- MMR - The Truth
by MELANIE PHILLIPS, Daily Mail
11th March 2003
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/health/article-171316/MMR--The-Truth.html
For three months, award-winning Mail writer Melanie Phillips has investigated the MMR controversy.
Her findings, reveal how officials have concealed major evidence, how 'neutral' experts are paid by the drug firms and research that could prove the doubters right all along....
He has been mocked, denounced and driven from his job. To the medical and political establishment, he is an outcast and an enemy.
But Andrew Wakefield, the doctor at the heart of the furore over the MMR vaccination, believes he is on the brink of vindication.
It was Mr Wakefield, a gastroenterologist then working at the Royal Free hospital in London, who first made the devastating claim that the triple jab for measles, mumps and rubella can provoke both autism and bowel disease in a small proportion of children.
His theory, which exploded into the public arena in 1998, spread alarm among parents everywhere.
The British and international medical authorities united to dismiss it, scorning his research as worthless and insisting the vaccination was perfectly safe.
Report after report was published to rebut his findings, with MPs and ministers - including Prime Minister Tony Blair - joining the chorus that there was no cause for concern.
According to Mr Wakefield, his life was made impossible. His funding started to dry up, professional collaborations were broken off, and researchers were allegedly bribed or threatened not to have anything to do with him.
Realising his work was imperilled, he felt obliged to leave the Royal Free and move to America. Now, however, Mr Wakefield has evidence that he thinks will prove he was right all along.
His new research - which has yet to be published in a medical journal - focuses on booster MMR jabs, which are given to children around the age of four, to reinforce the original injection given at around 15 months.
Among the children in Wakefield's study, those given the booster jabs suffered a dramatic deterioration in both behavioural problems and bowel symptoms.
After the booster, he claims, one child stopped growing for 18 months and another failed to develop at all for five years. There was also a significant increase in acute bowel inflammation in the majority of children who received the second jab.
Such evidence from revaccination is potentially explosive. Symptoms appearing after one jab might be put down to coincidence - the key counter- claim by Wakefield's critics. But if the same symptoms clearly worsen after a second jab, this argument becomes much harder to sustain.
Indeed, such evidence would seem likely to reignite the whole MMR debate.
The American Institute of Medicine, in its own report on the controversy, said that evidence from a booster would constitute a strong case that the vaccine and the symptoms ascribed to it were linked.
The report's author, Dr Kathleen Stratton, told me: 'If such evidence could be well documented - and so far it hasn't been - then it would be extremely useful and would certainly provide much more confidence that there is something there to be looked at.'
Her caveat is important, for one thing is certain: Wakefield's new evidence will be subjected to the most ferocious scrutiny by the many doctors and scientists who think his previous claims are based on bad science.
There are strong arguments on both sides. Experienced and principled figures are convinced that MMR can be trusted. On the other hand, Wakefield is not a lone voice; other experts, and independent evidence, now support him.
For example, Dr Ken Aitken, a neuropsychologist and autism expert in Scotland, has already performed preliminary research that helps back up Wakefield's new 'booster' study, showing that children who already had developmental problems get significantly worse after a second jab.
Dr Aitken also found that one of the key problems the youngsters display is incontinence - which is not common among classically autistic children, but indicates a more catastrophic disintegration.
The whole row has been fuelled by an apparent huge rise in the incidence of autism across the Western world.
Yet this, too, is the object of the most intense controversy, with experts in violent dispute over whether there really are more children with autism, or whether the diagnostic goalposts have simply been moved.
These are profoundly important arguments. But the whole debate has been tainted by the extraordinary behaviour of some of MMR's key supporters, and the sheer recklessness with which dissenting voices have been ignored.
As we are about to see, utterly inconclusive studies have been paraded as proving that MMR is safe. Warnings that the jury is still out, and that more research is needed, have been suppressed.
Key roles in adjudicating on the controversy have been handed to individuals with financial links to the drug manufacturers. Concerns have been voiced that some expert evidence may have been coloured by personal antagonism towards Mr Wakefield.
Most worrying of all, it can now be revealed that warnings over an early strain of MMR were knowingly disregarded - only for it to be suddenly withdrawn after it was found to have a potentially fatal side-effect. The fact that children were falling ill was not picked up for more than two years.
Now, with the Government still piling on the pressure for every child in the country to be vaccinated, parents need more than ever to know the truth about this whole affair.
Is it safe for their children to have the triple jab or not? Are single vaccines safer? Whom should they trust: the small group of researchers sounding the alarm, or the medical establishment?
