Guardian of What?

The Guardian, the Science Lobby, and the Rise of Scientific Corporatism

Martin J Walker

22 January 2008

[pdf version for printing]

Guiding the Media
The Guidelines

Denis Campbell was a sports reporter on the Observer newspaper, before he got the opportunity to write about health. In July 2007, he favoured a friend and interviewed Dr Andrew Wakefield, the consultant gastroenterologist at the centre of the MMR-autism controversy, the week prior to his GMC fitnessto-practice hearing.1 It was Campbell’s intention to present Dr Wakefield in the same way as any other pre-trial defendant, exploring his fears and feelings about slipping from a professional life into that of an infamous malefactor. In creating the article, however, Campbell, who had never entered the territory before, made the most serious mistake. Hearing of a paper produced by a department of Cambridge University that cited a considerable growth in cases of autism spectrum disorder, he linked this to Wakefield’s research work, which described a number of specific cases where the parents had pointed to the MMR injection as being key in the onset of a very particular form of regressive autism.

This article analyses what can happen when journalists blunder into the case of Dr Andrew Wakefield, without understanding the complex context of the media, health and New Labour. Increasing pressure is being brought to bear on the British media to report only stories that agree with corporate science. When training interpreters, teachers place considerable emphasis on the student’s all-round knowledge of the culture into which they are translating. This is unfortunately not true of the post-industrial journalists, who tend to imagine that they are presenting titbits of disconnected information, rarely conceiving that their newspapers and others are pursuing ideological positions.

Denis Campbell evidently had no idea that, by trying to present a broad social defence for Dr Wakefield, he was about to place his professional career as a journalist in jeopardy. Like many other people involved in the media, although he knew that New Labour was somehow involved in spin, he did not know that a group of erstwhile revolutionary communist, corporate scientists, Liberal peers and members of the New Labour administration had banded together to draw up a censorship code for the British media.

_______
1. I told the truth all along, says doctor at heart of autism row. Denis Campbell The Observer Sunday July 8, 2007.

In fact, Campbell was to find out on the publication of his Observer article, not only that the editors of the sister papers the Guardian and the Observer, both owned by the Scott Trust, had long been involved in an acrimonious argument, but that the Guardian was not the paper it had previously been. Since 2003, it seems to have passed from the stables of the free press into some Orwellian stew, where the news is consistently rewritten to fit a corporate view of science held by a handful of corporately-funded lobbyists.

* * *

MMR, the mumps, measles and rubella vaccination, was introduced to Britain in 1988. Its original introduction was seriously marred by adverse reaction to the Urabi mumps strain in the vaccination. It was not until 1992 that the Department of Health, downplaying the serious adverse events that had occurred using this particular strain, took two of the MMR vaccines off the market while making low-key and somewhat mumbled explanations to the public. Following this major problem, the Department of Health and the successive governments were determined not to admit to any other problems in relation to this vaccination.

Dr Wakefield, a senior researcher in experimental gastroenterology at the Royal Free Hospital, was approached by a gathering number of parents, after 1988, who claimed that their children had been adversely affected by the triple vaccine. These cases were brought to the Royal Free because often the first signs of adverse reaction to the vaccination were gastrointestinal. Initially, Dr Wakefield was sceptical about the department’s authority to deal with these cases. As well as reporting gastrointestinal conditions in their children, in the majority of cases that were brought to the Royal Free, parents reported signs of autism spectrum disorder. Dr Wakefield’s main area of expertise had, until the early 1990s been Crohn’s disease, a gastrointestinal condition that had markedly increased in recent years.

Initially Dr Wakefield protested that he knew nothing about autism spectrum disorders, and suggested that perhaps the Royal Free was not the best place to bring these children. However, as the rest of the team carried out more tests and observations on the gastrointestinal conditions presented by the children, superficial case review conclusions became inevitable; either the children had all developed autism spectrum disorders ‘naturally’ and biologically inevitably, or the condition, together with the intestinal condition, had been triggered or exacerbated by an environmental factor.

