Martin Walker Writes

walker45

Martin Walker   https://www.facebook.com/frakatime

Through the late Eighties into the early Nineties, Martin J. Walker worked as an investigator for lawyers in criminal and civil cases and with defendants - with and without lawyers. In the late 1980s he co-founded Hackney Community Defence Association (HCDA), a group which worked on the defence of people assaulted, fitted up and wrongfully arrested by the police in north east London. Throughout these years, he wrote four books about the police and crime. In 1990, he began investigating and writing about the ‘health fraud' movement and vested interests in science and medicine. His fifth book in 1993 - Dirty Medicine: Science, big business and the assault on natural healthcare , which took three years to research and a long time to write, was described by Christopher Bird, author of The Secret Life of Plants, as ‘a masterpiece of investigative journalism and attentive scholarship, elegantly written'. Since then he has published further titles including Brave New World of Zero Risk: Covert strategies in British science policy and HRT: Licensed to kill and maim and most recently, Cultural Dwarfs and Junk journalism. For five years up until 2006 he was one of the legal advisors to the BBC 1 drama series ‘Judge John Deed'. Most of his writing can be accessed at:

 www.slingshotpublications.com.

Martin Walker Writes:

Firstly let me thank JABS for putting links to my work on their site. If you read me here on the JABS site, you will know not just about my books, but about the shorter pieces that I write that tend to disappear down the cracks in the internet.

On January 2nd 2008, I released my latest short book about the Guardian journalist, Ben Goldacre, Cultural Dwarfs and Junk Journalism: Ben Goldacker, quakbusters and corporate science. This book was ignored by the mainstream media despite the fact that it raised important questions about the Guardian, their journalists and vested interests. I published the book free as an ebook so that there would be no impediment to people reading it, not because I consider it to be valueless! 

I followed up Cultural Dwarfs, with a twenty-page essay about the Guardian, it's relationship with a group called the Social Market Foundation, and the work of the science lobby in relation to the censorship of medical and health news. You can download this essay, Guardian of What? The Guardian, the science lobby and the rise of scientific corporatism for free from the Whale site (http://whale.to/vaccine/walker13.html ). 

I am trying to work out a policy for my work, which gets it distributed widely but also returns me some money. At the moment I am thinking about publishing everything I write or have written, as e material for free (with a small administrative charge for downloading), while hoping that enough people will order hard copy books, from the ‘print on demand' company that we intend to work with.

In the meantime if you want to download anything relevant from my site (www.slingshotpublications.com) feel free to do so. 

[Books and essays on the subject of vaccine damage, the infamous Urabe mumps component, Dr Wakefield etc and other important subjects can all be accessed from Martin's site.]

Martin J Walker

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Further Information About The GMC Hearing: 

On the 16th July 2007, Dr Andrew Wakefield, Prof John Walker-Smith and Prof Simon Murch were called before the UK's General Medical Council to answer over 80 charges of professional misconduct. The hearing was initially scheduled to last three months. 

It officially ended on the 23rd June 2009. There had been 144 days of sessions making it the longest hearing in the GMC's history. The verdict was announced on 28th January 2010. Martin Walker attended every session and his detailed diary of the proceedings (2007, 2008, 2009 and 2010) can be read here: 

The General Medical Council’s FITNESS TO PRACTICE HEARING of Dr Andrew Wakefield, Professor John Walker-Smith, Professor Simon Murch by Martin J Walker

https://static1.squarespace.com/static/57698667d2b8574e2db7710a/t/592afef1b8a79bae6ff25c5d/1495990005874/GMC+akt+oskarżenia.pdf

Two further video reports from April 2011 can be found here:

  • Selective Hearing, Brian Deer and the GMC
  • Dr Wakefield - In His Own Words

http://goldenhawkprojects.blogspot.co.uk/


An Update From Jabs:

On the 7th March 2012 Prof John Walker-Smith appealed the GMC's decision before a High Court Judge and won.

Mr Justice Mitting's full statement can be accessed here: http://www.bailii.org/ew/cases/EWHC/Admin/2012/503.rtf

The news of Prof Walker-Smith's complete exoneration was published in a number of newspapers. Here is an example. http://www.bailii.org/ew/cases/EWHC/Admin/2012/503.rtf

The Telegraph:

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/health/children_shealth/9128147/MMR-doctor-wins-battle-against-being-struck-off.html

'...A High Court judge quashed the finding of professional misconduct against Professor Walker-Smith, who had carried out some of the tests for the controversial paper that suggested a link between the MMR vaccine and autism.

Mr Justice Mitting also called for the reform of the General Medical Council's disciplinary hearings after the lengthy battle by Professor Walker-Smith to clear his name....'

