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| Guardian of What? The Guardian, the Science Lobby, and the Rise of Scientific Corporatism Martin J Walker 22 January 2008 ***** One Click Group Director Jane Bryant reviews and publishes the full text of Martin J Walker's new essay that details the way in which the science lobby has been involved in censoring the British media. Read this and weep. ***** As the most damning and incisive sequel subsequent to the worldwide acclaimed publication of his fourth book, Cultural Dwarves and Junk Journalism, that blew the lid off the Guardian newspaper's junior doctor columnist Ben Goldacre's involvement in the sinister New Labour industry lobby groups, investigative writer Martin J Walker publishes today what I consider to be one of the finest examples of his work - Guardian of What? The Guardian, the Science Lobby, and the Rise of Scientific Corporatism. You think we have a free, independent and objective press that does its best to keep its audience properly informed? Think again. Walker's new essay conclusively reveals why it is so difficult to get fair, balanced and independent media coverage over ME/CFS, Gulf War Syndrome, Lyme Borreliosis, Wi-Fi, mobile phone masts, vaccine damage, Big Pharma activity, corrupted science, psychiatric abuse of patients and a host of other subjects besides that vitally concern the general public - you and me - today. When the New Labour government came to power in Britain in 1997, spin immediately became one of its primary tactics to control how information and news is delivered to the general population. With the emasculated New Labour 'Cabinet' made purposefully virtually redundant by previous Prime Minister Tony Blair, the government elected to use public relations consultancies, a rag bag cadre of ex-Revolutionary Communist Party advisors, focus groups and the media to deliver its policy to the electorate, with the oil war in Iraq and the multitudinous dead and disabled being but one stunningly backfired example. Heavy Manners Corporate Science Media Spin Nowhere is this ravaged culture of heavy manners control spin more apparent than in New Labour's attempt to manipulate all coverage, even fiction and drama, revolving around the subject of science and health. Martin Walker writes: "From the turn of the 21st century, corporate scientific interests organised hard and unrelentingly to promote corporate science and to argue publicly against new technology having any adverse effects on public health. "The plan to guide the media began in March 2000, when the Royal Society published its Scientists and the Media: Guidelines for scientists working with the media and comments on a press code of practice. "Everything was done in the Guidelines to give them an almost statutory authority. In fact, they had been put in published shape by a small group of individuals who, despite being associated with celebrated organisations, now frequently worked in partnership with the pharmaceutical vaccine industry, the biotech industry and major chemical companies. "The sole objective of the guidelines was to censor articles critical of corporate science, professional medicine and their products. "The growth of the guidelines, through the Royal Society and the Royal Institution, and finally through the SIRC (Social Issues Research Centre) and then into the hands of the Science Media Centre, mark the development of a terrible arrogance, which is abroad in the community of corporate science. They want to outlaw political, personal and alternative views on health. They want to dismiss personal views on illness and to restrict any writing, even of fiction and drama, about science, entirely to observations about ‘successful’, apparently peer-reviewed science. "They now want to stop any subjective criticism of science or medicine. It is necessary to control ‘bad’ narratives, which do not coincide with the profitable projects of the corporations. "What about research that reaches critical minority conclusions, such as research into environmental illness, almost inevitably a minority view? Where would we be with research into smoking and lung cancer if corporate science had controlled research in the 1960s? Ah, yes, I forgot, that was all a terrible mistake. “And what of politics? Just because the ex-Revolutionary Communist Party has replaced politics with a religious faith in science, do we all have to do the same? Are we no longer to be allowed political choices because an RCP cadre has decided that politics has ended? Will corporate science now advise the correct course of action on health, on vaccination, on the taking of pharmaceuticals?” It is very frightening to see how the sinister government science lobby groups, Sense About Science and the Science Media Centre (run by Fiona Fox, ex-Revolutionary Communist Party member) et al came about and the control and censorship that they are trying to maintain over the British media; the media who unfortunately seem to have largely given up on investigative journalism in favour of the meaningless sound bite that properly informs no one and consistently provides purposeful mushroom cloud misinformation. Walker's essay begins with Denis Campbell's Observer newspaper interview of Dr Andrew Wakefield in July 2007, the consultant gastroenterologist at the centre of the MMR vaccine/autism controversy. It starkly illustrates what can happen to journalists (and their editors) when they fail to adhere to the coda drawn up by a group of erstwhile revolutionary communists, corporate scientists, Liberal peers and members of the New Labour administration that have banded together to draw up a censorship manual for the media in Britain. The furore that ensued between the Observer and its sister paper the Guardian subsequent to the Dr Andrew Wakefield interview was considerable. Martin Walker writes: "In the weeks following the article's publication, Denis Campbell was carpeted and criticised by staff at the