Selective Hearing- Brian Deer and the General Medical Council (2009)

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 In 2003, after 10 years work, legal aid was withdrawn from over 1,000 parents claiming damages in a suit in which Dr Andrew Wakefield was to appear as an expert witness.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. Deer’s 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 centre of the whole plot, did not give evidence. In bringing the fitness to practice case against Dr Andrew Wakefield, Professor Simon Murch and Professor John Walker-Smith, the GMC listened to journalist Brian Deer and excluded the views of hundreds of parents of vaccine damaged children. Who is Brian Deer? Vigilante for truth or front man for Big Pharma? Selective Hearing covers Deer’s part in the heartbreaking betrayal of vaccine damaged children by the medical profession, the pharmaceutical corporations and the British government. With the full power of the government and pharmaceutical industry behind him, few people were brave enough to tackle Deer. Alan Golding, however, is a Welshman, a very independent filmmaker and a man of considerable principle. Alan Golding gave himself completely over the three--year duration of the GMC hearing, to the cause of the parents of vaccine damaged children. Selective Hearing features clearly honest personal testimony from parents, an analysis of Deer’s faulted case and unique material of him holding forth for the pharmaceutical companies in a heated exchange with parents outside the GMC building. If you see this film you will want to do something about Brian Deer.