The California Homeopath
Journal of the California Homeopathic Medical Society

This hysteria was putting a good family in danger. If left unchecked the groundless chatter about murder could grow like a weed, spreading through the community, unsettling people, making them question one of the fundamental pillars of the new society (Soviet Union 1953): there is no crime.

Tom Rob Smith. Child 44. Pocket Books UK, Simon & Schuster, 2008

Since the rising count of autism began in the late 1980s, newspaper coverage of autism has principally related to 'an interesting' but esoteric illness, posing inevitable questions about perspective and interpretation. While the story of an autistic child, portrayed as an unhappy genetic accident, might pull on reader's heartstrings, a story that specifically blames vaccine manufacturers for an uncontrollable child with regressive autism is a different matter.

Over the last twenty years few press articles in Britain have attempted to join up the dots between mercury, measles virus, nutrition or, for that matter, any other environmental challenges and autism spectrum disorders (ASD). There seems to have been a natural reluctance amongst journalists and commentators to investigate rising rates of autism within any environmental context.[1] The story of Dr Andrew Wakefield, the serious white coated research doctor who since the mid 1990s, has been at the heart of the confrontation between the parents of vaccine damaged children, the vaccine industry and the government in Britain, has had an intermittent airing, while the story of the maverick Dr Wakefield challenging the establishment with cheated science has had a more regular audience. Nothing apparently, however, completely explains the descent of the vaccine-autism story into the present media silence that it now inhabits. This article explores that silence.

In 1988 three brands of MMR were launched in England, in 1992 two of these brands which containing the Urabe mumps viral strain were withdrawn following reports of adverse reactions of meningitis in Britain, Canada, Japan. There was next to no media coverage of the government's  withdrawal or of the large number of British children adversely affected by these two brands. The government played it very low- key intimating that British researchers and therefore Government labs, had grasped this nettle very quickly and saved large numbers of children from 'mild' adverse reactions.[2]

The truth, however, was quite different. Britain stopped prescribing Urabe containing vaccines two years after the government heard of problems from Queen's Medical Centre research in Nottingham. The adverse effects were severe, with the governments own figures suggesting that 20,000 babies and children had suffered adverse reactions.[3]^,[4] None of the parents of these children, affected by the two Urabe mumps strain vaccines have been compensated by the British government. In fact, a clear sign that the government and the pharmaceutical companies had seized the moral low-was that as soon as the Urabe strain mumps vaccine was taken off the market in Britain it was sold by GlaxoSmithKline to Argentina, Chile, Haiti, Honduras and Lebanon.[5]

By Martin Walker

Martin Walker has been a campaigner, a political poster artist and a writer for most of his adult life. His twelve books and large number of posters reflect his involvement in campaigns since the early seventies. Before 1993, he was mainly involved in campaigns over wrongful arrest and imprisonment but in 1990 began investigating pharmaceutical funded corporate lobby groups. His 1993 book Dirty Medicine: Science Big Business and the assault on natural health care, is considered ground-breaking by many who have followed the growth and development of these pro-pharmaceutical anti-alternative health lobbies. For five years between 2005 and 2010 he worked with the parents of children damaged by the MMR vaccine who supported Dr Andrew Wakefield in his trumped-up three year trumped-up trial before the UK General Medical Council. His latest book Dirty Medicine: The Handbook was published in May 201. Information about all his books and essays can be found on his web site: www.SlingshotPublications.com.

Martin's photo by Nigel Luckhurst

More Featured Articles