Remarkably, within a few years, almost all of Kathi Williams’s demands would be met.
Pediatricians used the Hawkins hearing as a chance to attack
Vaccine Roulette
. In a written statement, the American Academy of Pediatrics (AAP) called Thompson’s program “unbalanced,” “biased,” “inaccurate,” and “superficial,” and claimed it “unnecessarily frightened laypersons.” CDC officials complained that
Vaccine Roulette
had dismissed the seriousness of whooping cough, unfairly characterized doctors and health officials as ignorant of the vaccine’s side effects, and inaccurately claimed that the vaccine didn’t work very well. But despite their criticisms, not a single physician who testified at Hawkins’s hearing disagreed with Lea Thompson’s most damning accusation—that the “P” in the DTP vaccine had caused permanent harm. Edward Mortimer, professor of pediatrics at Case Western Reserve University and probably the most recognized vaccine expert in the United States, said, “Our best estimates are that, of the three and a half million children born annually in the United States, between twenty and thirty-five incur permanent brain damage as a result of the vaccine. Each of us concerned with vaccine recommendations believes that this is twenty to thirty-five kids too many.”
For years doctors had argued that the benefits of the pertussis vaccine outweighed its risks. Now, because of one television program, the public’s perception of those risks was tipping in the other direction. Thousands of parents were choosing not to vaccinate their children.
It was only the beginning.
Lea Thompson’s career was meteoric. After
Vaccine Roulette
, she worked as a contributing correspondent to NBC’s
Today Show
and
NBC Nightly News with Tom Brokaw
, produced and hosted a weekly half-hour magazine called
Byline: Lea Thompson
, and worked as the chief consumer correspondent at
Dateline NBC
and
MSNBC
. For her investigative reporting she won almost every major award in broadcasting, including two Peabody awards, two Polk awards, a Columbia Dupont award, a Loeb award, a National Emmy, the Edward R. Murrow award, multiple National Headliner awards, National Press Club awards, and two dozen Washington Regional Emmys. She was named Washingtonian of the Year in 1989. And her reporting made a difference. As a result of her stories, unsafe toys have been removed from shelves, millions of hairdryers containing asbestos have been recalled, procedures at Sears now ensure that old batteries aren’t sold as new, grocery stores have adopted policies for checking ground beef, warning labels have been placed on Infant Tylenol, and the largest manufacturer of defibrillators in the United States has been shut down. But no story had a greater impact than
Vaccine Roulette
. If the government hadn’t stepped in several years later, Thompson’s show could have eliminated vaccines from the American marketplace.
Fifteen years later, while receiving an award from the National Vaccine Information Center, the group she had essentially founded, Thompson said, “
DPT: Vaccine Roulette
stands out as one of the most important stories of my life—maybe
the
most important story of my life. And I can tell you that I only have one regret—only one. And that’s that we didn’t do this story ten years earlier. That we didn’t know about it ten years earlier. Because so many kids might not have suffered and so many kids might still be alive.”
Thompson’s program created one of the most powerful advocacy groups in American history. But Lea Thompson wasn’t the first investigative journalist to report problems with the pertussis vaccine; and the United States wasn’t the birthplace of the modern-day antivaccine movement. All of these events had already occurred—eight years earlier in England. Indeed, it was the concern of British parents that led to a study that prompted physicians like Jerome Murphy, Gordon Stewart, and Robert Mendelsohn to claim that the pertussis vaccine caused permanent brain damage—a claim that two decades later was found to be wholly and utterly incorrect.
CHAPTER 2
This England
This blessed plot, this earth, this realm, this England.
—WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE,
KING RICHARD II
O
n Friday, October 26, 1973, John Wilson, a pediatric neurologist, stood in front of a group of professors, consultants, and specialists at the Royal Society of Medicine in London. Wilson placed a typed manuscript on the lectern and looked up. What he was about to say arguably would lead to more suffering, more hospitalizations, more permanent disabilities, and more deaths than any other pronouncement in the history of vaccines.
