It has been reported that a GP has been erased from the medical register after a disciplinary tribunal concluded yesterday that her statements on vaccines amounted to misconduct.
Dr Jayne Donegan, who no longer works as an NHS GP, was found by the tribunal to have ‘encouraged parents to mislead healthcare professionals about their children’s diet or immunization history’. The UK General Medical Council (GMC) brought several allegations against Dr Donegan, about statements made between 2019 and 2020, however, the determination of impaired fitness to practise (FTP) and subsequent erasure was based solely on her suggestions to parents.
The tribunal determined that her misconduct ‘posed an ongoing risk to patient safety given her lack of insight and lack of remediation’ and that ‘public confidence would be undermined’ if such a doctor was allowed to remain in practice. An immediate order of suspension was imposed, which the tribunal determined necessary for the ‘protection of the public’. Other GMC allegations, such as Dr. Donegan’s statements failing to ‘give balanced information on the risks and benefits of immunization’, were proved true by the tribunal but were not determined to be serious misconduct.
Dr. Donegan works as a homeopathic and naturopathic practitioner and has been ‘researching disease ecology and vaccination since 1994’, according to her website. The tribunal considered statements made by Dr. Donegan in a consultation with an undercover reporter and during her lectures on vaccination. She had said that the historical decline in deaths from whooping cough was because of sanitation and surgeons, not vaccinations. She had also suggested to audiences at her lectures that they could avoid answering questions from healthcare professionals about their child’s immunization history. When asked by an audience member about this, Dr. Donegan had said: ‘I thought what am I going to do because if I were you, 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. What can I do? I thought maybe I can do something homeopathic because they are not having it. In the meantime, I wrote “Yes, I’ll get it done” thinking what will I do and they never came back to me, so when the next one went I just said “yes. The main thing is, don’t stick your head above the parapet because you make it difficult for them. If you say they are not vaccinated, they say they can’t go on the trip or they say “They could but the insurers won’t insure us”, so just keep saying “yes” but don’t say I said that.’
The tribunal concluded that comments like this made it clear Dr. Donegan was aware this was a ‘serious matter that could result in her being struck off’, despite her defense that she was simply ‘making people laugh’. The MPTS tribunal chair Mr Julian Weinberg said: ‘The Tribunal considered that honest and accurate communication of an individual’s medical history forms an essential part of ongoing patient healthcare and that any attempt to undermine this risks the safety of patients. It noted that whilst no dishonesty was found against Dr. Donegan, the Tribunal has found that she encouraged parents to be dishonest with healthcare professionals by, for example, forging medical documents/records, thereby undermined this essential quality of the doctor/patient relationship.’ Mr Weinberg highlighted that the tribunal’s findings did not concern ‘the rights or wrongs of her views on immunization’ but rather her encouragement to parents to mislead healthcare professionals.
Dr. Donegan said in response to the decision: ‘I boycotted the GMC’s political show trial against me which ended today. Serious irregularities include bogus dishonesty charges and bogus accusations that I put newborns at risk of serious harm.’ 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.’
Apparently, Dr. Donegan even claimed that she is delighted to be struck off the register of medical practitioners – and so, I presume, are many of us reading this post!
16 Responses to British GP-homeopath’s statements on vaccines amounted to misconduct – so, she was struck off the register
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From her home page here:
https://www.jayne-donegan.co.uk/
Quote, second paragraph:
“She no longer practices as a medical doctor as the requirement to put NHS policy before the best interest of the patient is not why she chose medicine as a vocation. She has had two applications to deregister the General Medical Council rejected by the Council.”
End-of-quote.
Quote, forth paragraph:
“in 2002 Dr Donegan acted as an expert in a vaccine case for two mothers whose absent and ex-partners were applying to force vaccination on their children. She was accused of serious professional misconduct by the UK General Medical Council in an attempt to stop her practising as a doctor. After three years of litigation and a three week hearing (GMC 2007), the GMC Panel stated, ‘Panel is sure that in the reports you provided you did not fail to be objective, independent and unbiased.’ “
end-of-quote
doctors are not allowed to de-register from the GMC while disciplinary action against them is ongoing
“She no longer practices as a medical doctor as the requirement to put NHS policy before the best interest of the patient is not why she chose medicine as a vocation.”
Or: “She did not practice as a medical doctor as she wanted to put unevidenced nonsense ahead of the best interests of the children”.
And she no longer practices as a medical doctor because she can’t.
