Article content
What happened when a British doctor appeared in court as an expert witness, who was meant to help two mothers prove that their children did not need to be vaccinated?
The result was a 3-year legal battle against the British General Medical Council, which ended with all charges against the doctor being dropped.
Dr. Jayne Donegan, a British general practitioner, survived a very fascinating story.
It began with her being a very strong advocate of vaccination, but only a few years later she was speaking out not only about the dangers of vaccination but was also summoned before the General Medical Council, which brought several serious professional charges against her.
After several stressful years in court against the medical council, Dr. Donegan ultimately won her case. However, it is possible you are only now hearing about it for the first time.
To get the full picture of what happened, it’s best to read the whole story. Dr. Donegan gave permission to use her entire report, which follows below.
The story of Dr. Jayne Donegan
As a general practitioner who graduated in 1983 from the Medical School of St. Mary’s Hospital, University of London, all my undergraduate education and postgraduate experience in obstetrics and gynecology, family planning, child health, orthopedics, emergency medicine and general practice led me to be a strong advocate of the routine childhood vaccination program.
In fact, in the 1980s I used to persuade parents who did not want to vaccinate their children against whooping cough — which was considered a “problematic” vaccine at that time.
I used to tell them that adverse reactions were indeed associated with the vaccine — I was not one of those doctors who would avoid such unpleasant details.
However, we doctors were told that the adverse reactions that could occur after pertussis vaccination were at least ten times less likely than the chance of complications from the disease itself and that essentially the purpose of giving the vaccine to their children was to protect them from getting the disease.
I used to regard parents who did not vaccinate their children as either uneducated or sociopaths
In fact I used to consider parents who did not want to vaccinate their children either uninformed or even sociopaths.
I am convinced that this view is not unusual among today’s doctors. Why did I hold this view?
Well, during my medical training I was taught that people who died in the thousands or tens of thousands from diseases such as diphtheria, pertussis and measles — diseases for which we have vaccines — stopped dying from them after vaccination was introduced.
At the same time I was taught that diseases such as typhoid, cholera, rheumatic fever and scarlet fever — for which there are no vaccines — stopped killing people thanks to improvements in social conditions.
It would then be logical to ask why, if social conditions improved population health regarding some diseases, they did not improve health for all diseases?
Well, the amount of information you have to absorb during medical school is so huge that you simply tend to take everything as written and not connect things that would be obvious to someone else.
For me and my contemporaries it was an accepted article of faith that vaccination is the most useful health intervention ever introduced.
When my children were born in 1991 and 1993, I obediently — that is, I believed I had all the necessary knowledge backed by my medical training — vaccinated them, including the MMR vaccine, because that was the right thing to do.
I even had my four-week-old daughter at a public health clinic vaccinated with an expired BCG vaccine (for tuberculosis).
Expired BCG vaccine harmed my child
I noticed (it is a force of habit — I automatically check vials and look for the drug name, batch number and expiry date) that the vaccine was past its expiry date and I said, “Oh, sorry, this is past its expiry date.”
The nurse replied tersely: “Don’t worry, that’s why the clinic is running an hour late — we were checking whether we could give it and IT’S OK.”
To which I said: “All right then.”
And I had her vaccinated… My poor daughter had a terrible reaction, but I was so convinced it was for her best that I continued with the scheduled vaccinations at 2, 3 and 4 months.
No evidence of a measles epidemic
This was my starting point — my enthusiasm for vaccines was not even disturbed by my interest in homeopathy. As I understood it, it was the same process — give a small dose of something and it will make you immune — so no problem.
So what happened?
In 1994 there was a vaccination campaign against measles and rubella in which 7 million schoolchildren were vaccinated against these diseases.
The chief medical officer sent letters to all general practitioners, pharmacists, nurses and other health staff that a measles epidemic was coming.
First it was one MMR dose, then two, now THREE?
The evidence for this epidemic was not published at that time. Later it appears it was forecast by a complex mathematical model based on estimates, and it might never have actually occurred.
They told us:
“Anyone with one dose of vaccine will not necessarily be protected against an upcoming epidemic. They therefore need more.”
“Well, that’s fine,” I thought, “we know no vaccine is 100 percent effective.”
Alarm bells: Now up to three MMR vaccines are needed?
I was, however, disturbed when they said that on the arrival of an epidemic even those who had received two doses might not necessarily be protected and that they would need a third.
You may not remember, but at that time the immunization schedule had only one dose of measles vaccine. It was a live-virus vaccine, so it was like encountering the wild virus, just slightly altered so it would be safer and lead to immunity.
Since then, of course, they added another dose in preschool because one dose did not suffice, but at that time it was only “one injection for life”.
