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WillowOne's Positions

Vaccines and Autism - A Measured Response

Media

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8BIcAZxFfrc

Overview

A feature-length video essay by hbomberguy (Harris Brewis) telling the whole story of the MMR-autism scare: Andrew Wakefield's 1998 paper, the press conference that launched the panic, Brian Deer's investigation, the General Medical Council hearing, the retraction, and the measles outbreaks that followed. It also goes back to the earlier thiomersal scare in the United States and forward to the anti-vaccine movement as it stood during COVID-19. The title is a joke at the expense of the genre; the content is a sourced history.

Notes

  • The most valuable part is the demonstration of how the fraud actually worked, with the altered case histories laid side by side. It makes the point that "the study was retracted" is the weakest version of the case against Wakefield. The strong version is that the data were fabricated to support a lawsuit he was being paid to assist.
  • Brewis is careful, in a way the subject rarely gets, to be sympathetic to the parents. People who believed Wakefield were not stupid; they were told by a doctor, in a famous journal, that their child's regression had a cause and a culprit. The post hoc reasoning that MMR at twelve to fifteen months "caused" autism diagnosed at eighteen months is the most natural mistake in the world, which is why it needed a scientist to not make it.
  • Long, and the length is justified. It is the single thing I would send to someone who wants to know why the vaccine-autism claim is treated as settled.

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