Michael Fitzpatrick

Dr Michael Fitzpatrick is a GP in Hackney, London. He is a Trustee of the controversial lobby group Sense About Science. Sense About Science shares its telephone number with an organisation called Global Futures of which Fitzpatrick is also a Trustee and to which Sense about Science's director, Tracey Brown, and its assistant director, Ellen Raphael, also belong.

Tracey Brown and Ellen Raphael both contributed to the magazine LM, which developed out of the monthly review of the Revolutionary Communist Party (RCP), Living Marxism. Global Futures appears to be one of a series of front groups generated by the political network of individuals involved with LM and the RCP to forward their political agenda.

Michael Fitzpatrick, like his brother John, was a leading member of the RCP. He frequently contributed to its monthly review Living Marxism under the alias Mike Freeman. Living Marxism later became LM, in which Fitzpatrick had a regular column.

Fitzpatrick has also contributed regularly to Spiked and has spoken at events organised by both Spiked and the Institute of Ideas (IoI), such as its Genes & Society Festival, organised in association with Pfizer. Spiked and IoI both developed out of LM.

Fitzpatrick was a member of the the joint Forum of the Social Issues Research Centre and the Royal Institution which drew up the Guidelines on Science and Health to try and 'improve' the reporting of controversial scientific issues like GM foods by the media.

Other members of the Forum included Professor Sir John Krebs FRS, the chairman of the Food Standards Agency, Lord Dick Taverne QC, the Co-Directors of The Social Issues Research Centre, and the Baroness Susan Greenfield, Director of The Royal Institution.

He has a regular column in The Lancet.

MMR

Fitzpatrick led the Medical Research Council team that concluded in 1998 that there was no risk from the MMR vaccine after Dr Andrew Wakefield claimed that patients had suffered adverse reactions from it.