This HUGE study in Japan found that people who experienced the REAL measles or mumps were much more likely to survive a cardiovascular event than those people who were vaccinated against these diseases. For those people who believe in evolution (it seems that a LOT of people at THIS website don’t!), these childhood diseases play a useful and important role in survival in helping to create a strong cardiovascular system. Well, either that…or…the vaccines do some type of damage to our cardiovascular system that leads to early death.
Which is it?
https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/26122188/
has your mummy not told you that correlation is not causation, Dana?
I can only see the abstract but the data set is rubbish. Subjects were born 1910-1950 when measles infected 99% of people. Survey asked them if they’d had measles or mumps – recall of childhood disease in adults is very unreliable. The no measles group mostly had it & don’t remember.
Transfer of knowledge could be differentially affected- rich/educated more likely to pass information on?
It’s a study of recall bias, not of infection.
Mr Ullman mentioned that JACC study previously:
on Sunday 17 June 2018 at 22:15
on Wednesday 08 March 2023 at 13:38
@Dana Ullman
Your comment seems off-topic and rather ill-informed.
1. What does this Japanese study have to do with this British doctor’s misconduct?
2. This Japanese study does not say anything about vaccines – for the simple reason that vaccinated people were explicitly not included in the study. The researchers only compared people age 40-65 who had contracted measles and/or mumps with people who hadn’t.
If contracting these viruses does actually confer a certain amount of protection against cardiovascular disease, then it is in fact quite possible that the MMR vaccine does the same – as MMR vaccination amounts to getting infected with the respective viruses, albeit in an attenuated, less virulent form.
Also, when you look at the mortality statistics for strokes and heart disease, you’ll find that these figures have more than halved in the past 60 years – although vaccination probably has nothing to do with this.
Hi Dana, can you say how many subjects had been vaccinated, and what their incidence of CVD was? I don’t have access to the full text, and for some reason this information isn’t in the abstract.
@Mojo
(Allow me to answer your question, as Dana almost certainly will not.)
A slightly more extensive version (although still not the full text) is found here, and it reveals this important bit of extra information on the number of vaccinated subjects:
“Study population … Participants were not vaccinated for measles and [mumps]”
And then there is this (my emphasis):
“Background— Recent studies clearly suggest that regulatory T cells play a critical role in the control of the immunoinflammatory response in atherosclerosis and substantially limit lesion development. Measles virus infection or vaccination is associated with immune depression, in part through the induction of an antiinflammatory response by measles virus nucleoprotein. We hypothesized that the antiinflammatory properties of measles virus nucleoprotein may limit the development atherosclerosis.”
Yes, Dana made a fool of himself. As usual.
Richard,
Mojo wrote “and for some reason this information isn’t in the abstract”.
🤣
Therefore years of birth: 1910–1950, as pointed out above by David Penington.
According to the CDC, one in 36 now has ASD:
https://www.cdc.gov/ncbddd/autism/data.html
Maybe Dr Jayne Donegan has a point (that needs to be investigated) because anyone of my generation has never come across ASD – it just did not exist when we were kids, and no one I know of my age has remotely had anything like it and we all got measles, mumps etc naturally.
are you competing for the dumbest comment of the week?
“Freedom means the right to be stupid.”
— Penn Jillette
Well exercised, Old Bob.
@Old Bob
It absolutely did exist, but it was not named and diagnosed as such. Kids with ASD got all sorts of unscientific labels ranging from ‘antisocial’ and ‘introvert’ and ‘withdrawn’ to ‘idiot’ and ‘imbecile’, depending on the severity of the disorder. I should know, because I was one of those kids. I was always ‘that weird kid’ who didn’t like the company of others, who hated team sports and crowds in general, and who preferred to find a corner by himself to read a book or play with Lego – even at other kids’ birthday parties or family gatherings.
And oh, I got measles at a young age. It was one of the worst experiences in my life (several days of 41°C fever), and I cannot imagine that any parent would want their kid to go through that.
So please sod off with your dumb antivaxx drivel. Yes, there have always been autistic people, and no, vaccines have nothing to do with autism (or any other disorder, for that matter).
Never heard of Kanner and Asperger and their work?
Never knew that Lorna Wing didn’t coin the term “Asperger’s Syndrome” until the early 80s?
Never heard of psychiatric and mental handicap hospitals and wondered why some folk were there?
Autism most definitely did exist when we were kids: if I look back, with the knowledge I gained over a decade or 2 of conducting autism assessments, I can be pretty damns sure that I was at school and university in the 60s and 70s with quite a few bairns with Asperger’s.