GP is struck off after comments made to parents about vaccines
BMJ 2023; 382 doi: https://doi.org/10.1136/bmj.p1581 (Published 07 July 2023) Cite this as: BMJ 2023;382:p1581
A GP prominent in the anti-vaccine movement has been struck off the UK medical register after a tribunal found that she encouraged parents to forge their children’s vaccine “red books” and to lie about their immunisation status.
Jayne Donegan, who qualified in 1983, did not attend her medical practitioners tribunal hearing, instead providing a written statement that branded the case a “politically motivated show trial.”
The case was brought over a series of statements made by Donegan from April 2019 to February 2020, in which she questioned the safety and efficacy of vaccines. Some of these appeared on her website. Other comments were made in lectures to paying members of the public and during a consultation with an undercover journalist from the Daily Telegraph. Reporters from both the Telegraph and the Times gave statements to the tribunal.
Donegan, who also worked as a homeopath, criticised vaccines in an interview with the Times journalist and suggested to a Telegraph reporter posing as a young mother that children should get measles, that girls should get rubella, and that “you definitely want [them] to get mumps.”
She did not, however, directly counsel the Telegraph reporter to avoid childhood vaccinations, and it was her comments in the lectures that led to a finding of misconduct.
Free speech
Donegan’s claim to be exercising her right of free speech on these occasions was rejected by the tribunal chair, Julian Weinberg. Having identified herself as a doctor and “used her position and credentials as a doctor to promote an opinion on a matter of medical importance,” he said, Donegan had “engaged her professional responsibilities.”
The tribunal also rejected Donegan’s defence that her advice was balanced because the other information patients heard was usually pro-vaccine and that she sought to balance that out. During one of her lectures, the General Medical Council’s (GMC) expert witness noted, an attendee asked, “Sorry, why do we have vaccines?” Donegan answered, “I can’t tell you why we have vaccines.”
The expert concluded, “To be unable to give any reason why we have vaccines is not a balanced position.” The tribunal agreed.
It did not find, however, that her general anti-vaccine statements at these events, taken alone, rose to the level of serious professional misconduct. Several other charges were found not proved.
She was also not found to have been dishonest in her claims about a previous medical tribunal that cleared her in 2007 of misconduct over statements she had made as an expert court witness. The trial judge had said that her testimony was based on “unsubstantiated claims,” and an appeal judge had called it “junk science.”
The 2007 tribunal disagreed with her testimony but found that she did not “allow any views that you held to over-rule your duty to the court and the litigants.” She later used that finding to claim on her website that “I’m the only doctor in the country whose opinion on vaccinations has been tested in a three week statutory tribunal and found to be objective and unbiased beyond any doubt.”
This was not the 2007 tribunal’s actual finding, the 2023 tribunal found, but the unclear wording in the 2007 case left room for Donegan to interpret it that way without being dishonest.
Shifting blame
Only one charge led to a finding of serious misconduct and ultimately to Donegan’s erasure. This was the encouragement she had given to parents attending her lectures to mislead schools and health professionals about their children’s vaccine status. At one point she told listeners that “what people do which I would not recommend because I will get struck off is . . . people have a red book . . .” She then went on to describe how to borrow a friend’s red book and copy its entries. “If I were you,” she concluded, “I could just forge something but I can’t do that because I am a doctor and I would get struck off and I really would get struck off.”
In her written defence, Donegan claimed to be joking and argued that the GMC was seeking “to turn humour into serious professional misconduct.” But, said Weinberg, “The tribunal did not accept that Dr Donegan genuinely believed that these proceedings have been brought against her by the GMC simply for making an audience laugh.”
Weinberg cited comments Donegan made in her written defence, which said that patients were being bullied into vaccination by less experienced hospital doctors instead of guided by senior GPs. “Each upcoming set of newly qualified doctors has a higher regard for what is called ‘science’ and less regard for the autonomy of patients because that is how they are taught to think,” she wrote.
This attempt to shift blame to junior doctors showed a failure to take personal responsibility for her actions, said Weinberg, and pointed to a significant risk of future misconduct. “Probity and trustworthiness are at the heart of the doctor-patient relationship,” he said, and “Dr Donegan’s misconduct fundamentally undermined that relationship.”
Donegan has 28 days to appeal her erasure if she wishes, but in a statement after the hearing she said she was “delighted . . . that after years of trying to get off the GMC register, I have finally achieved this.” She added, “Being struck off by a corrupt GMC is a small price to pay for taking a lawful ethical stand for the safety of British children.”