'.....Calling for changes in the way GMC fitness to practise panel hearings are conducted in the future, the judge said of the flawed handling of the case: "It would be a misfortune if this were to happen again."

The judge said the GMC fitness to practise panel's conclusion that Prof Walker-Smith was guilty of serious professional misconduct was flawed in two respects.

There had been "inadequate and superficial reasoning and, in a number of instances, a wrong conclusion"....'


Jabs issued a Press Statement at this time (7th March 2012):

The GMC's massive abuse of process

The welcome decision to exonerate Prof. Walker-Smith is a clear indication that the GMC's case against the Royal Free doctors was manufactured to discredit any association between bowel disease, autism conditions and some of the parents' reported link to the MMR vaccine. The allegations levelled at Prof. Walker-Smith and the Royal Free team now have to be viewed with total scepticism as nothing more than a witch hunt by vested interests at the highest level in Government, media and the pharmaceutical industry.

This decision shows that:

1. The 1998 Lancet paper was an early report of cases seen in consecutive order on the basis of clinical need and nothing whatever to do with the separate Legal Aid Board funded project.

 2. The children reported in the 1998 Lancet paper were very ill and did warrant serious clinical investigation and the investigations conducted were entirely appropriate for the children's needs.

3. The allegations of fraud based on this misconstruction, propagated by journalist Brian Deer, politician Evan Harris, the Murdoch press and the British Medical Journal (and rubberstamped by the GMC) are therefore also unfounded.

The decision vindicates Prof. Walker-Smith (one of two world pioneers of paediatric gastroenterology) after years of false allegations, which supports the ethicality of the Royal Free research and the integrity of the much disputed 1998 Lancet paper. The children were genuinely sick and properly investigated. 

Very serious questions arise about the basis of this prosecution:

a. We have to ask why this has happened? 

b. Was Prof. Walker-Smith unfairly targetted simply as a means to discredit Dr. Wakefield? 

c. Why was it necessary for the GMC to make out that very sick children were well? 

Background Information:

No parent of a child had complained. No child had been injured. Parents of children who had been treated at the Royal Free Hospital in London had nothing but praise for the way their children were cared for and treated by Prof. Walker-Smith and the other doctors. 

Parents reported that their children's conditions were not being taken seriously or treated appropriately by their own GPs or paediatricians. 

The 1998 Lancet report referred to eight of the twelve children's parents who directly associated the MMR vaccine with their children's medical condition. This association between MMR vaccine, autistic spectrum disorders and bowel disease warranted further investigation by the scientific community as called for by the publishing doctors. If MMR vaccines had not been mentioned within the report would there have been any criticism of the report and would a GMC hearing have taken place?

 How the charges (the start of the witch hunt) were first thought of are described in Richard Horton's, book MMR Science and Fiction (p.7). Mr Horton was the editor of the 1998 Lancet publication.

 "...In truth, they [the people bringing the charges] had not a clue where to begin. At a dinner I attended on 23 February, one medical regulator and I discussed the Wakefield case. He seemed unsure of how the Council could play a useful part in resolving any confusion. As we talked over coffee while the other dinner guests were departing, he scribbled down some possible lines of investigation and passed me his card, suggesting that I contact him directly if anything else sprang to mind. He seemed keen to pursue Wakefield, especially given the ministerial interest."

Richard Horton continues (p.13):

'....During the preceding few weeks, one protagonist in the affair had said openly and publicly that his intention was to 'rub out' Wakefield. A senior doctor who had played a part in shaping the debate around MMR sat in a North London bar with a glass of red wine in front of him boasting that he was 'drinking the blood of Andrew Wakefield'.

The intensity of feeling that Wakefield provoked in some opponents was unbelievably extreme. And, in the aftermath of the David Kelly affair, in which a British scientist and respected civil servant committed suicide after being caught up in a media blitz following a few incautious remarks to a BBC journalist, only those of a very robust constitution would have been able to stand up to the continued pressure of critics who wished to destroy his reputation. Wakefield's tribulations seemed insufficient for some. Whatever one's views about his wisdom as a doctor and scientist, this kind of malicious reaction somehow seemed equally bad - perhaps even worse.....'

JABS believes this is really about:

  • the cover up of the Department of Health's negligent handling of the MMR vaccine damage issue.
  • the freedom of medical professionals to listen to parents about their children's disease and to investigate appropriately. 
  • undertaking scientific research and having it peer reviewed independently without fear, prejudice or censorship.
  • the association between the MMR vaccine and a form of regressive autism with bowel disease.

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jackie@jabs.org.uk © John Fletcher 2012