ANDRZEJ KRAUZEAt the end of March, when the prestigious Tribeca Film Festival posted its schedule, a hue and cry arose about one of the films: Vaxxed: From Cover-Up to Catastrophe. The film was directed and co-written by none other than discredited British gastroenterologist Andrew Wakefield, who led the infamous 1998 study purporting to have established a link between autism and childhood vaccination against measles, mumps, and rubella (MMR). That highly controversial study was retracted in 2010 (a fact only briefly mentioned in the film), and Wakefield’s license to practice medicine was revoked a few months later (not mentioned in the film).
Objections to the film raised by clinicians, researchers, and others led Oscar-winning actor, producer, and festival cofounder Robert De Niro, the father of an autistic child, to cancel the Tribeca screening. But almost immediately after the cancellation, Vaxxed opened some five blocks north at the Manhattan art-film house Angelika, where it continues to play to both the curious and the small but vocal coterie of anti-vaxxers who still espouse the scientifically unfounded autism connection (one such believer is actively campaigning for a US presidential nomination).
It took 12 years and a chorus of saner voices decrying the paper before its retraction by The Lancet, even though 10 of the paper’s 13 authors had published a “retraction of an interpretation” in 2004. More specifically, it took ...