Observer, as well as interlopers from the Guardian and beyond. Months later, after the chastisement of the paper by the Guardian, the Observer’s most able editor, the hugely popular and ebullient Roger Alton, responsible for overseeing Campbell’s interview with Wakefield, was forced to resign. "In a country with an apparently free press, this little story of how New Labour corporate apparatchiks enforced censorship on one of Britain’s most notable papers should have created the most terrible public storm. But so low has the press sunk in Britain, and so powerful has the corporate science lobby become, that not a whisper of the scandal entered the public domain." So much for a free, unfettered press. Dr Andrew Wakefield In Guardian of What?, Martin Walker proceeds on from the Observer/Guardian row to meticulously indicate the history of the MMR vaccine (mumps, measles and rubella) since its introduction to Britain in 1988 and the endless problems that it has created right around the world. So much misinformation and deliberate media spin has been placed on the work of Dr Wakefield with a small group of autistic children brought to him by their desperate parents, that I am compelled to reproduce down the Home Page of this website for international public consumption, the section of Martin Walker's essay that deals with this so accurately. It is time to publicly set the record straight. Martin Walker writes: "MMR, the mumps, measles and rubella vaccination, was introduced to Britain in 1988. Its original introduction was seriously marred by adverse reaction to the Urabi mumps strain in the vaccination. It was not until 1992 that the Department of Health, downplaying the serious adverse events that had occurred using this particular strain, took two of the MMR vaccines off the market while making low-key and somewhat mumbled explanations to the public. Following this major problem, the Department of Health and the successive governments were determined not to admit to any other problems in relation to this vaccination. "Dr Wakefield, a senior researcher in experimental gastroenterology at the Royal Free Hospital, was approached by a gathering number of parents, after 1988, who claimed that their children had been adversely affected by the triple vaccine. These cases were brought to the Royal Free because often the first signs of adverse reaction to the vaccination were gastrointestinal. Initially, Dr Wakefield was sceptical about the department’s authority to deal with these cases. As well as reporting gastrointestinal conditions in their children, in the majority of cases that were brought to the Royal Free, parents reported signs of autism spectrum disorder. Dr Wakefield’s main area of expertise had, until the early 1990s been Crohn’s disease, a gastrointestinal condition that had markedly increased in recent years. "Initially Dr Wakefield protested that he knew nothing about autism spectrum disorders, and suggested that perhaps the Royal Free was not the best place to bring these children. However, as the rest of the team carried out more tests and observations on the gastrointestinal conditions presented by the children, superficial case review conclusions became inevitable; either the children had all developed autism spectrum disorders ‘naturally’ and biologically inevitably, or the condition, together with the intestinal condition, had been triggered or exacerbated by an environmental factor. "After work over the next decade, Dr Wakefield came increasingly to the latter conclusion, and was convinced that it was the vaccine measles strain, in combination with the strains of mumps and rubella, that was responsible for the gastrointestinal condition and, in this relatively small subset of children, also for the regressive autism from which many of them suffered. "Although Dr Wakefield tried hard to interest the Department of Health in the condition that his research had uncovered, and begged them to be more cautious in their vaccination campaign, it was six years before Dr David Salisbury, the Principal Medical Officer of the Communicable Disease Branch of the Department of Health, deigned to meet with him to discuss evidence of a public health crisis. "Dr Wakefield continued to write up his research, and noted, as time passed, that even without a reasoned discussion about his research or the clinical work of the Royal Free Hospital, a campaign was being orchestrated against him. In 1998, he was one of 13 authors who published a paper in the Lancet reviewing the cases of 12 children who had passed through clinical tests and treatment at the Royal Free. As well as reviewing all the clinical evidence, the paper noted the view of 8 parents, that there was a link between MMR and the onset of children’s illnesses. "From the time of the Lancet paper’s publication, a propaganda offensive of considerable power was turned against Dr Wakefield, and from this point onwards the parents who had reported an adverse reaction to the MMR vaccination were gradually made invisible. "Wakefield, his research and the clinical work of the department were roundly condemned. His identity and character were covertly attacked, and in 2003, an article by Brian Deer in Rupert Murdoch’s Sunday Times, accused Dr Wakefield of some criminal and much professional malfeasance. Deer followed up his Sunday Times article with a Channel 4 television programme, on 18 November 2004. It always appeared to those who were knowledgeable about Dr Wakefield’s work, that Brian Deer’s reporting was based upon incomplete information. "Included in the first Sunday Times article was a call by the then ex-Communist Minister for Health, John Reid, ordering a General Medical Council (GMC) hearing of Dr Wakefield and his colleagues. Deer had drawn in part upon the research capability of Medico-Legal Investigations, a firm of private investigators, who carried out most of their work for, and were mainly subsidised by, the Association of the British