A bit of Wakefield Research

So over at the James Randi Educational Foundation, one of the users did a bit of research and dug up this interesting bit of information:

I just realized Brian Deer has posted page images of the entirety of Wakefield's original 1997 patent application for the so-called "measles vaccine" he was planning on making his fortune from, once he's discredited MMR. The final 1998 version is also there.

http://briandeer.com/wakefield/vaccine-patent.htm
http://briandeer.com/mmr/1998-vaccine-patent.pdf

It will make hilarious reading for all the biomedical scientists here. It's the whole goat colostrum transfer factor thing, which is utter woo from start to finish. It's dressed up as science, but he's really just dreamed up the whole thing on the back of the theorizing of a quack called Fudenberg.

This makes it quite clear that the project to market his product was well advanced before the controversial paper was even published. The money he was getting for investigating these children and supporting their legal actions was only the start of it, and frankly small beer to what he seems to have been expecting to make if the MMR had been withdrawn and his goat colostrum nostrum adopted instead.

So far as I know, no safety or efficacy testing was ever done on this snake-oil.

I also sort of wonder how many mice he envisaged using in the first stage of the manufacture, and then how many pregnant goats would have been needed to provide enough of this product for widespread use? What about the kids they produced, which would be surplus to requirements once born, and also vulnerable liabilities when deprived of their mothers' colostrum which the kids need to provide their own passive immunity. I presume they'd just be killed when they were born?

The mind boggles, frankly. I wonder what the animal rights people would make of it? Gadzillions of mice injected with measles and then killed, with their tissues then injected into huge herds of pregnant goats spread out all over the countryside, with their kids being killed at birth so that the mothers' colostrum can be harvested.

Wow.

And as I said, if anyone thinks that even taking colostrum by mouth is "safe and natural", google "bovine neonatal pancytopenia". Oh, but Wakefield wanted to inject the colostrum-derived product right into the children's bodies, just like a vaccine.

You know, maybe more details of what he was planning (and is actually doing on a small scale, I understand) need to be highlighted.

Rolfe.

If anyone had any doubt as to how much of a slimeball this Wakefield ass is, they really can't... And reading the rest of the thread is interesting as well (just click on the title of this post).