After work over the next decade, Dr Wakefield came increasingly to the latter conclusion, and was convinced that it was the vaccine measles strain, in combination with the strains of mumps and rubella, that was responsible for the gastrointestinal condition and, in this relatively small subset of children, also for the regressive autism from which many of them suffered.

Although Dr Wakefield tried hard to interest the Department of Health in the condition that his research had uncovered, and begged them to be more cautious in their vaccination campaign, it was six years before Dr David Salisbury, the Principal Medical Officer of the Communicable Disease Branch of the Department of Health, deigned to meet with him to discuss evidence of a public health crisis.

Dr Wakefield continued to write up his research, and noted, as time passed, that even without a reasoned discussion about his research or the clinical work of the Royal Free Hospital, a campaign was being orchestrated against him. In 1998, he was one of 13 authors who published a paper in the Lancet reviewing the cases of 12 children who had passed through clinical tests and treatment at the Royal Free. As well as reviewing all the clinical evidence, the paper noted the view of 8 parents, that there was a link between MMR and the onset of children’s illnesses.

From the time of the Lancet paper’s publication, a propaganda offensive of considerable power was turned against Dr Wakefield, and from this point onwards, the parents who had reported an adverse reaction to the MMR vaccination, were gradually made invisible. Wakefield, his research and the clinical work of the department were roundly condemned. His identity and character were covertly attacked, and in 2003, an article by Brian Deer in Rupert Murdoch’s Sunday Times, accused Dr Wakefield of some criminal and much professional malfeasance. Deer followed up his Sunday Times article with a Channel 4 television programme, on 18 November 2004. It always appeared to those who were knowledgeable about Dr Wakefield’s work, that Brian Deer’s reporting was based upon incomplete information.

Included in the first Sunday Times article was a call by the then ex-Communist Minister for Health, John Reid, ordering a General Medical Council (GMC) hearing of Dr Wakefield and his colleagues. Deer had drawn in part upon the research capability of Medico-Legal Investigations, a firm of private investigators, who carried out most of their work for, and were mainly subsidised by, the Association of the British Pharmaceutical Industry.

This agency had in the past prepared for the GMC a number of cases that might have been said to help pharmaceutical industry competitiveness.

In 2004, Deer became the sole complainant to the GMC about the conduct of Dr Andrew Wakefield and his colleagues, Dr Simon Murch and Dr John Walker-Smith. After an almost four-year wait, this case was brought before a GMC fitness to practise panel in July 2007, and, having been designed for procrastination, it is unlikely to finish before September 2008.2

While the hearing to determine the future of Dr Wakefield’s professional career has continued at a snail’s pace, the media have continued with their onslaught, without proof or evidence, on the basis of off-the-cuff, industryinspired hearsay, to illustrate Wakefield’s bad science and criminal intentions to sink the Government’s combined vaccine programme.

It is perhaps of value, even at this late stage, to examine one of the major strategies used by the science lobby to discredit Wakefield’s work in the public mind, as well as to link the campaign against him to New Labour’s spin tactics and the entry into the post-industrial political world of the armies of PR clones and the robotic risk-communication company voices. While attention in this respect has always been pointed at Alastair Campbell, who served as Director of Communications and Strategy for Tony Blair from 1997 to 2003, such exposure has always been a part of the ‘laddish’ terrain of male politics in Britain. The use of similar armies of disinformation in defence of Big Pharma and corporate science, and against alternative medicine for example, has been tackled by few journalists.

The sword upon which Denis Campbell fell when he strayed onto the vaccine field; the most powerful weapon of the science lobby, has been that of hyperbole. Dr Wakefield and his colleagues at the Royal Free were always conscious of the fact, and always made clear, that those parents who had brought their children to the hospital were part of a relatively small and idiosyncratic population.

At the same time, clinical work at the hospital, and research by Dr Wakefield, showed the science peculiar to these cases in exacting detail.3 No one at the Royal Free, nor anyone connected with Dr Wakefield, has ever said bluntly that there is scientific evidence that MMR has been responsible for the substantial rise in cases of child autism in Britain over the past decade.