This series, which continues in the Mail tomorrow, is an attempt to cut through the propaganda that is clouding those vital questions.
- Part two 11/3/2003
Here we present the second part of award-winning writer Melanie Phillip's investigation into the MMR controversy.
LITTLE William Kessick was a bubbly and jolly baby. Bright as a button, he was born without problems 14 years ago and passed all the normal milestones of child development with flying colours. Then, at 15 months, he had his MMR jab - a triple vaccination for mumps, measles and rubella. Within a few weeks, his mother Rosemary says she watched her child start to disintegrate.
'He had started to use a few words, like ball and book. Suddenly I realised he wasn't saying these words properly any more. Then his language just faded away.
'The last word he had was juice; and then that went too. He started banging his head against the walls and the furniture. He stopped responding to the spoken word.' Mrs Kessick noticed that although William was eating normally, he was terribly thin, with his ribs poking through. He had appalling diarrhoea all the time, and was screaming all day and all night.
'The doctors just dismissed it. I put it together with the MMR which seemed to be the only thing that had happened, but they wouldn't listen. I was told I was being a bit neurotic about his behaviour.' As William got worse and worse, Mrs Kessick found one small ray of hope. Changes to her son's diet seemed to make a difference to his behaviour.
By trial and error, she discovered what other researchers have subsequently confirmed - that if such children avoid foods containing gluten and casein (derived from wheat and milk) not only their gut problems but also their behavioural difficulties dramatically improve.
The two sets of symptoms seemed inextricably linked. And Mrs Kessick was sure that MMR had somehow triggered them both.
She went from doctor to doctor but no one would listen. In desperation, she contacted a vaccination pressure group called Jabs, founded by Cheshire mother Jackie Fletcher after her own son, Robert, developed epilepsy and brain damage following MMR.
Robert, now 11, has the development of a 14-month- old baby.
Doctors told his mother that that the MMR jab had 'revealed' Robert's epilepsy, not caused it.
Jackie Fletcher told Mrs Kessick that she knew of only one doctor who would take her fears seriously: Andrew Wakefield, who worked at the Royal Free Hospital in London, and was one of the first doctors to sound the alarm over MMR.
Meeting him was to transform the lives of Mrs Kessick and her son. She would find herself at the centre of one of the greatest medical controversies of our age, with Wakefield and his supporters fighting a bitter battle to persuade the medical authorities that the MMR jab can trigger bowel disorders and autism in a minority of children.
BUT WAS Mrs Kessick right to blame the vaccination for her son's catastrophic decline? And how could gut trouble be linked to problems with behaviour and the brain?
Are Wakefield and his fellow researchers scaremongers, or pioneers ranged against a hidebound establishment? Have they made an important discovery - or are they wrenching the facts to fit a theory that doesn't hold water?
This is a debate of vital importance to every parent of young children in the land. Yet all too often the public has been fobbed off by soundbites and bland assurances.
To get to the truth, as this special Mail series is trying to do, we must look more closely at the medical arguments. As we are about to see, it is a story of warnings that have gone ignored and experts who have been savaged for failing to support official line. Yet however often the evidence against MMR has been dismissed by the medical establishment, the dissident researchers have come back with new and troubling questions.
ANDREW WAKEFIELD made his name researching inflammatory bowel disease (IBD).
He had a theory that measles virus - which tends to home in on gut tissue - might damage blood vessels, causing the wall of the bowel to break down and infection to set in.
His early work was aimed at proving a causal link between measles and Crohn's disease, a chronic bowel disorder. He failed to do so.
His critics cite this as evidence that his whole case is flawed, but other researchers have confirmed a high incidence of measles in the gut of children with Crohn's.
In any event, Wakefield still had measles in his sights. He had noticed a huge increase in IBD among children. Since the gut was important to the body's immune responses, there was probably something to which these children's immune system was reacting.
Might it be measles virus, or even the attenuated form of the virus in measles vaccine? Wakefield's concern deepened when he found that exposure to both measles and mumps in the same year appeared significantly to increase the risk of IBD.
The MMR vaccine, introduced in 1989, was for measles, mumps and rubella. In other words, it gave children simultaneous exposure to the two key viruses.
Wakefield became so anxious that he wrote to Dr David Salisbury, the Government's principal medical officer for communicable diseases and immunisation, drawing attention to numerous studies indicating an association between bowel disease in children and measles. He received no reply.
