Video transcripts: Dr Wakefield - In His own words

January 6, 2011

full thing

http://whale.to/vaccine/wakefield23.html

2010 April

Question 1:

Part 1

Why have you been called to the GMC ?

Part 2 Access

to Justice

Part 3

Professor Zuckerman Forgets

Part 4

Dr Armstrong and the BMA

Part 5: The

Whistle-blower

Part 6

Government liability

Question 2: Conflicts of Interest and Dishonesty?

Question 3: Dr Salisbury calls the the GMC !

Question 1:

Part 1 Why

have you been called to the

GMC ?

Why is this hearing being held at all in front of the

regulatory body of the UK, and who bought the case and what is the

case? The case, it seems, on the face of it, was brought by a

single complaint by a

freelance

journalist who had been working for the Sunday Times, and others, and

had been trying to uncover some misdemeanour on our behalf at the Royal

free in the investigation of children with regressive autism, with bowel

problems, many of the parents of whom said their children regressed after

the Measles, Mumps, Rubella vaccine.

And I will just take you back, because when I began this work in 1995

parents approached me and said-- my child developed perfectly normally,

they had their MMR vaccine, I wasn't anti-vaccine, I took them along,

they had their vaccine according to the routine schedule and then the

lights went out, eyes glazed over, they lost speech, they lost

interaction, they stopped playing with their siblings, they never smiled,

they were grizzly, and eventually having lost skills and become mute and

self injurious, they were diagnosed with autism or atypical autism.

And I said, I am terribly sorry, I know nothing about autism, how can I

possibly help, and they said, well, my child has terrible bowel problems,

diarrhoea, pain, I know they are in pain, they can't tell me they are in

pain because they have lost the ability to speak, but I know they are in

pain, my instinct as a mother tells me my child is in pain, they are

screaming, they are drawing their knees up to their chest, particularly

bad when they have their bowel opened. Losing weight, failing to

thrive, and the doctor says your child is autistic, that is just the way

it is.

Well, that is not just the way it is, that is not what autism is, these

are children who are sick, who are clearly unwell. So we put the

autism to one side and we said how do we manage these children if they

had these symptoms and they were developmentally normal and we would

investigate? And so we decided we would, over the course of many

months, we put together a protocol, a clinical protocol, for the

investigation of these children. What investigations do these

children need in order for us to unearth the origins of their problem,

for example, do we do a colonoscopy to investigate their bowel problems,

are the bowel problems linked to the behaviour? Because the parents

were reporting us--when my child's bowel is bad, when they are in pain,

their behaviour is terrible, they can't concentrate, they are at their

worst autistically, and their autistic mannerisms get worse when their

intestine is bad and gets better when their intestine improves, and this

was intriguing to us as gastroenterologists because we had seen this

before in other gastrointestinal diseases.

Gastrointestinal inflammable diseases like Celiac disease, or bacterial

overgrowth when you lose a lot of your small intestinal, and you are just

left with a little bit behind where bowel bacteria overgrowth leads to

deterioration in behaviour, what is called encephalopathy, and often even

progressing to coma, and the way you treat that is to treat the bowel,

get rid of the bugs in the bowel and the behaviour improves. So we

had seen it before, this gut-brain link, something in the bowel affecting

the brain, and treating the bowel helping the brain, so why was this

different? Was this a similar process? Was, for

example, some form of intoxication, some bacterial by-product coming from

the intestine and injuring the brain, rather like drinking alcohol, you

drink alcohol, it gets to the brain, injures the brain, affects the

brain, affects behaviour, and so this was no different, it is not

difficult, it is not rocket science, very very straightforward.

Something going on in the gut primarily, and injures the brain, so this

was an entirely reasonable idea to look at.

The other thing is these children had regressed in the face of a viral

insult, they had been given a live viral vaccine, they had been given

viruses which were known to be able to infect the brain and cause

inflammation in the brain, for example autism. So it was entirely

appropriate that they would undergo a series of investigations, in other

words could we find in a laboratory setting evidence of measles virus in

the inflamed intestine. Research. So combining as we should

do in an academic institute like the Royal Free, clinical investigation

with research. And we progressed through the process thereby

refining the clinical investigation. This is necessary, that isn't,

this is telling us something, this isn't, out that goes, and then

refining the process, so we were getting the maximum amount of

information from investigating these children for the minimum

inconvenience and risk to the child, and that is just good

medicine.