Further, it is easy to see what it was that Dr Wakefield did say, which so unnerved the government and the pharmaceutical industry, who were determined on a future model of increasingly combined vaccines.

Wakefield actually said bluntly, at a press conference that preceded the publication of the case review in the Lancet, that parents should be given the chance to choose single vaccines until the post vaccination scientific research had been conducted into the triple vaccine. He was

2 So making it the second longest juridical procedure that has taken place in Britain.

3 In fact two papers were sent to the Lancet before the case review was published in 1998. The second paper which one peer reviewer said while giving evidence for the prosecution at Wakefield’s GMC hearing, should have been published together with the case review, detailed all the science necessary to link MMR to the gastrointestinal illness of the children in the review. This second paper was ‘knocked out’ after two peer reviewers out of three considered it unready for publication.

encouraged to voice this opinion by the then head of the university department joined to the Royal Free teaching hospital.4

In a classic defence of the Government and Big Pharma, against the measured criticisms voiced by Dr Wakefield, the first thing that the science lobby did was to distort and misrepresent his research results. In this crude version of the Royal Free’s complicated clinical work, Dr Wakefield was made responsible for claiming that the considerable and continuing rise in classic autism in children was entirely due to the introduction of MMR in 1988.

To argue against this simplified and distorted perspective was easy. Such a colossal cause and effect had not been observed by anyone else involved in the study of either autism or gastroenterology, and none of the large epidemiological studies carried out on the causes of autism. Nonetheless the cause and effect supposedly claimed by Dr Wakefield (whilst stated explicitly not to be the case in the paper itself) was to be frequently trotted out over the coming years.5

By making it appear that Dr Wakefield was making worldwide claims on the basis of 12 cases reported in the Lancet, his detractors can readily conclude publicly that Dr Wakefield and fellow academics are deranged and subversive and that their claims cannot possibly have a rational foundation. There is a lesson here for everyone involved in unpopular causes, up against the PR industry and New Labour spin: always ensure that you keep your eye on the small picture.

* * *

In the weeks following the articles publication, Denis Campbell was carpeted and criticised by staff at the Observer, as well as interlopers from the Guardian and beyond. Months later, after the chastisement of the paper by the Guardian, the Observer’s most able editor, the hugely popular and ebullient Roger Alton, responsible for overseeing Campbell’s interview with Wakefield, was forced to resign. Campbell’s interview people think, was just one brick in the wall that had begun being built when Alton and the Observer had backed Blair’s decision to invade Iraq, a question upon which the Guardian editor Alan Rusbridger had maintained a principled dissent.

In a country with an apparently free press, this little story of how New Labour corporate apparatchiks enforced censorship on one of Britain’s most notable papers, should have created the most terrible public storm. But so low has the press sunk in Britain, and so powerful has the corporate science lobby become, that not a whisper of the scandal entered the public domain.  Ten days after Campbell’s interview with Andy Wakefield, Ben Goldacre in his ‘Bad Science’ column in the Guardian, publicly discredited something; although, as is usually the case, it is difficult to tell what it was that he discredited.6 Despite the hundreds of emails posted on the Guardian’s Comment is Free site by PR company associates and friends of Big Pharma, which lauded Goldacre for writing the most erudite and beautiful pieces of prose since the Second World War, all his piece actually did was to destroy the straw man put up by his crisis management PR colleagues.

__________________
4 This was denied by the department head at the GMC hearing, yet he had specifically written this support into two letter to Dr Wakefield.

5 The Cochrane review of epidemiological studies that the science lobby and the government used to shore up their view that no one had found a connection between MMR and autism, pointed out that the studies quoted were not a suitable vehicle for identifying MMR as a factor in the development of regressive autism, because on the whole they didn’t use focus on children with regressive presentations.