A year later, when he heard of the proposed revaccination in 1994 of more than seven million children to counter a suggested measles epidemic, he wrote again urging that the campaign be aborted while more research was carried out.
He was ignored again and the campaign went ahead. Meanwhile, more and more parents were becoming convinced that the MMR jab had produced a catastrophic reaction in their children.
Rosemary Kessick was one of them - and her relief when she contacted Wakefield was immense.
Besides being prepared to consider a connection between the measles vaccine and her son William's bowel symptoms, he was also prepared to listen when she suggested that it was linked with William's behavioural problems.
'I phoned him and said I thought the gut has affected the brain - and bless him, he didn't put the phone down on me,' recalls Mrs Kessick.
William was examined by the Royal Free team including the renowned paediatric gastroenterologist, Professor John Walker-Smith.
They found an impacted bowel, diarrhoea and inflammation. After the examination, said Mrs Kessick, Walker-Smith came into the room and said: 'You are right; we think this is a new disease state.' Once they started treating William's bowel symptoms, there was a dramatic transformation in his behaviour. He began to laugh again and use words for the first time in years.
To Mrs Kessick, it was now undeniable that the two sets of symptoms were linked. She then consulted Norfolk solicitor Richard Barr, who was preparing law suits on behalf of hundreds of other parents who claimed their children had been damaged by MMR.
In 1996, Barr was sufficiently concerned by the cases he was seeing to write to the Committee on the Safety of Medicines, expressing anxiety about the safety of the vaccine. He was also worried that the 'Yellow Card' system for doctors to report adverse reactions to vaccines was grossly inadequate.
The previous year, Dr Elizabeth Miller of the Public Health Laboratory Service had found five times more adverse reactions than doctors had reported.
In 1997, Wakefield finally won a meeting with the Health Department. He, John Walker-Smith, Jackie Fletcher of Jabs and the solicitor Richard Barr met the new health minister, Tessa Jowell.
David Salisbury, the immunisation chief who had ignored Wakefield's warnings, was also present, as was the Government's Chief Medical Officer, Sir Kenneth Calman.
The parents' side set out their evidence. They explained that there were hundreds of cases where children had been developing normally until MMR, whereupon they had lost all their social skills, including speech, and started suffering severe bowel problems and other physical symptoms.
Calman was sufficiently impressed to order an inquiry by the Medical Research Council. But according to Wakefield, Salisbury was dismissive, telling Mrs Fletcher it was all coincidence and there had probably always been something wrong with her son.
It was a response the medical establishment was to repeat ad infinitum, along with the dismissive observation that autistic children are bound to have gut problems because they tend to be 'faddy eaters'. In fact, Wakefield says he has found a specific intestinal disease in these children that 'faddy eating' cannot explain.
The whole controversy finally exploded into public consciousness in 1998, when Wakefield, Walker-Smith and their colleagues published a paper in The Lancet.
- Retracted abstract:
http://www.thelancet.com/journals/lancet/article/PIIS0140-6736(97)11096-0/abstract
They reported how 12 children of previously normal development had suddenly lost their language and social skills, and had developed - along with these autistic symptoms - a new type of bowel disease.
The researchers conceded that this combination could have occurred by chance; but they believed they had identified a unique disease, which they called autistic enterocolitis.
What made the paper so incendiary was that it reported that a majority of the children's parents believed the trigger for this disease had been MMR. At a press conference, Wakefield recommended single vaccines should be used instead.
The Lancet was engulfed by a storm of criticism. Doctors said Wakefield's theory made no sense and was based on self- selected samples and bad science.
And indeed, the theory was confusing. Was the MMR jab supposed to cause autism or bowel disease or both? If only one of them, did autism then cause bowel disease or vice versa?
There was particular fury that Wakefield's paper presented no evidence for the MMR link except the experience of the parents. Wakefield remains unrepentant about this. He told me: 'It wasn't my hypothesis; it was what the parents said. We acknowledged this did not prove a causal association.
'It's not my job to censor the parents' story. So when the parents say they believe this happened after vaccination, we are not in any position to say: "You are wrong." We must say instead: "We will investigate your history to the best of our ability." '
In fact, warnings over a possible link between MMR and autism had been issued before.
In 1996, an American immunologist and professor of medicine, Sudhir Gupta, told the National Autism Association of Chicago that there was a striking association between MMR and the onset of behavioural problems in all children he investigated for regressive autism (where the child suddenly loses skills after previously normal development).