So during this process I was approached by some lawyers who were acting

on behalf of these children, investigating the parental claim that their

child had regressed, disappeared, become autistic after a vaccine.

And they said to me, would you help us? You have an interest in

Crohn's disease and measles virus, measles vaccine. We are now

seeing these new children, what do you think, can you help us in this

process? And I thought about it long and hard, and I decided that I

would, and I later wrote to my colleagues explaining my reason for doing

so, and my feeling was this, it was very straightforward.

Vaccination is designed for the greater good, to protect the majority and

it does so at the expense of a minority, and that minority of children

are those that are damaged by the vaccine, and we don't know the size of

the number because it has never been investigated properly, but

nonetheless, even if you accept that is a permissible ethical approach,

that we can protect the majority at the expense of the minority, then

that minority are a group of children who have paid the price for

protecting the rest of society, and therefore society has an absolute

moral and ethical obligation to care for those children for the rest of

their lives, period. That is it, there is no escaping that moral

imperative, and yet to acknowledge those children in a public health

setting is to raise doubts about the safety of vaccines and therefore it

is much better to put them in a corner and forget about them, to pretend

they simply don't exist.

That is what had happened to these children. The studies that had

been designed to look at safety had been designed in such a way as they

would never capture these children, nor did anyone want to capture them,

nor was anyone interested in the parents story when they said my child

has regressed after a vaccine. They were just put in a corner, told

it couldn't happen and never investigated, and that was absolutely

unacceptable.

Part 2 Access to

Justice

So, the other thing that happened, around the same time, is a

parent called me, she is the mother of two autistic children from the

Midlands, and she was an older parent, and she had a husband who was

older than she was. He was infirm and she herself had

arthritis. And she called me one day and she said, doctor Wakefield

please don't be judgmental, don't judge me harshly she said, but when I

die, I am taking my children with me, and I thought long and hard about

that, and I wasn't in any way judgmental, in fact quite the opposite, I

was struck.

She said to me, Dr Wakefield, no one else cares about my children, I am

the only person who loves them and when I die or become infirm to the

extent that I can no longer care for them, they are going to be lost,

they are going to be on the street and they are going to die on the

street because the world doesn't care. And she was right, she was

absolutely right, there was nothing for these children, and you will know

that in the Thatcher era all the long stay institutions, the old asylums

were closed down and turned into luxury apartments and there is nothing

left. It is care in the community, what does that mean? It

just means shoving people with long term mental disabilities out into the

community where they can injure themselves or injure other people, or

whatever. Who knows, who follows them, who cares? And that

was the future for these children, so, I decided at that point that I

would help the lawyers, because if nothing else I was in a position to

look at this scientifically, objectively and provide an answer that

would, or would not take this story forward, but would nonetheless give

these children access to the due process of justice, and that is what

they had been denied.

So it was about access to justice and surely that cannot be denied

anyone, you would think, in a civilised society. So the lawyers

asked me what we should do, how would you go about in a scientific

context, taking this to the next step, determining whether this temporal

association that the mother has made between a child's exposure to this

vaccine and regression, how would you then further link that if possible

to the virus, and I said the bowel disease that we have seen in these

children and the Crohn's disease looks like an infectious disease and you

would look for evidence of the virus in sites of infection or obvious

swelling of the lymph glands, there is one site in the intestine, it is

like swelling of the tonsils when you get a sore throat, you would look

in the tonsil for the organism that was causing it. So if you have

got swelling of the lymph glands in the intestine, look in there for the

evidence of the virus, and measles virus, and measles was a virus

that was known to cause this kind of swelling of the intestinal lymph

glands. So it made logical sense to look in those areas and so we

set up a study.

I was asked to design a study that would take this to that level, that we

would get funding from the Legal Aid Board (LAB), hypothetically, and

then we would look for evidence of the virus in the intestine, and after

a series of exchanges, and a protocol was prepared, we received

acknowledgement of funding form the LAB to conduct that study. It

is was negative it was negative, if it was positive it was positive,

either way it got published. It was not designed to produce a

particular answer, it was just designed to produce an answer, is the

virus there, or not? It didn't make it causation but it was a

piece, a crucial piece of the jigsaw that took it to the next

level.

