Would you trust your kids with this man? No? I didn't think so.

Today I want to shine a bit of light on the conspiracy theorist behind the film "Vaxxed" and its recent sequel, "Vaxxed II." I'm not going to provide any links to the movie, or to describe it, except to say that it's a slickly-produced conspiracy theory masquerading as a documentary. Don't watch it.

Anti-vax activists often use conspiracy theory tactics, which work like this: they simply make up a claim, out of thin air, that a secret cabal of doctors (or government scientists, or pharma companies) is out to harm patients by giving them vaccines, and is hiding the "truth" about the risks of vaccination. Never mind how irrational this is, and never mind that there's not a shred of evidence behind it: if you try to argue with the anti-vaxxer, you're part of the conspiracy.

So rather than try to disprove something that was never proven in the first place, let's look instead at the source of the anti-vax propaganda film, "Vaxxed." The source is one man: Andrew Wakefield. Who is this guy, and why is he so obsessed with vaccines?

Wakefield was once a doctor, before he had his license revoked a decade ago. In his former life, he was a gastroenterologist, with no special training in vaccines or infectious diseases. He first gained fame–a lot of fame–for a 1998 paper in a medical journal, The Lancet, in which he claimed to have discovered a link between the MMR vaccine (that's the one that covers measles, mumps, and rubella) and autism.

Here are some things you need to know about Wakefield before watching his movie:

1. Wakefield's 1998 paper, it eventually turned out, was "an elaborate fraud." Wakefield defrauded the public, his patients, and even his own co-authors on the paper, most of whom were unaware of his elaborate conflicts of interests.
2. Before he published his 1998 study, Wakefield was hired by a lawyer, Richard Barr, who was trying to build a lawsuit against vaccine makers. Barr paid Wakefield £435,000 (equal to $750,000 US dollars at the time) to help him build his case. Wakefield's co-authors were unaware of this contract.
3. The study claimed that 8 out of 12 children had been diagnosed with autism soon after getting the MMR vaccine. It described these children as "a consecutive series" of admissions to the hospital where Wakefield worked. That was a lie. It turned out, as investigative journalist Brian Deer revealed, that all 12 children and their parents were referred to Wakefield by Barr–the lawyer who was paying Wakefield to conduct the study, and who was trying to sue vaccine makers.
4. Wakefield also falsified data on all 12 of the children in his original study.
5. Wakefield conducted "invasive and distressing procedures" on the children without approval from his hospital's ethics board.
6. After learning some of the back story, 10 of his 12 co-authors tried to retract the paper in 2004. Wakefield refused to join them, so they published a partial retraction, signed by the 10 co-authors. The Lancet itself later fully retracted the paper (over Wakefield's objections), but it took until 2010 for them to act. By then, the anti-vax movement had spread widely.
7. Prior to publishing his paper, Wakefield filed a patent claim for a "safer" vaccine for measles, one that would have profited him greatly once he discredited the (perfectly safe) MMR vaccine.
8. After losing his license in the UK, Wakefield moved to Austin, Texas where he ran an organization called Thoughtful House, through which he paid himself a salary of $280,000. (Perhaps coincidentally, Austin is now a hotbed of anti-vaccination activism.)

For more than 20 years, Andrew Wakefield has made money off false claims that vaccines cause autism, first put forth in his discredited 1998 paper. He gives talks, writes books, conducts seminars, and now makes movies, of which make him money. Since the publication of his paper, dozens of studies involving literally millions of children have shown, time and again, that vaccines do not cause autism. Wakefield has denied every one of those studies, and continues to push his bogus claims.

(Why, you might ask, have scientists conducted studies looking for a link between autism and vaccines, if there was never any evidence for such a link? The answer is simple: anti-vaxxers have been so successful at scaring people about a nonexistent threat that scientists and public health experts felt it necessary to conduct those studies, in order to reassure people. Literally millions of dollars have been spent to prove something we already knew.)

Meanwhile, measles outbreaks have appeared with increasing frequency in the U.S., the UK, other European countries, and around the world, including the deadly outbreak in Samoa late last year, which caused 5,700 infections and 83 deaths in a population of just 200,000. Wakefield's new movie was released in the middle of that outbreak.

So to anyone who watched the movie Vaxxed and is now having doubts about vaccines, I ask: would you trust your children with this man? I wouldn't.

MMR vaccine (still) doesn't cause autism, new study finds

Nope.

We’re still spending vast amounts of time and money trying to counter the ill effects of a discredited, retracted paper from 1998 that claimed to find a link between the MMR (measles, mumps, and rubella) vaccine and autism. Even after the The Lancet retracted the study, and even after the British Medical Council revoked the medical license of its lead author, Andrew Wakefield, many people continue to withhold vaccines from their children because of a fear that somehow, despite all the evidence to the contrary, vaccines might cause autism. Vaccines, I hasten to add, have saved millions of lives and are probably the greatest medical advance of the past two centuries.

Now another study has appeared to add more weight to the evidence about the safely of the MMR vaccine. The new study by Anjali Jain and colleagues, just published in the Journal of the American Medical Association, looked at a huge number of children–95,727–for evidence of any link between autism and the MMR vaccine.

The results were not surprising, to those who have been following the science. To quote the conclusions directly: 

“Receipt of the MMR vaccine was not associated with increased risk of ASD [autism spectrum disorder], regardless of whether older siblings had ASD. These findings indicate no harmful association between MMR vaccine receipt and ASD even among children already at higher risk for ASD.”

That should settle it, right? But then, dozens of previous studies should have already settled this question. Unfortunately, due to the ongoing activism of anti-vaccine groups such as Age of Autism, (who already attacked this new study) and to conspiracy theorists such as Robert F. Kennedy Jr. (whom I wrote about last summer, and who was campaigning against vaccines in Vermont just last week), misguided claims that vaccines cause autism or neurological problems persist.

Here are the numbers from the new study. The authors compared vaccinated children to unvaccinated children, using a huge database of medical claims that included at least 5 years of followup. (This was an "observational" study, by necessity–it would be unethical to withhold vaccines from children on purpose.) The relative risk for autism in children who had 2 doses of the MMR vaccine (the recommended amount) compared to unvaccinated children was 0.74. In other words, a child was somewhat less likely to be diagnosed with autism if he or she were vaccinated. 

Even more surprising was the relative risk among children who had an older sibling with autism: in this smaller group, children with 2 doses of MMR were just 44% as likely to be diagnosed with autism as unvaccinated children. This statistically significant finding indicates, unexpectedly, that vaccines might actually protect children from autism.

The authors were quick to note that there are other good reasons for this apparent protective effect of vaccines: in particular, if parents of autistic children withheld vaccines from their younger children, this could explain the effect. Why? Because we know that autism has a genetic component, and that if one child has autism, his younger sibling is more likely (because they share many genes) to have autism as well. Jain and colleagues explained that if these parents withheld vaccines–because of fears spread by the anti-vaccine movement–then their children could contribute to the apparently lower rate of autism in children who were vaccinated. The authors couldn’t rule out a protective effect of vaccines, but scientifically it seems unlikely, and they wisely offered an alternative explanation.

So: once again we have a large, carefully conducted study showing that the MMR vaccine does not cause autism, and even finding evidence that vaccinated children have lower rates of autism. Let's hope this study helps to end the anti-vax movement, so that we can soon stop spending time and money trying to refute their long-discredited hypotheses and instead focus on trying to understand the true cause.