Brian Deer is the reporter spearheading the current smear campaign against Dr. Wakefield, the lead author of the 1998 case series about children who developed autism and bowel problems after their MMR vaccinations. Deer falsely accused Wakefield of altering data. Yet, a new discovery reveals Brian Deer drastically altered the content of a copyrighted 1994 article he authored for The Sunday Times newspaper featuring Susanne, a grieving mother whose daughter was killed by a defective antibiotic known in the UK as Septrin, and her connection to the mother of a vaccine-damaged man. Deer committed this act of deception on his own website.
Brian Deer altered a passage from The Sunday Times, March 20, 1994 article, The Pill That Killed, which he authored. The original version is now archived in the Factiva intelligence engine. Text deleted by Deer from the original article is in red and Deer’s newly added text is in green.
Hers is perhaps a naive view, but Susanne has been stronger on questions than answers about the reasons for Justine's death. For the past five years, she has voraciously hunted for any information that might fill the yawning gap in her understanding. comprehension of what happened. In January, she studied a BBC documentary about Margaret Best, an Irish woman who was awarded [£]2.8m in compensation against Wellcome last year after its whooping cough vaccine damaged her son. Yet still Susanne could make no sense of the feelings that were nagging inside.
"Tell her not to feel guilty," says Best, who believes that Susanne should get immediate advice from a good specialist lawyer. "I know what it's like. There's something that's eating away at you. You've got to find the truth of what happened. And you just go and look for that. I can understand her anger and her frustration.”
Click to enlarge the screenshot of the original 1994 Sunday Times Article by Deer:
Altered Passage First Uploaded to Deer’s Site in 2003:
http://web.archive.org/web/20030405001055/http://briandeer.com/septrin3.htm
Passage on Deer's site from 2009, remained altered six years later:
http://web.archive.org/web/20090629034729/http://briandeer.com/septrin3.htm
Passage as seen on Brian Deer's website now, still altered:
http://briandeer.com/septrin3.htm
Unlike the original article that actually ran in The Sunday Times, the butchered version expunges all reference to vaccine damage and the hefty claim that was won against DTP vaccine manufacturer, Wellcome. The deleted text said the three-in-one DTP vaccine for Diphtheria, Tetanus and Pertussis (Whooping Cough) damaged the son of an Irish parent named Margaret Best, who was also quoted in the original article. All her quotes along with any mention of her or her son were among the text that was deleted.
In 1998, four years after he wrote The Pill That Killed, Deer would betray Best and son in The Vanishing Victims, a Sunday Times magazine article he wrote denying the vaccine damage suffered by DTP vaccine recipients, including Best’s son. Deer actually quoted himself in the article asking Margaret Best if her son is a dog due to his behavior.
Yet “The Pill That Killed,” the text of which has since been altered on Brian Deer’s personal website, contradicted his “award-winning” article, “The Vanishing Victims” regarding DTP vaccine damage in relation to Margaret Best’s son. Whereas “The Vanishing Victims” denied his DTP vaccine injury, the earlier article, “The Pill That Killed,” said the vaccine made by Wellcome caused his brain damage. The grieving woman featured in that article was trying to come to terms with the loss of her daughter, Justine Gibbs, to the defective antibiotic, Co-trimoxazole, marketed as Septrin by none other than the UK pharmaceutical giant, Wellcome, now GlaxoSmithKline – maker of the MMR and DTP vaccines. (Septrin is also marketed as Bactrim by the Swiss pharmaceutical giant, Roche.)
Although he has not written any article about Septrin since 1995, by which time the UK Department of Health had already curbed its use, Brian Deer’s Septrin writing would give him credibility in future articles defending UK drugs. In fact, Brian Deer has relied on his Septrin articles more so than perhaps anything else he has written to argue that he is unbiased toward the pharmaceutical industry and the Association of the British Pharmaceutical Industry in particular.
Ironically, what Brian Deer has done to victims of Septrin is almost as disgusting as what he has done to those of vaccine injury. Not only did Deer erase Margaret Best’s quotes along with his statement that her son suffered vaccine injury, but in doing so, he changed and misrepresented the nightmarish experience of a mourning parent who lost her daughter to a lethal side-effect from another drug made by the same UK drug company that made the DTP vaccine. He will readily subvert victims of adverse drug reactions in favor of his own interests as he has done with the mother of Justine Gibbs, trivializing a parent’s anguish over losing a daughter by completely omitting and denying Margaret Best’s tragedy.
With Wellcome now part of GlaxoSmithKline, Deer is backing a Goliath bigger than any he has ever fought before. As a result, he has caused medical help to be denied to children who developed autism and gastrointestinal disorders following their MMR vaccinations. According to one of their parents, Lancet mother Isabella Thomas:
“It is interesting that Brian Deer also believed vaccine caused brain damage in Children and challenged the drug companies. Then he changed his mind and came back fighting against families of vaccine damaged children.
WHY?”
Whether or not Brian Deer changed his mind, he certainly changed his
writing, after making the original text in “The Pill That Killed” vanish.
He would, after all, need to continue to support the inaccurate tale he
already told in his 1998 vaccine-damage denying screed, “The Vanishing
Victims.”
In the midst of my investigation for this article, I have lost access to Brian Deer’s personal website while everyone else I contacted could access it with no problem. But when I attempted to log onto the site, I got:
"Forbidden
You don't have permission to access / on this server."
From my IP Address in Connecticut, Brian Deer's personal online shrine and cesspool of self-adulation and deception has vanished, too.
Jake Crosby has Asperger Syndrome and is a contributing editor to Age of Autism. He is a 2011 graduate of Brandeis University with a BA in both History and Health: Science, Society and Policy. He currently attends The George Washington University School of Public Health and Health Services where he is studying for an MPH in epidemiology.