While the original article had principally been about a competent medical research scientist whose work had helped hundreds if not thousands of parents, facing a GMC fitness-to-practice hearing, Goldacre’s apparent deconstruction of it simply made the point that Campbell had suggested that MMR was responsible for a massive rise in autism across the board over the past decade. In fact, Goldacre dispensed with this idea in the article in a perfectly well considered, opening paragraph.7

Whatever you think about Andrew Wakefield, the real villains of the MMR scandal are the media. Just one week before his GMC hearing, yet another factless ‘MMR causes autism’ news story appeared: and even though it ran on the front page of our very own Observer, I am dismantling it on this page. We’re all grownups around here.

As with the great majority of Goldacre’s writing, this paragraph, though ostensibly good journalism, is completely disingenuous. While of course he was interested in showing that there was presently no proof that MMR or any other vaccination had caused a rise in autism, his prime task was to disassemble the idea that Dr Wakefield was a good scientist who had tried to forewarn the government of a public health crisis, while at the same time denying that children had suffered adverse reactions from MMR.

Campbell’s article had, after all, reinforced the view that some children had suffered dreadful adverse reactions to the MMR vaccination, and given a voice to Dr Wakefield, who made it more than clear that he had been truthful about his research, and about the clinical work carried out at the Royal Free on behalf of hundreds of unhappy parents.

_____________________
6 The MMR story that wasn't. Ben Goldacre. July 18, 2007. The Guardian

7 Ibid. Goldacre.

Neither the New Labour government nor the pharmaceutical companies, the medical establishment nor, certainly, the science lobby, was going to admit that MMR, or any other drug or vaccination, provoked adverse reactions. Nor was any one of these going to admit that Dr Andrew Wakefield had a defence of any kind. Perhaps most spectacularly of all, from the beginning of the GMC hearing, the parents and their children simply disappeared. This is almost supernatural! In a major social public health crisis, to which, as always, the public are the first, only and best immediate witnesses, from this time onwards, no journalist would consider the unscientific and ‘anecdotal’ views of any of the parents of vaccine-damaged children. The story from now on was simply that no children were damaged by MMR, and anyone that said they were, was being unscientific and possibly suffering from Munchausen’s Syndrome by Proxy, or the famous False Illness Belief (FIB) syndrome coined by Professor Simon ‘Spin’ Wessely.8

* * *

How had the profit-promoting agents of corporate science managed, not only to enable the GMC to conduct the second-longest legal prosecution in British history, but also to wipe from the blackboard all the evidence and names of those citizens whose children had been adversely affected by MMR?

As soon as New Labour came to power in 1997, spin became a major part of government. The liberal axis that steered New Labour policy was determined to create a society in which considerations of big business, science and advanced technology were at the forefront of policy.

It the late 1990s, multinational corporate science suffered one of its most serious defeats, when environmentalists organised against Monsanto’s plans, supported by a number of British scientists, to unilaterally introduce GM crops to Britain. The campaign resulted in a kind of plebiscite that finally decided publicly against the introduction of GM crops. It resulted in something else as well, the organisation by the British state, something that so far had only been toyed with, of a propaganda offensive against all and any kind of criticism of corporations for damage to the environment or the health of the population. This propaganda offensive has been on a Soviet scale and has left in its wake a number of serious intellectual dissidents.

From the turn of the 21st century, corporate scientific interests organised hard and unrelentingly to promote corporate science and to argue publicly against new technology having any adverse effects on public health.

The two Liberal Democrat peers most involved in the battle to push through corporate science and new technology were David Sainsbury and Dick Taverne. Both were made Lords after New Labour won their first election in 1997.

__________________________
8 Those who want to understand the rational behind this argument, should read this authors Brave New World of Zero Risk that can be found at: www.slingshotpublications.com.

While Sainsbury was made head of the Department of Trade and Industry, in control of all matters medical and scientific, Lord Taverne began championing corporate interests through the Science and Technology Committee in the Lords. He gathered PR personalities and ex-revolutionary communists 9 10 together, and began the task of regulating the media’s response to corporate science. With his background in libertarian think-tanks and anti-environmentalist US organisations, together with his friendship with David Sainsbury and his background in PR and consultative companies – not to mention the power-broking Bilderberg group and the Trilateral Commission – Taverne was ideally placed to set up Sense About Science, which he did in 2002. Ludicrously, he secured the emergent organisation charitable status, and from the beginning was its chairman.