Part 3

Professor Zuckerman Forgets

[

Zuckerman]

Interestingly, the Dean of the medical school, Prof Ari Zuckerman, world

renowned virologist, expert in Hepatitis B, worked very closely with the

WHO, was deeply involved with hepatitis B vaccination, a great advocate

of hepatitis B vaccination, different story, but nonetheless, there he

was in the general apparatchik of the vaccine advocates. And he

said to me that he had been contacted by the

Department

of Health and a certain members of the

Royal College of

Child Health who had made him aware of this funding, and I said yes,

this is a grant we got from them and perfectly respectable, and we are

conducting the science, and he said there was a conflict of interest, a

clear conflict of interest, and I couldn't understand it, why?

Why was there a conflict of interest? I had no conflict of

interest, I was asked to take this grant to conduct a piece of science

and give an answer. That wasn't a conflict of interest. The

funding would be disclosed in the paper that wrote up the science, the

funding came from the Legal Aid Board, but beyond that where was the

conflict? Anyway, I wrote back to him and said your suggestion that

there is a conflict of interest has exercised my mind greatly over the

last several months and I cannot see where it lies, and i laid out for

him the context of my discussions with the lawyers and the work that was

to be done, and he wrote back to me and couldn't precisely define what

the conflict was, but talked about if a legal action was anticipated, and

preliminary discussions had already taken place then there was a

conflict, and it didn't really make a lot of sense to me.

I wrote back to him again and reiterated that we had been asked to do a

piece of science that wasn't seeking a particular answer. I

wouldn't have got involved in the first place if there was any effort of

coercion or demanding that......we own the data, the lawyers didn't own

it. We would do what we felt was scientifically appropriate, and I

had every faith in the lawyers, they seemed very concerned, genuinely

concerned about these children, they weren't in any way ambulance chasers

but nonetheless there was some clear problem for the Dean in this, and he

ultimately refused to take the money, and I said send it back, we don't

want it, if you are not going to let us do this, we won't do it.

Anyway, one of my colleagues said we will put it into an account at the

hospital, a charitable account...and see if that is OK. So we did,

now, interestingly the Dean has just appeared as a witness on behalf of

the prosecution at the GMC. Professor Ari Zuckerman, now 7 years

retired and clearly deeply frustrated that he should be dragged out of

retirement to have to give his evidence in this case, but nonetheless his

first foray was to say, yes, when this money was transferred by the

accountant of the Royal Free Medical School it was too late, I didn't

know about it, it had already happened, I couldn't stop it.

It is interesting that he actually signed the cheque for the

transfer. Surprising that, given the fact that it had already

happened by the time he knew about it, nonetheless an interval of 11

years can cloud ones mind, memory of things. There we are.

But that was the first error he made.

Part 4 Dr

Armstrong and the BMA

What he disclosed, interestingly, to me during that period was

that he had written to the ethics committee of the British Medial

Association (BMA), to take their advice, how to deal with this perplexing

issue that was causing him concern about conflicts of interest that has

was really unable to articulate to me. So he wrote to Dr Armstrong

at the BMA ethics committee to ask their opinion, and in it unbeknown to

me at the time, he had said he had been contacted by the Department of

Health who said to him that the government stood to be sued by the

parents of children affected by MMR or apparently affected by MMR

vaccine, and that this to him was a conflict of interest. That

government was going to be sued.

Do you understand, I came into this with the lawyers believing the case

was against the vaccine manufacturers, the government didn't even come

into it, but he was clearly under the impression that the government were

going to be sued. He also said that this may be embarrassing for

the medical school. Now, we were never party to the ultimate

response of Dr Armstrong of the BMA. We were never told about

it. All we did when he wrote back to me is to say you will know

that I have taken advice on this matter from the BMA and leave it that,

as though the BMA had ruled completely against it.

When in fact we got the documents, as we did do as part of the disclosure

for the GMC, there it was, the letter from Dr Armstrong, not only

endorsing the fact this study could and should be done because it was

morally and ethically proper that it should be done, but that not to do

it because it was embarrassing to an institute or because it meant the

government might be sued was not a sound moral argument. His

words.

So in other words the BMA ethics committee said this is fine. It

said actions of this kind or research of this kind is often funded by a

group with a particular interest. Of course they are, the Multiple

Sclerosis Society funds research for MS in the hope that it can make

patients better. So here we have another group of people with a

vested interest funding a piece of research. As long as it is

ethical, and as long as it is conducted in a way that it is published,

whether it is positive or negative, then that is fine.

