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COMMENT 15 April 2016

Warning: Wake elds anti-vax lm may make

you sick
Andrew Wake eld's documentary attempting to prop up his discredited linking of MMR vaccine
to autism is one for the conspiracy theorists, says Paul Of t

Andrew Wake eld claimed MMR was linked to autism

Peter Macdiarmid/Getty

By Paul Of t
Andrew Wake eld, the former British doctor who erroneously claimed MMR vaccine
causes autism, has reinvented himself as a documentary maker for the movie Vaxxed:
From cover-up to catastrophe.
This is the cinematic offering that sparked a storm for Robert De Niros Tribeca lm
festival 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.
The lm also comes with a lot of baggage. Wake eld rst sparked international attention
and a dangerous ight from childhood vaccination with a publication in The Lancet in
1998 makinghis claim about the combined measles-mumps-rubella shot.
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This was based on eight children who developed autism within a month of receiving
MMR. Wake eld 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 Wake eld
had performed intestinal biopsies, it wouldnt have been hard to demonstrate such viral
activity in these cells. This, too, wasnt done.
Third, this intestinal damage opened the door to unidenti ed proteins capable of
damaging brain tissue, which then somehow crossed an intact blood-brain barrier and
damaged unidenti ed cerebral cells, causing autism.
The most remarkable aspect of this paper wasnt 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 Wake eld was struck off by the UKs
General Medical Council.
In the years since publication, more than a dozen controlled studies have found no
evidence that MMR caused autism.
Unfortunately, its 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 deaths from measles as a consequence.
Although Wake eld has been marginalised by the medical and scienti c communities
and his hypothesis completely debunked, in Vaxxed he tries a new way to frighten
parents.

No cover-up
According to the movie, Wake eld has been the victim of a cover-up. Apparently, a paper
published by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) in 2004
misrepresented data concerning a small subset of African American boys in Atlanta.
Wake eld claims there was a statistically signi cant 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 whistleblower. We only hear his voice. This raises questions about whether he knew he was
being recorded and how his statements were used.
Second, the real reason for the Atlanta nding is never given in the lm. 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 couldnt get support services until vaccinated. In other words, MMR didnt
cause autism in these boys. Rather, the diagnosis of autism caused them to get the MMR
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vaccine.
That Wake eld claims to be the victim of a deception is ironic. Perhaps Vaxxed will yet
win an award, for Most Outrageous Conspiracy Theory.

Paul Of t is a professor of pediatrics in the division of infectious diseases at the Children's

Hospital of Philadelphia. He is author of Autism's False Prophets: Bad Science, Risky
Medicine, and the Search for a Cure (Columbia University Press)

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