And in 1998, American researcher Dr H. Hugh Fudenberg noted that 15 autistic children had developed their symptoms within a week of MMR immunisation.
Although he said he could not prove an association with MMR, he nevertheless recommended that immunisation with live viruses should be delayed until at least three years of age - because children's immune systems were still not fully developed at 15 months, the usual time of MMR jabs.
But what about the other side of the coin - bowel problems? If anyone had been alert, there had been warnings signs about these, too, in the MMR safety trials years before.
One of these studies by Dr Joseph Stokes, published in 1971, looked at the effect of the vaccine on children in Philadelphia, Costa Rica and San Salvador.
It concluded the vaccine was safe, with the most important clinical reaction being 'mild fever in a portion of the children'.
However, buried in the report was a table which showed that the Philadelphia children who were vaccinated were more than four times as likely to develop gastroenteritis as those who were not. Could this be proof that the jab was linked to gut problems?
The confusing thing was that there was no such correlation among the children from Costa Rica and San Salvador. In a paper they published in 2000, called Through A Glass Darkly, Wakefield and his colleague Dr Scott Montgomery suggested an answer.
They speculated that the absence of any rise in gastroenteritis in the Latin American children might be due to the fact that gut problems were much more prevalent in developing countries, swamping any possible effect from MMR.
In Philadelphia, however, where gastroenteritis was not so common, the increased incidence after MMR was highly significant - and extremely ominous.
Through A Glass Darkly mounted a long and detailed onslaught on the original MMR safety trials, which it claimed had been wholly inadequate. It was accompanied by four reviews of its findings by other experts; none disagreed with the findings.
One assessor, Dr Peter Fletcher, concluded that even on an 'extremely generous' assessment, the evidence for MMR's safety had always been 'very thin'. 'Being realistic,' he said, 'there were too few patients followed up for insufficient time. Caution should have ruled the day. The granting of a product licence was premature.'
The paper caused a storm, and the establishment counter-attacked with great force.
The Medicines Control Agency, the body responsible for vaccine safety, published a savage critique that claimed that Wakefield and Montgomery had been selective in their evidence, misrepresented certain studies and got others wrong.
Nevertheless, the researchers were backed up by one of the world's foremost epidemiologists, the American professor Walter Spitzer, who said that he couldn't find any reliable MMR safety data in any published report.
- Part three 11/3/2003
Daily Mail In part three of Melanie Phillips' investigation we look at the evidence surround the safety of the MMR jab.
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/health/article-171346/MMR--truth-revealed.html
Another example of such distortion involves the Committee on the Safety of Medicines (CSM). In 1999, the committee sent questionnaires to parents who were suing the drug companies over the alleged damage to their children from MMR, and to their doctors.
Only some questionnaires were returned, and the Committee whittled this number down even further. It decided that the quality of the information was extremely variable, and insufficient to permit meaningful analysis.
The Committee said it could find nothing that gave it 'cause for concern about the safety of MMR vaccines'. Nevertheless, 'it was impossible to prove or refute the suggested associations between MMR vaccine and autism or IBD (irritable bowel disorder)'.
In other words, given the available evidence, the Committee was saying that the question was still open.
Yet in January 2001, the Department of Health issued a press release after a 'further review' quoting the Committee's chairman, Professor Alasdair Breckenridge, as saying: 'MMR vaccine is very safe. There is no question mark whatever over its licensing.'
The Chief Medical Officer, Professor Liam Donaldson, was equally categorical.
'MMR remains the safest way to protect our children,' he said. 'Concerns that have been raised relating to autism and Crohn's disease are considered by the CSM and other expert bodies nationally and internationally to have been refuted.'
But they hadn't been. Indeed, the Committee on the Safety of Medicines had expressly said it was impossible to refute them.
The way in which such absence of evidence has been persistently misrepresented as proof that all is well led Dr Peter Fletcher, a former assessor to the committee, to protest in a letter to a clinical periodical.
He wrote: 'The readers of this journal may ponder the curious turn of events which has now led to the Department of Health, the Medicines Control Agency, the Committee on Safety of Medicines and other eminent bodies citing negative studies as absolute evidence of safety.'
The most protracted and bitter battle, however, took place over a review of autism research by the Medical Research Council. This was begun after the then Health Minister, Tessa Jowell, met Mr Wakefield and the parents back in 1997.