However, before founding Sense About Science, Taverne’s first objective was to create new rules for all media, in which science news and information were given the right of way. All stories about science, including those about health, presented in the media, were to be written or presented only by scientists. In this kind of journalism, ill health could only be written about in relation to it being cured by pharmaceutical drugs and other therapies offered by allopathic doctors.

The idea was to block all personal stories about health, which was to be turned into an aspect of life science and have nothing to do with the individual’s understanding or control of his or her own body or feelings. All stories about the use of alternative medicine, and all stories about the adverse effects of environmental factors on human health, were to be forbidden. It was to enforce these new rules about science and health, and to teach only the correct information about the right kind of science, that the two new lobby organisations, Sense About Science and the Science Media Centre, came into being.

Guiding the Media

The plan to guide the media began in March 2000, when the Royal Society published its Scientists and the Media: Guidelines for scientists working with the media and comments on a press code of practice.11 The House of Lords Select Committee on Science and Technology subsequently endorsed this document in its report Science and Society. 12

________________
9 See the GM Watch web site and Zero Risk
10 This combination of left leaning liberals and communists, is very similar in make up to those cohorts of administrators and bureaucrats that developed around the US Congress following the Second World War. It was this growing clique, sympathetic to the Soviet Union after the defeat of Hotler that ushered in the Macarthy hearings.

In order to produce the final guidelines, the Royal Society and the Royal Institution came together with the Social Issues Research Centre (SIRC) to form the Joint Forum of the Social Issues Research Centre, a collaboration between people from Sense about Science and from SIRC. The joint forum included, apart from SIRC personnel, Dr Michael Fitzpatrick with his 20-year history of revolutionary communism, and Dick Taverne QC, now, thanks to New Labour, a Liberal Democrat peer. Other members of the Joint Forum included Mr Peter Bell, former controller of policy, BBC News; Philip Harding, controller of editorial policy, BBC; Steve Connor, science editor, the Independent; Dr Graham Easton, GP and ‘senior broadcast journalist’, BBC Science Radio; Professor Susan Greenfield, director, the Royal Institution; Dr Michael Clark MP, chairman, Commons Science and Technology Committee, and Professor Sir John Krebs from the University of Oxford. The Forum was moderated by SIRC directors Kate Fox and Dr Peter Marsh At the same time as bringing out the guidelines, the SIRC set up the Health and Science Communications Trust, a charity that aimed to disseminate the guidelines, while also organising seminars and workshops to bring together journalists, broadcasters, scientists and health professionals.

The administration of the Trust was left mainly in the hands of the SIRC.

The SIRC claims to be an independent, non-profit-making organisation, founded to conduct research on social and lifestyle issues. Its website tells us that ‘SIRC aims to provide a balanced, calm and thoughtful perspective on social issues, promoting open and rational debates based on evidence rather than ideology.’ As with many contemporary social and medical research groups, the Centre’s claim to be ‘not for profit’ is meant to make us think that it is not linked to any commercial organisations.13

However, SIRC is mainly funded from the profits of a sister organisation, MCM, and both organisations share the same founding management staff. MCM Research is a problem-solving, risk management research, positive communication and PR organisation, which works almost entirely for the food-and-drinks industry. It is also a research and consultancy company, which specialises in applications of social psychology to the workplace and public contexts.

MCM presents positive marketing campaigns for the sugar and alcohol industry. It works for, among other clients, Conoco, Grand Metropolitan Retail, Kingfisher Leisure, Marks and Spencer, Mars Confectionery, The Ministry of Defence and the Sugar Bureau.

_________________
13 See this authors: HRT: Licensed to Kill and Maim. 2006. Slingshot Publications. London, available from www.slingshotpublications.com

The Guidelines

The Guidelines on science and health communication, which grew out of the 2000 guidelines on scientists and the media via a series of consultations, were published in November 2001. Despite sounding terribly official, they were prepared by the relatively-unknown SIRC, partnered by those longestablished and august-sounding organisations the Royal Society and the Royal Institution of Great Britain, both of which had over recent years fallen victim to flooding by corporate funding. The sole objective of the guidelines was to censor articles critical of corporate science, professional medicine and their products.

