On October 26, 1973 Dr John Wilson, paediatric neurologist was “among 50 professors, consultants and other specialists, listening to research and discussion papers about children’s convulsive disorders” at the Royal Society of Medicine conference in London.  The topic of Wilson’s contribution was Neurological complications of pertussis inoculation, given as a triple vaccine, or DTP. [1]

Wilso stated:

“The clustering of complications in the first 24 hours after [DTP] inoculation suggests a causal rather than a coincidental relation.” …“Between January 1961 and December 1972 approximately 50 children have been seen at the Hospital for Sick Children, London, because of neurological illness thought to be due to DTP inoculation,” Wilson presented

“He was by no means the first doctor, or even the most prominent, to suggest a link between the vaccine and brain damage. But few in the lecture theatre’s steeply-ranked pews missed the dynamite in his presentation,” reports journalist Brian Deer (Dr Andrew Wakefield‘s adversary) in 1998.

Three months after the conference in January 1974, J. Wilson et al published their paper in the British Medical Association’s Archives of Disease in Childhood, Volume 49  [2]  Deer quotes it as becoming “an instant classic” and “often quoted a quarter of a century later as it was when it first appeared”

This paper and others [1953] “urge” a prospective study Precaustion has been suggested in 1953, and again now in 1974, and possibly in between.

Deer writes the “national furore…was the prototype for modern health scares.” Following an 1974 ITV broadcast featuring Wilson British DTP vaccination rates went from 80% to 31% by 1978, he reported “cases of whooping cough sored”.  In 1978 a government vaccine compenstation was established.

The paper also stated:

“Finally, we urge the systematic reporting of reactions to all forms of inoculation to the Committee on Safety of Medicines, since we understand that few, if any, reactions from DTP inoculation are notified to the Committee.

“After a frightening television broadcast in the United States in April 1982, American vaccine makers were hit with lawsuit claims worth $10 billion. Wilson’s paper was repeatedly cited” according to Deer.

It was because of the DTP vaccine that the US 1986 Act was established.  In 2011 a Harvard study concluded that only 1% of vaccine adverse reactions are reported into VAERS, and in 2023 not much has changed.