And now they tell us that when an epidemic comes, people are not necessarily protected even after two doses of the “one-off” vaccine. At that point I began to ask myself:
“Why have I been telling parents that vaccines are safer than getting the disease and that vaccination essentially prevents their children from contracting the disease — with the risk of complications?
That vaccines are not 100 percent but are basically intended for that, when it appears children can be vaccinated, have various vaccine-related adverse effects, and yet still get the disease with all the possible complications associated with it, even though they have had two doses of the ‘one-off’ vaccine?
So what’s the point? This does not seem right to me.”
If you’re asking how someone could have two doses of a “one-off” vaccine, it’s because when MMR was introduced in 1988, many children had already been vaccinated against measles.
Well, we were told that they should still be given MMR because it would “protect them against mumps and rubella and boost their immunity against measles”.
We were also told that mass vaccination was the best method because it “breaks the chain of transmission”. So I thought:
“Why are we vaccinating all those babies at 2, 3 and 4 months? Why not wait two or three years and then vaccinate all who have been born meanwhile and thus ‘break the chain of transmission’?”
Things simply don’t add up
So some things just don’t add up. It is, however, very difficult to seriously begin to question the safety and effectiveness of vaccination, especially when you have been taught to believe in it so firmly.
The higher your medical education, the harder it is, because in some ways your brain is more washed.
It is not easy, or at least it wasn’t then, to set out on a path that may lead you in the opposite direction to all your colleagues and the health care system in which you work.
I read some books that could be described as “anti-vaccination”.
They contained charts showing that much of the decline in deaths from infectious diseases against which we vaccinate and the decline in their incidence occurred before vaccines were introduced in the 1950s and 1960s, for example for pertussis and by the late 1960s for measles.
I concluded that I could not simply accept what these books told me, especially when the reference was the opposite of what I had been taught. I needed to do some research myself.
It seemed the charts in my textbooks and the Department of Health immunization manual showed that the introduction of vaccines caused a sharp drop in deaths from vaccine-preventable diseases.
Collecting my own vaccination charts — why was it so hard to get the information?
I decided that if I were to seriously question what I had learned at medical school and from my professors, I would have to obtain the actual data myself.
So I phoned the Office for National Statistics (ONS) and asked them to send me graphs of deaths from the diseases we vaccinate against from the mid-19th century, from when records began up to the present.
They told me: “We don’t have them — we only have graphs for smallpox and tuberculosis; you should probably try the Department of Health.” So I did.
The Department did not have graphs from the 19th or early 20th centuries either. They said: “You’d better try the Office for National Statistics.”
“I’ve already tried them,” I replied. “They told me to contact you.”
It seemed I was beginning to go round in circles, so I phoned the Office for National Statistics again and told them about my problem.
“Well,” they said, “we have all the data from the time the civil registry began recording deaths from infectious diseases in 1837. If you want, you can come and look at them.” It was free.
To obtain the information I wanted to select myself I had to go with my two children aged 6 and 4 to the Office for National Statistics in the Pimlico district of London.
The girls were very good — they were used to traveling with me and accompanying me — and the library staff were very kind; they kindly gave my daughters orange juice, paper and crayons so they could draw and keep themselves occupied while I pulled out all those moth-eaten old books from 1837 to 1900, after which, fortunately, there was a CD-ROM that you could buy for a considerable sum and take home.
It was one of the most user-unfriendly data repositories I have ever encountered, but it was better than having to commute there day after day.
So I went home with my notes and the CD-ROM and eventually compiled my own charts. I was startled and considerably upset to find they resembled the charts from some of the books (anti-vaccine) I had recently read.
People stopped dying from whooping cough long before the vaccine was introduced
I was astonished and rather upset to discover that if you chart mortality from pertussis beginning in the mid-19th century, you can clearly see that at least 99% of the people who died from pertussis in the 19th and early 20th centuries had ceased to die from it long before the pertussis vaccine was first trialed in the 1950s and then widely introduced in the 1960s.
I also realized that the reason vaccination appears so effective in the Department of Health charts is the fact that the charts start from the 1940s, by which time most of the health improvements had already occurred.
And that was even before antibiotics became commonly available.
Even more dramatic was the decline when you selected only deaths of persons under 15 years — by the time the pertussis vaccine became part of the routine schedule in the early 1960s, most of the heavy lifting had already been done.
Department of Health charts: a poor way to demonstrate changes in mortality and disease
I then began to realize that the charts shown in the Department of Health’s Green Book are not a good or clear way of demonstrating changes in mortality and morbidity that occurred before and after the introduction of vaccination against these diseases.