“Between January 1961 and December 1972,” Wilson began, “approximately fifty children have been seen at the Hospital for Sick Children in London because of neurological illness thought to be due to the DTP inoculation.” For years Wilson had accumulated these children’s stories. For years he had struggled with the damage caused by pertussis vaccine. Now it was time to tell the world about it. Wilson reported one child who had transient blindness and mental deterioration. Another had vomited for four days, become blind, and died six months later during an uncontrolled seizure. Yet another had been completely paralyzed on one side of her body. The final accounting was grim: of fifty children studied, twenty-two had become mentally disabled or epileptic or both. To John Wilson, the cause of all of this suffering and death was clear. “We do not think ... that the majority of cases here represent a chance association,” he said. Wilson was convinced by “the clustering of illness in the seven days after inoculation and particularly in the first 24 hours” that the damage had been caused by pertussis vaccine.
Although he was the most influential, John Wilson wasn’t the first to propose that pertussis vaccine permanently harmed or killed children.
In 1933 Thorvald Madsen from the State Serum Institute in Denmark reported two children who had died after receiving pertussis vaccine.
In 1946 Jacob Werne and Irene Garrow from St. John’s Long Island City Hospital in New York reported twin brothers who “cried considerably,” “vomited,” “fell asleep,” and “when next noticed by their parents, appeared ‘lifeless.’” One child was dead on arrival to the hospital; the other died a few hours later.
In 1948 Randolph Byers and Frederic Moll, from Boston Children’s Hospital and Harvard Medical School, reported fifteen children with seizures, coma, or paralysis within a day of receiving pertussis vaccine. Most became severely retarded; two died.
In 1960 Justus Ström from the Hospital for Infectious Diseases in Stockholm, Sweden, reported thirty-six children harmed by pertussis vaccine. “In twenty-four of these, the initial symptom was convulsions, in six cases coma, and in four, acute collapse.” Seven years later, Ström examined the records of more than five hundred thousand children, this time finding one hundred and seventy with seizures or “destructive brain dysfunction” or shock.
In 1973, when John Wilson finished his presentation to the Royal Society of Medicine a murmur spread through the crowd. The society was one of the most prestigious institutions in London, and Wilson worked at the Hospital for Sick Children at Great Ormond Street, a world-renowned medical center. Further, Wilson, a doctor of philosophy and medicine, was a member of the prestigious Royal College of Physicians. When John Wilson said that pertussis vaccine caused brain damage, the charge was taken seriously.
Six months after his presentation to the Royal Society—and three months after his study was published—John Wilson appeared on a thirty-minute prime-time British television program called
This Week
. A precursor to Lea Thompson’s
DPT: Vaccine Roulette
, the program featured frightening images of children allegedly damaged by pertussis vaccine—and terrifying calculations of how any child could be one of them. One caption read, “Every year about 100 are brain damaged.” Six minutes into the program, John Wilson appeared. Now, instead of influencing a handful of specialists at the Royal Society, or a few thousand readers of a medical journal, he was talking to millions of television viewers. Wilson was asked whether he was convinced that pertussis vaccine caused permanent harm. “I personally am,” he replied. “Because now I’ve seen too many children in whom there has been a very close association between a severe illness, with fits, unconsciousness, often focal neurological signs, and inoculation.” The reporter asked him what he meant by “too many children.” Wilson, recalling his experiences at Great Ormond Street Hospital, replied, “Well, in my time here, the last eight and a half years, I personally have seen somewhere in the region of eighty patients.”
The media exploded. Headlines in influential British newspapers read, “Whooping Cough Vaccine Risks Concealed, Say Victims’ Parents,” “Vaccine Call Is Attacked,” “Whooping Cough Vaccine ‘Should Be Abandoned,’” “New Campaign to Win State Help for the Vaccine-Damaged,” “Dangers of a Shot in the Dark,” and “Boy’s Brain Damaged in Vaccine Experiment.”