Pharmaceutical Industry. This agency had in the past prepared for the GMC a number of cases that might have been said to help pharmaceutical industry competitiveness. "In 2004, Deer became the sole complainant to the GMC about the conduct of Dr Andrew Wakefield and his colleagues, Dr Simon Murch and Dr John Walker-Smith. After an almost four-year wait, this case was brought before a GMC fitness to practise panel in July 2007, and, having been designed for procrastination, it is unlikely to finish before September 2008. While the hearing to determine the future of Dr Wakefield’s professional career has continued at a snail’s pace, the media have continued with their onslaught, without proof or evidence, on the basis of off-the-cuff, industry-inspired hearsay, to illustrate Wakefield’s bad science and criminal intentions to sink the Government’s combined vaccine programme. "It is perhaps of value, even at this late stage, to examine one of the major strategies used by the science lobby to discredit Wakefield’s work in the public mind, as well as to link the campaign against him to New Labour’s spin tactics and the entry into the post-industrial political world of the armies of PR clones and the robotic risk-communication company voices. While attention in this respect has always been pointed at Alastair Campbell, who served as Director of Communications and Strategy for Tony Blair from 1997 to 2003, such exposure has always been a part of the ‘laddish’ terrain of male politics in Britain. The use of similar armies of disinformation in defence of Big Pharma and corporate science, and against alternative medicine for example, has been tackled by few journalists. "The sword upon which Denis Campbell fell when he strayed onto the vaccine field, the most powerful weapon of the science lobby, has been that of hyperbole. Dr Wakefield and his colleagues at the Royal Free were always conscious of the fact, and always made clear, that those parents who had brought their children to the hospital were part of a relatively small and idiosyncratic population. "At the same time, clinical work at the hospital, and research by Dr Wakefield, showed the science peculiar to these cases in exacting detail. No one at the Royal Free, nor anyone connected with Dr Wakefield, has ever said bluntly that there is scientific evidence that MMR has been responsible for the substantial rise in cases of child autism in Britain over the past decade. Further, it is easy to see what it was that Dr Wakefield did say, which so unnerved the government and the pharmaceutical industry, who were determined on a future model of increasingly combined vaccines. "Wakefield actually said bluntly at a press conference that preceded the publication of the case review in the Lancet that parents should be given the chance to choose single vaccines until the post vaccination scientific research had been conducted into the triple vaccine. He was encouraged to voice this opinion by the then head of the university department joined to the Royal Free teaching hospital. "In a classic defence of the Government and Big Pharma, against the measured criticisms voiced by Dr Wakefield, the first thing that the science lobby did was to distort and misrepresent his research results. In this crude version of the Royal Free’s complicated clinical work, Dr Wakefield was made responsible for claiming that the considerable and continuing rise in classic autism in children was entirely due to the introduction of MMR in 1988. "To argue against this simplified and distorted perspective was easy. Such a colossal cause and effect had not been observed by anyone else involved in the study of either autism or gastroenterology, and none of the large epidemiological studies carried out on the causes of autism. Nonetheless the cause and effect supposedly claimed by Dr Wakefield (whilst stated explicitly not to be the case in the paper itself) was to be frequently trotted out over the coming years. "By making it appear that Dr Wakefield was making worldwide claims on the basis of 12 cases reported in the Lancet, his detractors can readily conclude publicly that Dr Wakefield and fellow academics are deranged and subversive and that their claims cannot possibly have a rational foundation. There is a lesson here for everyone involved in unpopular causes, up against the PR industry and New Labour spin: always ensure that you keep your eye on the small picture." No 'scientific' media controversy such as this could ever be complete without the parachuting in of the Guardian's columnist, junior doctor Ben Goldacre. With but one academic paper to his quackbusted name and currently being trained by the Institute of Psychiatry at the acolyte knee of notorious psychiatrist Professor Simon Wessely, the risible and ridiculous Goldacre has now been further outed to public oblivion in Walker’s new essay. Goldacre’s modus operandi métier is to attack anything or anyone that does not have a Big Pharma label stapled to their forehead and nowhere is this more apparent than in his attempt to deny that any children have suffered adverse reactions to the MMR vaccine in the Guardian. The science lobby protection racket with Goldacre as its wee junior national newspaper protagonist went into full rebuttal swing over the Denis Campbell/Dr Andrew Wakefield Observer interview. As Walker so pertinently writes: "Neither the New Labour government nor the pharmaceutical companies, the medical establishment nor, certainly, the science lobby, was going to admit that MMR, or any other drug or vaccination, provoked adverse reactions. Nor was any one of these going to admit that Dr Andrew Wakefield had a defence of any kind." So often in the British media today and particularly the Guardian, it would seem that we are being permitted to read about ill health only in relation to it being cured by pharmaceutical drugs and therapies offered by allopathic doctors. This is extremely ironic bearing in mind that the aforementioned are between them responsible for the iatrogenic death (induced by physician activity) of millions around the world currently running in America alone in 2003 at some 783,936 deaths per annum. (Gary Null, PhD, Caroly Dean, MD ND, Martin Feldman, MD, Debora Rasio, MD and Dorothy Smith, PhD, Death by Medicine, October 2003, released by the Nutrition Institute of America). 