The problem with the guidelines, comes immediately into sight with the title of the documents, Guidelines on science and health communication.

In the body of these guidelines, it becomes clear that the titles should better read, Guidelines to Enforce a Corporate Scientific Construct on Health Communications.

The original guidelines remained virtually intact throughout their discursive travels. This was mainly because, although the opinions of many people were apparently canvassed, almost all of them were fervent defenders of corporate science and its contemporary corporate funding.

There can be no doubt about the motivation and the goal of the guidelines. Their purpose was to serve as a defensive weapon in any future conflicts between corporate science and scientific, cultural or political dissenters. The guidelines attempt to cut off supplies of the oxygen of expression both to dissidents and to those who might be swayed by their arguments.

Only slightly beneath the surface of the guidelines lurks the same defence of vested corporate interests dominating all the rationalisation of ‘scientific’ lobby organisations. The central problem seems to be that those involved in propagating the social construct based upon corporate science are unable to conceive of a democratic process that involves political, moral or social opposition to their ideas. As Fitzpatrick says in his book about MMR, ‘there is nothing political about vaccination’. And, as Dick Taverne argued at a Stockholm Network14 Westminster Fringe debate in London in January 2006, ‘Democratisation of science would not be in the public interest’.15

 The growth of the guidelines, through the Royal Society and the Royal Institution, and finally through the SIRC, and then into the hands of the Science Media Centre, mark the development of a terrible arrogance, which is abroad in the community of corporate science. They want to outlaw political, personal and alternative views on health. They want to dismiss personal views on illness and to restrict any writing, even of fiction and drama, about science, entirely to observations about ‘successful’, apparently peer-reviewed science.

_______________
14 The Stockholm Network pursued a wide range of policy-oriented activities.We formalised our work into three programmes: Health and Welfare, Intellectual Property and Competition, and Energy and Environment.We also hosted regular public debates in Brussels – the Amigo Society – and London – The Westminster Fringe – as well as launching seven major publications.

On January 15 2008, the Amigo Society an offshoot of the Stockhold Network held a debate in Brussels titled, ‘When health scares become our daily meal’. The speakers were Nathalie Moll an executive director of Europabio and an executive member of Euro association of Bio industries and Dr William Durodie, Senior Lecturer in Risk and Corporate Security, Resilience Centre, Cranfield University and an advisor to the Scientiic Alliance that argues against any Environmental dangers produced by science (Durodie is part of the Living Marxism Network that grew out of the Revolutionary Communist Party.) The ‘debate’ was chaired by Dr Tim Evans, Dr Tim Evans is the Stockholm Network’s director of development. The ‘debate’ was advertised in the following terms.

The media incites us to greet unidentified risks with great caution: the policy equivalent is the precautionary principle. This entails considerable regulation and safety precautions for the general public until any untested product or technology has been proven harmless. The approach is seemingly common sense: better safe than sorry. This can, however, put a straitjacket on research and scientific inquiry overall. GMO crops are a case in point: these have been in use for 20 years and not a single health incident has been reported. Yet, national and EU authorities have decided that the technology which has the potential of saving millions of people from death by starvation must be suspended.

15 Other participants in this debate were Professor Colin Blakemore, Ian Gibson MP, Daniel Glaser, Rick Nye Shereen el Feki of the The Economist.

They are ready to move on, to exclude the personal narrative of illness and treatment, illness and cure, to outlaw the stories of curers, herbalists and homeopaths, and original scientific research, which is first, inevitably, the minority. They now want to stop any subjective criticism of science or medicine. It is necessary to control ‘bad’ narratives, which do not coincide with the profitable projects of the corporations.

