Andrew Wakefield, the former British doctor who erroneously claimed MMR vaccine causes autism, has reinvented himself as a documentary maker for the movie .
This is the cinematic offering that in New York, which intended to premiere it on 24 April but cancelled the screening amid criticism. It has since been shown outside the festival in New York and in Florida.
I have now seen Vaxxed and it should come with a warning – watching this last-gasp attempt to prop up a thoroughly discredited idea is dangerous to the health of children.
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The film also comes with a lot of baggage. Wakefield first sparked international attention and a dangerous flight from childhood vaccination with a publication in The Lancet in 1998 makingÌýhis claim about the combined measles-mumps-rubella shot.
This was based on eight children who developed autism within a month of receiving MMR. Wakefield suggested a series of improbable events to back up his conclusion. First, the triple vaccine overwhelmed the immune system, for which he provided no evidence.
No evidence
Second, because the immune system was suppressed, measles vaccine virus travelled to the intestine, reproduced itself and damaged intestinal cells. Again, given that Wakefield had performed intestinal biopsies, it wouldn’t have been hard to demonstrate such viral activity in these cells. This, too, wasn’t done.
Third, this intestinal damage opened the door to unidentified proteins capable of damaging brain tissue, which then somehow crossed an intact blood-brain barrier and damaged unidentified cerebral cells, causing autism.
The most remarkable aspect of this paper wasn’t this fanciful series of unsubstantiated events or that there were more authors than study subjects, but the fact that it was published at all. It was fully retracted in 2010 and Wakefield was struck off by the UK’s General Medical Council.
In the years since publication, more than a dozen controlled studies have found no evidence that MMR caused autism.
Unfortunately, it’s been much easier to scare people than to unscare them; hundreds of thousands of parents in the UK and the US still refuse to give their children the MMR vaccine, with outbreaks and as a consequence.
Although Wakefield has been marginalised by the medical and scientific communities and his hypothesis completely debunked, in Vaxxed he tries a new way to frighten parents.
No cover-up
According to the movie, Wakefield has been the victim of a cover-up. Apparently, a misrepresented data concerning a small subset of African American boys in Atlanta.
Wakefield claims there was a statistically significant association between having the MMR vaccine and development of autism in these children. His case is supposedly made by a whistle-blower from the CDC who was involved in this study.
There are two problems with this revelation. First, we never actually see the whistle-blower. We only hear his voice. This raises questions about and how his statements were used.
Second, the real reason for the Atlanta finding is never given in the film. African American boys in the city at the time of the study were less likely to have received the MMR vaccine than their Caucasian peers. If an African American boy was diagnosed with autism, he couldn’t get support services until vaccinated. In other words, MMR didn’t cause autism in these boys. Rather, the .
That Wakefield claims to be the victim of a deception is ironic. Perhaps Vaxxed will yet win an award, for Most Outrageous Conspiracy Theory.
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