'Guiding' The Media Martin Walker writes: “The plan to guide the media began in March 2000, when the Royal Society published its Scientists and the Media: Guidelines for scientists working with the media and comments on a press code of practice. "The Guidelines on science and health communication, which grew out of the 2000 guidelines on scientists and the media via a series of consultations, were published in November 2001. Despite sounding terribly official, they were prepared by the relatively-unknown SIRC (Social Issues Research Centre), partnered by those long-established and august-sounding organisations the Royal Society and the Royal Institution of Great Britain, both of which had over recent years fallen victim to flooding by corporate funding. The sole objective of the guidelines was to censor articles critical of corporate science, professional medicine and their products." Walker illustrates very clearly that the Guidelines, "are designed by the very corporations that are sheltered by them, and that, like the pharmaceutical companies, consistently disguise or bury or fail to make public their research results, they jeopardise the very soul of scientific inquiry. When such guidelines are used to censor other kinds of research, for instance from lay patients or qualitative or participatory or biographical work, then rather than making research safer, they deprive science of the little humanity it has previously professed." We are all sailing in corrupt science waters when the information that the electorate is allowed to receive is so heavily skewed by vested interests. The Guardian Newspaper The organisation that definitively comes out worst in Walker's essay is the Guardian newspaper. Walker writes: "Although the paper had often defended corporate interests in the past, since the employment of Ben Goldacre, an admitted quackbuster intent upon defending corporate interests, the Guardian has become a priori the paper defending industrial interests that might damage human health. While most media in Britain avoid the whole debate about environmental health, the Guardian has moved into a position of active support for those industries that cause this damage." It is fascinating to see how Martin Walker recounts the Guardian's previous good history to show the stagnant, fetid pool that it swims in today in 2008, frantically defending the corporate science lobby activities, particularly those of the vested interest pharmaceutical industry and "its cynical and bilious, unscientific attacks on alternative medicine." In case any of you still remain under any illusion, this is all about the protection of vested best interests pharma money and how a political party can financially benefit whilst purposefully misleading the health-crucified electorate. Long gone are the days when as a teenager, I used to take great delight in waving a copy of the Guardian about under some elderly Establishment relative's nose to irritate the pants off him, thus ensuring that my perceived adolescent liberal leanings guaranteed exorcism from any dreadfully boring distant stuffed relations dinner party. This was the information age when you really could put some faith in what the paper then published. Conclusion I conclude this piece by quoting the final three paragraphs of Martin Walker's essay: "So how is it possible to get to the truth in a society where the media are harassed and muscled by ex-communists and liberal corporatists? One way is to turn the discourse away from science and towards politics. Is it healthy in a democracy to have cadres of ex-revolutionary communists (in or out of uniform) visiting newspaper editors and showing them the error of their ways? "As many sceptics have counselled, when this becomes commonplace, we are indeed turning the corner into a dark and informationless age, not as they suggest because our thinking capacity has become addled by mysticism or because we have turned our backs on the rational world, but simply because the institutions of industrial democracy have collapsed, apparently without cause but coincidental with the election of New Labour in 1997. "There has come an end to ideology and political discourse, and we are all now observers on the shore of a poisoned sea watching the great mother-ship of global scientific control power towards us like some post-modern Nuremberg rally. Our political institutions linked to the New-Labour government are dank with vested interests and spin, and because corporations now guide the government, we are all living on the edge of second-generation corporatism; a soulless collectivism ruled this time, not by authoritarian ideology but by science." New Labour's rag bag of PR personalities and ex-Revolutionary Communist Party members are now running the science arm of the British government and doing a very effective job of controlling how the media tackles the subject of science and health. If you would like to gain yourselves a mandatory education to completely understand what masquerades for ‘science’ and how it is heavy manners manipulated in the British media today, I strongly recommend that you download the full text Martin Walker’s great essay, Guardian of What? It is one of those knowledge-is-power decisions that you will never regret. Jane Bryant Director The One Click Group Guardian of What? The Guardian, the Science Lobby, and the Rise of Scientific Corporatism Martin J Walker 22 January 2008 ********************** For Further Information: Synopsis Martin J Walker's New Essay ********************** |
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