And what of the minority view, which is implicit in any democracy, and previously dismissed only in totalitarian systems? Will it no longer be possible to report a variety of therapeutic approaches? The pharmaceutical alternative will, of course be the majority view; what of the minority within that majority, those who suffer adverse reactions? In research, what about competing minority alternatives, which find it hard to raise funding, and which anyway do not get access to the select journals? Will reporting of these be censored? What about research that reaches critical minority conclusions, such as research into environmental illness, almost inevitably a minority view? Where would we be with research into smoking and lung cancer if corporate science had controlled research in the 1960s? Ah, yes, I forgot, that was all a terrible mistake.

What of investigative writing about science, such as the ‘monumental’ 50,000-word article published by the Chicago Tribune, written by John Crewdeon, which ‘put science under the microscope’ and questioned Dr Robert Gallo’s role in the discovery of HIV.¹⁷ What of criticism?

In Sweden, Lennart Hardell is one of a small number of scientists who managed to persuade the government to ban herbicides containing dioxin. Hardell is still fighting his corner, after Sir Richard Doll, at the time a highly-paid consultant for Monsanto, wrote to the judge in the Australian Royal Commission Inquiry into Agent Orange, suggesting that Hardell’s ‘minority’ views should be struck from the scientific record.

______________
16 Talk of ‘weakening of the public will … sorry, public mind … made me wonder whether this quote had got into this essay by accident. Was it a quote from Germany in the 1930s?

17 Discussed by Serge Lang in Challenges and published with additions, as Science Fictions: A scientific mystery, a massive cover up, and the dark legacy of Robert Gallo. John Crewdson. Little Brown and Company. USA. 2002.

And what of politics? Just because the ex-Revolutionary Communist Party has replaced politics with a religious faith in science, do we all have to do the same? Are we no longer to be allowed political choices because an RCP cadre has decided that politics has ended? Will corporate science now advise the correct course of action on health, on vaccination, on the taking of pharmaceuticals?

 Everything was done in the Guidelines to give them an almost statutory authority. In fact ,they had been put in published shape by a small group of individuals who, despite being associated with celebrated organisations, now frequently worked in partnership with the pharmaceutical vaccine industry, the biotech industry and major chemical companies.

The idea that corporate science is the only lens through which we understand the working of our bodies and diagnose or treat ill health, and that the life sciences have greater authority in our world than religion, culture, politics or the individual’s own emotional being, is a consequence of a number of factors. Perhaps the primary one, however, is the development of the contemporary pharmaceutical company and its insinuation into all aspects of life. The guidelines are an attempt by science to impose a scientific construct on all health, and the creation of a break wall to censor criticism of corporations that cause either environmental or iatrogenic health damage.

Most pointedly, when these guidelines are designed by the very corporations that are sheltered by them, and that, like the pharmaceutical companies, consistently disguise or bury or fail to make public their research results, they jeopardise the very soul of scientific inquiry. When such guidelines are used to censor other kinds of research, for instance from lay patients or qualitative or participatory or biographical work, then rather than making research safer, they deprive science of the little humanity it has previously professed.

* * *

Over the past couple of years, the Guardian newspaper has become more deeply involved in defence of corporate interests, particularly those of the pharmaceutical sector. Although the paper had often defended corporate interests in the past, since the employment of Ben Goldacre, an admitted quackbuster intent upon defending corporate interests, the Guardian has become a priori the paper defending industrial interests that might damage human health. While most media in Britain avoid the whole debate about environmental health, the Guardian has moved into a position of active support for those industries that cause this damage.

Given the nature of professional secrecy, how this happened is unlikely to become apparent in our lifetime, but it is worth looking at the circumstantial evidence and speculating. To anyone entering the fray of the present battle with the Guardian, which has recently turned into a full-scale campaign against all kinds of alternative medicine and any suggestion of environmental illness, an understanding of its political position could be hard. However, at least a brief understanding of the present, politicallybrackish water in which the Guardian swims is essential to an understanding of the paper’s increasingly sceptical, not to say cynical, position.

The Guardian was originally known as the Manchester Guardian; it had been produced in the heartland of liberalism since the early 19th century. In the 1920s, a modern concept of liberalism came on to the scene in Manchester, and affected the Guardian. Modern liberalism wanted to find a meeting point