Health - Selective Hearing: Brian Deer and the GMC

Brian Deer, a journalist writing for News Internationals Sunday Times, was the only person in the world to complain to a regulatory body about the work of doctors at the Royal Free Hospital in London who diagnosed children with Inflammatory Bowel Disease, which their parents suggested had occurred following MMR vaccination. In 2003, after 10 years work, legal aid was withdrawn from over 1,000 parents claiming damages in a suit in which Dr Andrew Wakefield was to appear as an expert witness. In 2004 Deer wrote an exposé of Wakefield that was full of concoctions, half truths and fantasies and which claimed that the children examined by the team at the Royal Free were not ill. Deers distorted pharma--imaginings became the basis of over 80 charges leveled against Dr Wakefield and three other doctors to be tried by the General Medical Council (GMC). The hearing took place over three years between 2007 and 2010 and became one of the longest regulatory hearings ever held in Britain. Brian Deer, the center of the whole plot, did not give evidence.