise work.

'The immediate effect of this decision is that Professor Walker-Smith is now a fully registered medical practitioner.

‘Today’s ruling does not however re-open the debate about the MMR vaccine and autism. As Mr Justice Mitting observed in his judgment ‘There is now no respectable body of opinion which supports [Dr Wakefield’s] hypothesis, that MMR vaccine and autism/enterocolitis are causally linked.’

cont: http://www.gmc-uk.org/news/12288.asp

Once again, they make the anti-scientific claim that the DEBATE is closed. The BBC article also made the false claim that the link b/w autism and vaccination has been discredited, even though the evidence is mixed.

Elevated levels of measles antibodies in children with autism. "Virus-induced autoimmunity may play a causal role in autism... immunoblotting of measles vaccine virus revealed that the...antibody to this antigen was found in 83% of autistic children but not in normal children or siblings of autistic children. Thus autistic children have a hyperimmune response to measles virus, which in the absence of a wild type of measles infection might be a sign of an abnormal immune reaction to the vaccine strain or virus reactivation." http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/12849883

(It's also possible that vaccine-induced immunity to vaccine-strain measles virus can suppress natural immunity to wild strains, leaving one more vulnerable to infection to wild measles virus. Despite the media disinformation, numerous cases of measles infection in vaccinated populations have been observed in the scientific literature. Google "measles outbreak highly vaccinated population")

Detection and sequencing of measles virus from peripheral mononuclear cells from patients with inflammatory bowel disease and autism. “The sequences obtained from the patients with ulcerative colitis and children with autism were consistent with being vaccine strains.” http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/10759242

I had an issue with this sentence from the BBC article too: "Prof John Walker-Smith carried out research with Dr Andrew Wakefield claiming there was a link between autism and the combined jab for measles, mumps and rubella." NO, the researchers simply honestly reported their results and suggested that a POSSIBLE link existed and that more research is needed--which is real science. Whereas the vaccine establishment continues to rely on a handful of dubious studies, and/or studies with inconclusive results, to claim that it has been unequivocally proven that vaccines have no relation to autism. And they even have made the shocking recommendation that no further research be done!

There's an old saying, "the truth doesn't fear examination."

Here is an eye-opening study from the British Medical Journal about influenza vaccination: "Relation of study quality, concordance, take home message, funding, & impact in studies of influenza vaccines" ( http://www.bmj.com/content/338/bmj.b354.abstract ): "Search of the Cochrane Library, PubMed, Embase, and the web... identified 259 primary studies... A higher mean journal impact factor [the most cited journals, considered to be most read and the ones that publish articles of the best quality] was associated with complete or partial industry funding compared with government or private funding and no funding... Higher quality studies were significantly more likely to show concordance between data presented and conclusions, and less likely to favour effectiveness of vaccines."

According to whistleblower David Graham, "...there was an orchestrated campaign by senior level FDA managers to intimidate me so that I would not testify before Congress... One attack came from our acting Center Director who contacted the editor of the Lancet... and intimated to the editor that I had committed scientific misconduct & that they shouldn't publish a paper that I had written showing that Vioxx increases the risks of heart attack." (Vioxx, like MMR, is a Merck product)