Nonetheless Prof Zuckerman did not get the answer he wanted. He

never disclosed that to us, he just kept beating us over the head with

the certain knowledge that he had contacted the BMA and they had given

him an opinion.

Part 5: The

Whistle-blower

....................Dr Alistair who was from the

ish dept of health, and Dr had been seconded onto the

JCVI, effectively

from Canada, and he had been brought in, at least in part, to advise on

the introduction of MMR vaccine. The experience in Canada was that

they introduced a vaccine which contained a mumps component made up of a

strain of the vaccine called Urabe, which was originally generated in

Japan and they had run into problems with this vaccine. It produced

meningitis in children (1:43). the mumps virus was identified in

the brain of the children and the vaccine was pulled in Canada, it was

pulled, it was stopped in 1997 (1:53), nonetheless this was the vaccine

that was intended to be introduced into the UK a year later in

1988.

They changed the name, but the vaccine was identical, so it had gone from

Trivirix to

Pluserix

in the UK, an identical vaccine that had already been withdrawn for

safety reasons, in Canada.

Now advised the

JCVI not to

introduce this vaccine because it was not safe. He was

overruled. He said if you are going to introduce it then you should

have active surveillance. That is doctors or people going out and

asking doctors--have you seen and cases of the following in the past

month, not waiting for doctors to spontaneously report. Spontaneous

reporting picks up 1-2% of those adverse reactions.....It is totally

inadequate but they were totally overruled, not active surveillance

(3:02). So they were going to intro a vaccine that has been

withdrawn in other countries, known to be unsafe and they were going to

have no active surveillance (3:08) for possible adverse events in this

country. Now this was done, he said, for competitive pricing

reasons. The strain of the vaccine that contained the dangerous

mumps component was approx. 1/4 the price of the American MMRII made by

Merck. There had been no reports of meningitis using the Merck

vaccine which contained a strain of mumps called Jeryl Lynn....So what we

had was a cheaper vaccine that was known to be dangerous (3:47), so when

the vaccines were licensed or the proposal to licence these vaccines, the

JCVI or members of that committee (4:0) went to

Kline Beecham

(SKB) and said we want your vaccine. SKB said we are not happy

about it because this has already been withdrawn in Canada, it has got

this mumps component in it which is dodgy

They said if we are going to do it then we want an indemnity, we want

indemnity from prosecution for damage to children on the basis (4:27) of

the receipt of the vaccine, and it appears that indemnity was granted,

and told us about this (4:33), and he said at the meeting, the

girl there from SKB said we are immunising the children and the

government is immunising us.

So the vaccine was produced, licensed, given, and cases of meningitis

started to appear. they were recorded and documented in the minutes

of the JCVI which are now available on line and have been obtained by us

as part of our investigation. More and more cases began to be

reported, the ish dept' withdrew this vax, certain health areas

rejected the Urabe containing vaccine but still the

JCVI continued

with it. There was no withdrawal of this vaccine until finally a

study was grudgingly done in Nottingham where they found a much higher

risk of meningitis with this vaccine (5:33) than had previously been

predicted by passive surveillance, and the vaccine was withdrawn

overnight, and it was only withdrawn overnight because it was leaked to

the press.

It appeared in a newspaper and suddenly the vaccine was pulled. So

a dangerous vaccine, a knowingly dangerous vaccine was introduced and

ultimately proven to be dangerous and had to be withdrawn (6:00) in

1992.

Part 6

Government liability

The two of the three vaccine brands that were introduced in

1988 had to be withdrawn for safety reasons and yet Dr

Salisbury

in his statement to the

GMC sums up by

saying this is a vaccine with an exemplary safety record. Well, if

that is his idea of an excellent safety record then we have a very

different perception he and I of vaccine safety. And so we come

full circle now because it turns out the Dean was right.

Ari

Zuckerman was right. Based upon the information he got, he says

(probably from Dr Salisbury way back when these parents started coming to

us in 1996/7), that it was the government that was going to be

sued.