The Medical Research Council first set up an ad hoc committee. According to one of its members, autism specialist Dr Ken Aitken, this concluded that there was insufficient evidence to say there 'We agreed it needed more investigation,' he said, 'but there was not sufficient evidence to change the policy. But Sir Kenneth Calman, the then Chief Medical Officer, then issued a press release at variance with this conclusion, in which he said there was no problem.'
Dr Aitken believes that Sir Kenneth's statement was bound to mislead the public. 'I was concerned that Andrew Wakefield had been given very short shrift,' he says.
The Medical Research Council then set up a bigger review which became mired in argument between the experts and the lay members.
The review had been originally set up expressly in response to Wakefield's concerns. Yet lay member Rosemary Kessick, whose son William has suffered so badly since his MMR jab, says there was an immediate volteface.
The first thing we were told was that MMR was not in the committee's remit. On the contrary, their premise was, if MMR wasn't causing autism, then what was?'
This is quite remarkable. The committee's eventual report discussed selective evidence about MMR in a show of objective analysis - yet, in truth, it had ruled it out from the start.
The main dispute, however, arose over a perceived conflict of interest. A number of expert members on the Medical Research Council's panel turned out to be advisers to the drug companies defending the law suit being brought against them by the parents.
As far as Rosemary Kessick was concerned, this turned the review into a farce. 'I didn't see how this could possibly be independent,' she said.
According to the MRC's research strategy manager, Dr Peter Dukes, the panel responded to the row by bringing on additional members. 'In the end, there was a broad consensus by the lay group that the process was fair,' he said.
Mrs Kessick does not agree, and insists that the lay members were excluded from the decisionmaking.
'They said the lay members would only be observers and not contribute to the final report,' she said. 'It was outrageous.'
The final report itself is a notably equivocal document. Having found flaws in a number of the studies it considered, the MRC panel concluded that 'the current epidemiological evidence does not support the proposed link' of MMR to autism.
However, an earlier draft of the report - which I have read - put a rather different slant on the panel's conclusions.
- Part four 11/3/2003
The history of MMR's safety
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/health/article-171347/The-history-MMRs-safety.html
In the final part of today's investigation into the MMR vaccine, Melanie Phillips examines the history of the jab's safety in Britain.
Referring to the reviews by the MRC and the Institute of Medicine, as well as by the American Academy of Paediatrics and the Irish Department of Health and Children, the draft observed that these had unanimously concluded that a causal link between MMR and autism was 'neither proven nor disproven'.
The draft also agreed with the finding of these studies that, although the epidemiological evidence did not support the proposed link, it 'could not exclude the possibility that a very small number of children are affected differently from the large majority'.
It added that 'more extensive research would be necessary to provide the consistency and biological plausibility required to establish a causal link between viral infections and autism'.
In other words, in its early draft, the Medical Research Council concluded that the jury was still out on a link between MMR and autism, and more research was needed.
By the final, published version, this conclusion had vanished.
Many believe the only way to resolve this whole controversy is through fresh, undisputed clinical research.
'We don't think any more epidemiological studies have any purpose,' says Judith Barnard of the National Autism Society. 'They are a very blunt tool and do not pick up very rare occurrences.
'Scientists funded by the statutory agencies are firmly of the belief that Wakefield's studies are bad science, so we want to see more research by other people. And not, as the Medical Research Council is now doing, looking at more patient records, but more physiological studies.'
Since the Medical Research Council funds such studies, I asked its strategy manager, Dr Dukes, why this wasn't being done. 'We have not received any specific proposals to look at the effects of MMR,' he said. 'No scientists have approached us.'
But I have spoken to one highly regarded autism researcher who was one of a group that did offer the MRC precisely such a proposal, but which was unaccountably turned down flat. And this researcher says there have been others.
Now the Government has given the National Institute for Biological Standards and Control ?300,000 to try to replicate Wakefield's research.
But the scientist who heads the institute, Dr Phil Minor, is being paid to advise GlaxoSmithKline, makers of the MMR vaccine, in the forthcoming lawsuit.
And one of his colleagues, Dr Mohammed Afzal, leader of the Institute's MMR programme, has been giving free legal advice to law firms representing the companies involved in the case.
This may be one reason why the Government has serious problems in regaining public confidence in the safety of MMR.
Parliamentary answers two years ago listed six members of the Joint Committee for Vaccination and Immunisation, and seven members of the Committee on the Safety of Medicines, who had declared financial or other interests in the drug companies involved.
According to parent David Thrower, more recent data issued by the Committee on the Safety of Medicines reveals that 19 members of these two committees now have such interests.