The same is true for measles: the Green Book shows a chart that begins only in 1940. According to it, a large fall in cases occurred after the vaccine was introduced in 1968.
But when you look at a chart going back to 1900 you can see that the mortality rate — with death being the most severe complication of the disease — had fallen by 99% before the vaccine was added to the schedule.
100 percent drop in measles deaths three years before the vaccine was introduced
Looking specifically at the under-15 age group you can see that in the period 1905 to 1965 there was practically a 100 percent reduction in measles deaths — which was three years before the vaccine was introduced in England.
At the end of the 1990s there was an advertisement for the MMR vaccine showing a baby in nappies sitting on the edge of a cliff with a creeping lion nearby.
A voice over said: “No loving parent would intentionally leave their child unprotected and at risk.”
In my view it would be more scientific to publish as a warning one of the graphs using Office for National Statistics information — parents would then have a better chance of deciding informedly rather than being compelled by fear.
When you leave your GP or health worker feeling afraid, it is because you have taken on their feelings.
If your view of disease and health is only the “medical model”, then you know only that there is a hostile world out there and if you don’t have vaccines, antibiotics and 100 percent antibacterial soap you will have no defense against all those germs that surround you and your children.
When your children get measles they may be fine, but you never know when a disaster will strike and they may be left disabled or dead by a random twist of fate.
Health comes from nutrition and other measures of common-sense healthy living.
The only immunity is health
That is how I was too, and when I began to have the terrible realization that vaccines are not what they claim to be, I panicked and looked for some other way to protect my children and myself — some other magic bullet.
My long slow journey of studying the ecology of vaccine-preventable disease included learning about other models and health philosophies and a gradual realization that what people had been telling me all along, namely, that “the only immunity is health”, is true.
We do not need to be protected from what is “out there”. Infectious diseases occur when our bodies need periodic cleansing.
Childhood localized rashes or “exanthems”, as they are also called, are beneficial particularly for children to make the appropriate developmental leaps.
When we have fever, cough, rashes, we need to treat them supportively rather than suppress them.
Standard medical treatment suppresses symptoms and causes the greatest harm
In my experience the greatest complications from childhood infections are caused by standard medical treatment, which includes suppressing all symptoms.
What is the biggest obstacle for doctors who even toy with the idea that the general childhood immunization program may not be the perfect success it is portrayed to be? Or that there may be other ways to achieve health that are better and more lasting?
Perhaps it is fear of stepping out of line and being perceived as different — with all the consequences that can have, which I know from my own personal experience.
As George Bernard Shaw said in 1906 in his introduction to the play “The Doctor’s Dilemma”:
“Doctors are exactly like everyone else: most of them have neither honor nor conscience.
What they are usually mistaken for are sentiment and an intense fear of doing anything that nobody else does, or neglecting to do what everyone else does.”
– Dr. Jayne L. M. Donegan, MBBS, DRCOG, DCH, DFFP, MRCGP, MFHom, holistic general and homeopathic physician
The case against the British General Medical Council
At this point we give some very interesting information about Dr. Donegan and why you should pay attention to her expertise in vaccines simply because the medical world already has.
In 2002 Dr. Donegan went to the High Court because she was involved in a legal dispute in which two mothers sued their former partners over the vaccination of their children.
The mothers did not want their children to be vaccinated — under any circumstances — fearing irreversible harm. The fathers did vaccinate, which led to a controversial legal dispute.
Dr. Donegan wrote and lectured publicly about vaccinations and natural ways of maintaining children’s health, and so she was asked to act as an expert witness for both mothers.
Dr. Donegan expressed her expert opinion that the safety and efficacy of vaccines had not been well researched and that there were other ways for these children to achieve health besides vaccination.
“The proceedings initiated by the General Medical Council against Jayne Donegan were a calculated attack on the right of a defendant to present evidence from an independent expert to the court.” – Martin Walker
The process proved to be very long and extremely stressful. At times it was very unfair, when she barely had time to gather documents while the opposing side had twice the time to prepare theirs.
Accused of dubious science
Because of the information she provided to the court (and which was in stark contrast to typical mainstream medical advice), the appellate court called her evidence “doubtful science” and the GMC — the organization that regulates doctors and tells them how to practice — focused on the doctor herself.
Eventually Dr. Donegan was accused of “serious professional misconduct” which could potentially end her entire medical career.
In 2004 she received the official documents, and writing the reports and going through hundreds of medical documents and studies took three long years before the hearing finally came.