I thought it was going to be the drug companies, but it wasn't. Why

was it the government? Because the government had given the drug

companies an indemnity against harm and so this is why we are here, this

is what this is all about (1:19), this is what this whole GMC affair and

effort to descredit doctors questioning the safety of the MMR vaccine has

come about because of an indemnity given to the drug companies all those

years ago for the introduction of an unsafe vaccine by perhaps just a few

members of the department of Health or recommended by the Dept of Health

to the Government such that a vaccine (1:53) was introduced and when you

ask now, and people have asked, was there an indemnity? is there an

indemnity? the answer is catagorically, from Salisbury, time

and time again, there was no indemnity (2:07), no letter of comfort,

nothing at all....and yet in the minutes of the

JCVI, as late on

in this story as 1997, there is an entry there that says (it talks about

the various brands of vaccine that are available)

SKB continued to sell

the Urabe strain without liablity (2:39), there it is, in black and white

in their own document.

I have been every which way around that statement and cannot reconcile it

to anything else other than that there was and remains an indemnity, so I

am afraid (3:00) that this is really the origins of this whole process

and the hope that my colleagues and I be discredited before this

information ever becomes public, and in an effort to protect that

original decision, that original flawed decision and the consequences

that have flowed from it, then we find ourselves in this position, and

that is fine but it is not going to stop the truth coming out, and you

would think under those circumstances having withdrawn this vaccine

(3:37) in Australia, Canada and Japan, and the UK that that would be it,

they would get rid of it, because it is not safe, but no (3:46) they go

on making it, and what do they do with it, they ship it out to the third

world, and there was a mass vaccine campaign in Brazil in the 90's where

they gave the great majority of Brazilian children a re-vaccination with

MMR, during a very short space of time, with the Urabe containing

vaccine, which they knew to be dangerous, which produced an epidemic of

meningitis (4:16), a huge peak in the numbers of cases, and there was a

paper written about it after, and one of the points in the discussion in

the paper was perhaps it was not a good idea, in effect, to do mass

vaccination campaigns because it produced the true incidence of side

effects to a vaccine.

Well, who wrote that, who in God's name wrote that? So this is, if

you like, the morality of the people we are dealing with. Why is

that vax even on the shelf? Why is it being sold at cut rate price

to third world countries? What is the thinking behind this?

Because it is certainly not a moral imperative, it must be a commercial

one. So that's why we are here and that is why we will remain here,

and continue to fight this (5:12) kind of thing, because you can't

treat people as expendable. You can't damage them and put them to

one side. Adolph Hitler in Mein Kampf once wrote the greater truth

excludes the lesser truth. In the world or mind of people like

Adolph Hitler and that kind of thinking failed in the 1940s and it is

going to fail now. You cannot treat people in a civilised society

as expendable.

Yes, there may be an argument for a vaccine programme that protects the

greater good but that does not mean that you can render those who are

damaged, just consign them to the dustcart because they are an

inconvenience, or their (6:08) mere presence undermines public

confidence, better to keep them hidden out the way and there are too many

of these children now, they won't be hidden away, and parents are getting

very very angry, and they have every right to be angry, and the truth is

going to come out, and it is going to be a very very painful truth when

it does come out.

The tragedy is, it is going to damage public confidence in vaccine policy

across the board because people are going to say we don't believe you any

more, we don't trust you, you lied to us and when that happens all

vaccination policy is compromised, the whole pillar of public health

comes tumbling down and a lot of trouble is going to ensue as you are

going to deal with a population who are not protected from these

infections and we are going to run into big problems, and that

responsibility for that lays at the door of the public health figures and

their commercial partners who have allowed this to happen.

Question

2: Conflicts of Interest and Dishonesty?

There have been some slightly difficult moments about

differences of opinion, for example with Horton over conflicts of

interests...the Lancet statement on conflict is: 'anything that would

embarrass you if it were later disclosed', and my involvement with the

Legal Aid Board didn't embarrass me at all, and it wasn't relevant, in my

opinion, to disclose it in the Lancet paper because they didn't fund any

of the Lancet paper, they funded a subsequent virological study, as was

always intended, but it had been misrepresented in the media that they

had funded the Lancet study, and it wasn't disclosed, and this was the

perception Horton originally had, and when I was asked about this

by him way back in 2004 I said, no, they didn't fund the study at all,

they funded a separate study, and he said 'well in that case it could be

perceived as a potential conflict of interest', and I said where did that

come from?