Perhaps the greatest cause for concern lies in the history of MMR in Britain.
In 1992, the particular type of MMR being used was withdrawn, as it was discovered that the Urabe strain of mumps vaccine in the mix was causing an alarming amount of aseptic meningitis, a disease that can kill infants.
The Department of Health then switched to an alternative MMR vaccine made by a different manufacturer.
But it had known of concerns about Urabe before it first introduced that vaccine in 1989.
Months previously, Canada had suspended its use of the Urabestrain MMR after discovering the risk of aseptic meningitis, and switched to an alternative vaccine. However, the Department of Health went ahead nevertheless and introduced it into the UK.
Dr Elizabeth Miller, head of the vaccines division of the Public Health Laboratory Service, was involved in eventually identifying the Urabe risk in Britain.
Although the Department of Health knew about the Canadian evidence before it introduced the Urabe vaccine here, she said, the risk was considered low, at one in every 100,000 doses. It was also unclear at the time, she said, whether the alternative vaccine posed a similar risk.
Nevertheless, she said, the department identified Urabestrain MMR as something for which surveillance needed to be introduced. So paediatricians had to complete a card every month saying whether there had been any adverse reactions.
This surveillance ran for two to three years. A few cases of aseptic meningitis were reported, but the apparent risk worked out at about one in 250,000 - even rarer than the reports from Canada.
However, among these cases, there appeared to be a cluster in Nottinghamshire where the risk was much higher. So Dr Miller conducted a study identifying every case of aseptic meningitis, regardless of whether they showed up in the surveillance reports.
'We linked this to the vaccine records and found many cases of aseptic meningitis linked to the vaccine that had not been picked up,' she said.
As a result, in 1992, Urabestrain MMR was suddenly withdrawn in the UK and replaced with the type of MMR vaccine used today. The revelation of this d?bacle poses some extremely urgent questions. Why did the department introduce Urabe- strain MMR, knowing there to be a question mark over its safety? Was this not tantamount to gambling with the health of Britain's children?
And what price the Government's vaccine safety surveillance when it failed, for two to three years, to detect the risk eventually picked up by Dr Miller?
How can we be sure there are no other adverse effects from the current vaccine, when doctors accept that the normal surveillance system fails to unearth most adverse reactions?
Above all, how can we trust the Department of Health's assurances that MMR is safe, when the original vaccine safety trials failed to spot the risk of aseptic meningitis from the Urabe- strain mumps component?
The Government says repeatedly that MMR is the safest way to protect our children. But why should we trust them when they got it so badly wrong before?
More articles from Melanie Phillips which look at the extraordinary way in which warnings about MMR have been brushed aside, and how Andrew Wakefield and his fellow researchers have refused to be silenced.
'..Award-winning writer Melanie Phillips continues her expos? of the links between MMR manufacturers and key government aides....'
- This baby suffered brain damage and epilepsy after the MMR jab. So why did doctors ignore warnings that it might be unsafe? mmr: THE TRUTH By MELANIE PHILLIPS, Daily Mail 12/3/2003
- International evidence against MMR by MELANIE PHILLIPS, Daily Mail 12/3/2003
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/health/article-171540/International-evidence-MMR.html
'...Dr Arthur Krigsman, a gastroenterologist from New York, revealed that he had evaluated 43 autistic children after a colleague observed a large proportion of autistic patients suffering from chronic, unexplained gut symptoms....'
- ARE WE FACING AN AUTISM EPIDEMIC? By MELANIE PHILLIPS, Daily Mail 13/3/2003
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/debate/columnists/article-229995/ARE-WE-FACING-AN-AUTISM-EPIDEMIC.html
'...ACCORDING to the medical establishment, the whole idea is a nonsense. The suggestion that a new autistic bowel disease is now affecting large numbers of children who were previously normal until they were vaccinated with MMR is simply not borne out by the evidence....'
- MMR: the true facts by MELANIE PHILLIPS, Daily Mail 16/3/2003
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/health/article-171779/MMR-true-facts.html
'....She examines claims that the vaccine has triggered an epidemic of autism in our children - and how the evidence is piling up that official complacency is sorely misplaced....'
- New Questions on MMR by Jenny Hope and James Chapman, Daily Mail 11/3/2003
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/health/article-171313/New-questions-MMR.html
'...Disturbing questions about the the MMR jab have been exposed by Daily Mail writer Melanie Phillips. She found links between vaccine manufacturers and key government advisers...'