Doctors also sounded the alarm. George Dick, a respected microbiologist at Queens University in Belfast, said, “I would not recommend the vaccine for infants living in communities where there is good maternal and medical care.” Gordon Stewart, the epidemiologist from the University of Glasgow who later appeared on
Vaccine Roulette
, said, “The Department of Health and Social Security ... refuse[s] to acknowledge brain damage as anything but a doubtful and rare consequence of vaccination. The facts suggest otherwise.” David Kerridge, a professor of statistics at Aberdeen University, joined Stewart in decrying the vaccine. “My advice would be to abandon vaccination,” he said.
Health officials in England waited for the other shoe to drop. In October 1975, an editorial published in the
British Medical Journal
warned: “A sharp decrease in the number of infants routinely immunized after the 1974 adverse publicity could mean that there will be a substantial pool of susceptible children when the next epidemic is due in 1978. Will this mean that there will then be a resurgence of whooping cough?” The answer came quickly. The year before Wilson’s paper, 79 percent of British children were immunized. By 1977, the rate had fallen to 31 percent. As a consequence, more than a hundred thousand children contracted whooping cough; five thousand were hospitalized; two hundred had severe pneumonia; eighty suffered seizures; and thirty-six died. It was one of the worst epidemics of whooping cough in modern history. Dr. David Salisbury, later to be director of immunization at England’s Department of Immunization, was a young pediatrician when the epidemic hit: “At a practical level, I was very aware of the drop in coverage of the pertussis vaccine. Every evening that I was on duty children were referred to the hospital with whooping cough. I remember ventilating them for weeks and weeks and weeks and there were some that we simply couldn’t get off the ventilators.”
Fear of pertussis vaccine spread. In Japan, after health officials placed a moratorium on the vaccine, the number of hospitalizations and deaths from pertussis increased tenfold.
John Wilson later became an advisor to the Association of Parents of Vaccine Damaged Children and its founder, Rosemary Fox, a forty-six-year-old social worker. By advising Fox, Wilson had completed the cycle of events in London that would be repeated in Washington, D.C., several years later: a national television program alerting parents to the harm of pertussis vaccine; formation of a parents’ group seeking compensation; a media outcry in support of aggrieved parents; and irreparable, unending suspicion that vaccines were doing far more harm than good.
Probably no one was in a better position to comment on events in England than Dr. James Cherry. Currently a professor of pediatrics at UCLA’s School of Medicine, Cherry has co-authored the leading textbook on pediatric infectious diseases, published hundreds of articles and book chapters on pertussis and pertussis vaccine, lectured before physicians and scientists internationally, and won many prestigious awards. James Cherry is arguably the world’s expert on pertussis.
Soon after John Wilson issued his terrifying report, Cherry moved to England to study pertussis at the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine. He noticed one critical difference between the United States, where immunization rates dropped only slightly, and England, where immunization rates dropped precipitously. “It wasn’t the public; it was the doctors,” recalled Cherry. “It was the family physicians who really stopped vaccinating.” (A survey by the London
Sunday Times
in 1977 found that 47 percent of general practitioners “would not recommend” the pertussis vaccine for their patients.) Further, Cherry found that the number of children who died from whooping cough was vastly underestimated. “I noticed the pertussis deaths in the epidemic ... were incredibly low,” he recalled. Cherry knew the reason why: physicians weren’t accurately reporting the disease. “[Doctors] didn’t want the parents to have guilt feelings but it turned out [the doctors] didn’t want to have guilt feelings. So they were reporting [pertussis deaths] as other things.” Cherry found that pertussis hadn’t killed thirty-six British children (as was officially reported); it had killed six hundred. Most were classified as respiratory deaths without mention of pertussis, and two hundred pertussis deaths were classified as Sudden Infant Death Syndrome (SIDS). “SIDS cases went up during the epidemic,” said Cherry.