The statement as I read it in the Lancet, the requirement is to 'disclose

things that might embarrass you if they emerge later'. And it was

interesting because within that document, which was self contained,

anyone writing a paper for the Lancet would just need to read that and

the actual statement is the test of conflict of interest in the Lancet is

an easy one, 'anything that would embarrass you', and so you don't go

beyond that, it is a self contained document, why would you go any

further, but there is a website flagged up in there where you can go and

there is a more broader description of conflict of interest there which

does include potential or perceived conflicts of interest, which no one

ever went to. Why would you do it? You have got it in front

of you. Now there is a very big difference. Anything that

would embarrass you is the active move, OK, it is what would embarrass

me, so I can think what would embarrass me, and I can make a decision

about that.

What others might perceive to be a conflict of interest is myriad, it

goes on forever. You have to put yourself in the third person and

think what might someone else with their various views and biases

construe to be a conflict of interest, and that is massive, where does

that end?

So that is a huge conceptual leap in terms as to what you would disclose,

and there was no formal way for doing it at the time. Now you have

a document where you fill in the boxes, saying no shares, no this, no

that. That is very straight foreword, but in those days it wasn't,

it was highly ambiguous, and it was always my intention, and always was

disclosed, when there was a direct funding for a study, a grant giving

body, or in this case the Legal Aid Board, and so in the viral study it

was disclosed, 'this study was supported in part by the Legal Aid Board,

and Dr Wakefield is acting as an expert in the MMR litigation', that is

an easy one as it goes, but in the Lancet study I felt no need to

disclose it at all, and neither did any of my colleagues who knew that I

was involved with the Legal aid Board on behalf of some of these

children.

So that was a difficult moment but it was a difference of opinion, he

thought I should have disclosed it. I felt at the time that I

didn't, now in retrospect, having seen this new document about perceived

conflict I can see that it should have been disclosed, but there was no

dishonesty, and he was good enough to say there was no intent to deceive,

'when Dr Wakefield was asked about it he was entirely open, he said yes

there was this grant'. We got into an argument and debate about

what was or wasn't a conflict of interest, but there was absolutely no

intent to deceive and the charge is dishonesty, so he was extremely

helpful in this as much he said, no this was not dishonest, this was a

genuine difference of opinion, and so that then largely

resolved.

Question 3: Dr Salisbury calls the the

GMC

!

Where does it leave the GMC if you are not guilty?

Very good question on a very broad front. They have some tough

decisions to make. One on the level of the case itself, and have

they mis-instructed their experts, are they going to have to retrench in

a different set of charges. They have to take time to structure

those charges and get a response from their experts. Are they going

to be allowed to do that, I don't know, but it must be becoming obvious

to them now that much of the original information they were given, was,

had been, misconstrued, and basing their charges on that information has

been in error.

At another level they are under big pressure from the Department of

Health, and

Salisbury

in particular has been calling them on a regular basis urging them to

prosecute this case more vigorously against me, be nastier, be meaner,

throw more in, and I know this because we get sent the unused material,

and so I took the opportunity (he didn't know this, I mean you get all

the telephone conversations, all the conversation between people, all the

draft reports which is an interesting advantage to us), so I was able to

write to

Salisbury

and was able to say I am now in a position to have read the unused

material from the

GMC,

and I note your entreaties to them....He was furious, he contacted the

GMC and said: " I didn't know they were going to get the unused

material...you never told me, this is a disgrace! " And

the wonderful thing about that is that we get the documentation of that

telephone conversation as well (laughs).

So, you can see they are under a great deal of political pressure to

prosecute this case and it is interesting in the public domain

Salisbury

has said we don't want this to be seen as a vendetta on behalf of the

Department of Health. So, mixed messages.

PART TWO. The other dilemma they have is who do they represent in the

end? Because the

GMC

have historically stood for the patient, the patients rights, the

patients protection from, for example, medical malpractice. Well,

who do they stand for now because we stand for the patients.

Everything we have done is in the best interests of the children.

What they are representing and prosecuting is not on behalf of the

children no parent has complained against us, but on behalf of the

Department of Health, on behalf of the new kid on the block, 'the greater

good.'

So here we have a body who has traditionally represented the patient, the

victim, if you like, against the medical profession or against medical

malpractice. Now they are defending the diktat of public health

against the rights of the individual.

So they are in a real quandary, or if they are not they should be, about

quite who they represent, because I know who I represent--the individual

patient.

January 6, 2011