The charges were as follows:
“That you (Dr. Donegan):
6a. gave misleading or potentially deceptive impressions about the research on which you relied;
6b. selectively cited research, reports and publications and omitted relevant information,
6c. allowed your deeply held views on vaccination to prevail over your duty to the court and the parties,
We recommend: Natural treatment of Candida (yeast infections)
6d. failed to present an objective, independent and unbiased opinion;
7. Your actions in the above head 6 were:
7a. misleading,
7b. in direct conflict with your duty as an expert witness; unprofessional,
7c. likely to bring the profession into disrepute; and that in relation to the facts you stated you committed serious professional misconduct.”
After reading these words you will surely agree that these were very serious accusations. Essentially they said that Dr. Donegan’s testimony in court was fabricated, that she gave harmful advice that could damage the entire medical profession and that she allowed her personal opinion into the case.
For another three years Dr. Donegan had to prepare her defense, write letters, go through piles of evidence and categorize documents, so she could barely attend to her family or medical practice.
She also had to cope with her legal team withdrawing from the case six weeks before she was due to appear in court.
Scientific “evidence”: very different from “evidence” in a court of law
At that time Dr. Donegan managed to secure Mr. Clifford Miller, a lawyer who was exceptionally well-informed on the topic of vaccination.
Mr. Miller was not only a very good lawyer but also a scientist with a BSc in physics. He had a very thorough knowledge of scientific methodology, knew what constituted scientific “evidence” and how different it was from what is accepted as “evidence” in a court of law.
Dr. Donegan and Miller very carefully relied in support of their claims only on reports and studies from medical journals. It is very important to remember this.
They used only information from recognized medical sources.
The case started with almost zero chances of success, but after nearly three years of legal wrangling and a three-week hearing before the General Medical Council panel in Manchester, the GMC reached the following conclusion:
“The panel was satisfied that at no stage did you allow your views to prevail over your duty to the court and the parties.
You demonstrated to the panel that your reports did not spring from your deeply held views and your evidence confirmed this.
You explained to the panel that your approach in your report was to provide the court with an alternative perspective based on the material you referenced in your citations.
That material was largely drawn from publications that in fact spoke in favor of vaccination.
From your evidence and that of your witness it was clear that your aim was to direct parents to sources of information on immunization and child health safety so that they could make an informed decision.
You told us that there are many books by doctors and other authors on this subject and also other countries that seriously question vaccination and in support of their arguments cite many historical data, evidence and medical studies.
You did not use any of these publications because you did not think the General Medical Council would consider them a satisfactory support or reference for your recommendations.
You mostly used what was available in peer-reviewed medical journals. The panel is satisfied that the reports you provided are objective, independent and unbiased.
The panel therefore declares that you did not commit serious professional misconduct.”
The dispute between Dr. Donegan and the GMC was very much like David versus Goliath and was another rare example of a true David victory.
GMC agreed that children do not need vaccines to be healthy
I would like you to seriously consider this process — the claims made — the final outcome and what it might mean for the whole vaccination industry:
Donegan was called as a witness to prove that children do not need vaccines to be healthy and that many vaccines are unnecessary rather than safe.
This attracted the unwanted attention of the British General Medical Council, which then took her to court.
During this three-year case she presented her evidence against very strong opposition composed of many lawyers and a very expensive legal team, yet Dr. Donegan with her much smaller team won the dispute.
What do you think it means that evidence was presented and that this medical council could not prove her wrong?
How has it influenced what you think about vaccines now?
And what does it make you think about current science when it presents itself before a court of law?
The media stay silent about the case outcome
This shocking result with its improbable and surprising victory in fact did not make it into the media at all.
It should have been front-page news in every newspaper in the world, but of course that did not happen.
When the media are owned or funded by pharmaceutical companies that can exert pressure on governments to do what they want, it is not surprising this significant victory was kept out of public view.
When Dr. Donegan was first accused of serious professional misconduct it, of course, made the newspapers. But when she won, there was hardly any media that paid her any attention.
Don’t you think the public deserves to know about this outcome? Wouldn’t you like to know about it? And wouldn’t you also like to know about the dirty tactics used in the court case against Dr. Donegan?
After finishing her hearing before the GMC Dr. Donegan was asked what the experience had taught her:
“Perhaps that when parents say to me ‘I worry about the safety of vaccination’, they are told ‘You don’t understand, you’re not a doctor’. But when a doctor says the same thing they are told: ‘We are charging you with serious professional misconduct…’
Please visit Dr. Donegan’s website:
Dr. Jayne L. M. Donegan MBBS DRCOG DCH DFFP MRCGP MFHom
Holistic general and homeopathic physician
Dr. Donegan travels around the UK and lectures to parents about vaccines and how to create health through nutrition, nutritional supplements and homeopathy.
