A
recent story in New Yorker magazine paints a Springfield radiologist as a physician who’s moved from the fringe of
vaccine controversies to the outer limit of child abuse experts.
Before
becoming an expert witness in child abuse cases, Dr. David Ayoub argued that
immunization amounts to genocide in the Third World. When it comes to
population control via sterilization, he once compared the cost of vaccines to
the cost of wars, which are messier and more expensive. “They run toward these
bullets, so it’s ideal,” he said in a 2005 speech.
Thirteen
years later, Ayoub, who blames rickets as opposed to violence for broken bones,
downplays his criticism of immunization, saying he was concerned about mercury
in vaccines and that those levels have been reduced and so his work is done. “I
don’t talk about that anymore,” he says.
His
views on vaccines, Ayoub says, have nothing to do with his takes on child
abuse. Mainstream experts have derided criticism of vaccines as junk science
that puts people at risk. Ayoub won’t say whether he believes that vaccines, on
balance, do more harm than good. “In order to have an opinion, I have to dig
really deep,” Ayoub says. “I know what the popular opinion is.”
When
it comes to child abuse, the New Yorker article shows Ayoub as pushing against a wall of other experts, blaming
rickets, time and again, for fractures in infants that have led to charges
against caregivers. He’s testified in 80 or so trials, including a few
proceedings in Europe and England, and authored reports in, he estimates, 200
other cases. He doesn’t charge for his services. Billing, he says, involves a
lot of paperwork, and so he doesn’t bother. He also says that he’s taking on
fewer cases these days, but still gets as many as 10 queries a week from
lawyers. “I turn down – even when I was doing more – I turn down the vast
majority of cases,” he says. “I’ve got too many cases.” He says the defense
prevails in about half of the criminal cases in which he testifies.
Not
everyone is impressed.
“In
every case in which he has written a report, he has expressed the opinion that
the child in question suffered from a metabolic bone disease,” a British judge
wrote in January. “In a television interview given in about 2010, he said this:
‘I’ve not seen any high-risk family. I don’t believe any case of fractures I’ve
seen has been the result of real physical child abuse, that it’s metabolic.’”
The
judge wrote that Ayoub doesn’t have sufficient expertise to offer opinions in
court, and he criticized the doctor as an advocate with entrenched positions as
opposed to an objective expert. “(H)is approach is shot through with the dogma
that child abuse is over-diagnosed,” the judge wrote.
Memorial
Medical Center, where Ayoub has privileges, notes that the doctor is not an
employee and says that it wasn’t aware of Ayoub’s work as an expert witness
before the New Yorker published its
story last week. “Memorial does not share his views,” Memorial spokesman
Michael Leathers wrote in an email.
In
a 2016 case tried in Maryland, Ayoub testified that a six-month-old girl who
died three days after being taken to an emergency room with broken ribs, a
fractured leg, a broken arm, bruises on her face, bleeding in her eyes and a
brain injury had suffered from rickets. The jury couldn’t agree on a verdict
after hearing Ayoub testify. The doctor didn’t take the stand in a second
trial, and the daycare operator charged in the death was convicted and
sentenced to 50 years, the New Yorker reported.
Ayoub
blames bruises in the Maryland case on disseminated intravascular coagulation,
a blood condition unrelated to violence. The bleeding eyes brain injury, he
says, also could have been natural ailments. The dead girl, he says, showed no
bruising or internal injuries in extremities or on her torso that would be
expected if she’d been beaten, although he also acknowledges that he isn’t a
bruise expert.
Contrary
to what the New Yorker published and
what others say, Ayoub says that rickets isn’t a rare condition in infants.
Rather, he says, it’s commonplace, and doctors going back nearly a century ago
knew it. That’s why, he says, mothers once were counseled to dose babies with
cod liver oil, which is rich in bone-strengthening Vitamin D, and put infants
in the sun for an hour or more each day to help kids absorb the critical vitamin
that staves off rickets. “Rickets has been removed from the textbooks,” he
says.
An
overlooked epidemic of rickets, Ayoub says, has broken out due to lack of
awareness and preventative measures. Most cases are mild, undiagnosed and
self-correcting, he says, but a small percentage are severe enough that even
routine handling of a baby can result in fractures. In a recent Florida case,
Ayoub testified that an infant who suffered fractures to an arm, a shin bone
and a thigh bone likely was injured while being held down for immunizations at
a doctor’s office. Two experts who disputed Ayoub’s analysis pointed out that
the child, who had more than a dozen fractures, suffered not a single broken
bone after being separated from his accused abuser, according to the New Yorker story.
Ayoub
says the sheer number of fractures in the Florida case and others, without
corresponding bruises or injuries to internal organs, supports his view that
rickets, not violence, is the cause. He says a patient run over by a car
typically sustains six fractures, and so dozens of fractures sustained by a baby
often can’t be explained by abuse.
Ayoub
dismisses criticism that he hasn’t been trained in pediatric radiology and that
he doesn’t routinely see infants in his practice. Not being an pediatric
radiologist, he says, allows him to look at cases with fresh eyes. “I’m not a
pediatric radiologist,” he says. “I didn’t drink the Kool-Aid.”
Political
correctness, Ayoub says, explains why he’s being attacked. Judges, he said,
tend to be former prosecutors. As such, they’ve been part of a system that’s
unfairly put wrongly accused child abusers in jail and are reluctant to
reconsider mindsets. He also says that he didn’t intend on becoming
controversial when he first agreed to look at a case involving fractures to an
infant when a colleague asked for help a decade ago.
“I
didn’t get into this thinking ‘I’m going to stir the pot,’” he says.
Contact Bruce
Rushton at brushton@illinoistimes.com.
This article appears in Dec 6-12, 2018.
