Gastroenterologist Dr. Andrew Wakefield recently had the opportunity to speak at an “Ignite the Truth” event in Dana Point, California, about his well-known case study identifying novel inflammatory bowel disease as an outcome in some children who receive the MMR vaccine. Dr. Wakefield’s powerful testimony about what his study actually found versus what the media reported, as well as how he was maliciously targeted for his honest effort to help suffering children, absolutely destroys the prevalent myth that Dr. Wakefield has somehow been “discredited” as a scientist and doctor.

At the event, Dr. Wakefield cleared up some major misconceptions about his famous paper, including the lie that it declared all vaccines to cause autism. He had this to say concerning the structure and intent of his greatly misunderstood research:

“No one has read this paper. No one actually knows what it says. This is a case series. This is the way human disease syndromes are described, whether it’s Asperger’s syndrome or Crohn’s disease or multiple sclerosis — a handful of patients that present with a similar pattern of signs and symptoms that merit investigation and reporting in their own right.”

Concerning what his paper supposedly declared, Dr. Wakefield had this to add:

“It doesn’t test any hypothesis. It’s not intended to. It can’t. All it can do is generate hypothesis of causation — what is based upon, in this case, the parents’ story. What did this mother, sitting across the desk from me in clinic, say happened to her child? That is where medicine begins. It doesn’t begin in a laboratory, it doesn’t begin with a test — it begins with a clinical history.”

The full video of Dr. Wakefield’s speech is available on YouTube:
YouTube.com.

Dr. Wakefield’s study was a case report, the foundation of “where medicine begins”
When parents came to Dr. Wakefield and his colleague Dr. John Walker-Smith reporting unexplained bowel problems in their children who were recently vaccinated with MMR, the two doctors merely reported on this honestly for the betterment of science. And contrary to popular belief, their research was later corroborated by others within the field who conducted their own follow-up studies implicating the MMR vaccine as associated with novel inflammatory bowel disease.

“My father used to say to me as a neurologist, ‘If you find something on physical examination of the patient that you have not anticipated in the clinical history, you have not taken an adequate history,'” stated Dr. Wakefield. “And the history the mothers gave is that they took their children to have, in this case, the MMR vaccination… and beyond that point their child disappeared. They were not anti-vaccine. They were at the front of the line. They took them [to get vaccinated] on time. They were not looking for excuses, they wanted answers.

“Their child was normal. After the MMR, they had a very high fever, they screamed, they then fell asleep for three days, they had a seizure. And when they woke up, they were never, ever the same again. Speech, language, interaction, socialization — gone.”