You’ve probably noticed that anti-vaccination propaganda became a lot more prominent during and after the pandemic. While social media companies did take limited action to prevent the spread of disinformation, Elon Musk’s takeover of Twitter (now called X), and his advocacy of ‘free speech’, saw the grifters back with a vengeance – loud, proud, blue-ticked and fully monetised. And if there’s one thing the anti-vaccine movement loves, it’s a zombie argument (i.e. an argument that has been comprehensively refuted, but is still repeated as Truth).
Take, for example, the claim that vaccines cause Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD). The popularity of this claim is usually attributed to Andrew Wakefield, whose 1998 study in The Lancet linked the Measles, Mumps and Rubella (MMR) vaccine, specifically, with ASD. For years, the papers were full of hand-wringing pieces about the possible link, talking about separate vaccines, and many parents did not vaccinate at all. The result was a steep drop in immunisation rates.
A serious lie to hide the truth
But if you look at the graph, you’ll notice that immunisation rates recovered strongly after about 2005. This is thanks, in no small part, to the work of investigative journalist Brian Deer. His work uncovered the fact that Wakefield’s paper was “the most damaging medical hoax of the last 100 years” – an elaborate fraud paid for by lawyers seeking compensation for children whose parents believed that vaccines had caused their children’s ASD. Wakefield had not declared this conflict of interest. Nor had he declared his patent for a single measles vaccine, which he intended to market in place of the combined MMR. Nor did he receive ethics board approval for invasive tests on vulnerable children. His “callous disregard” for patients led to him, eventually, to being struck off the medical register in 2010.
And even more importantly
One thing to remember: as well as potentially leaving you blind or brain-damaged, measles kills in more than one way. It can come back years later as subacute sclerosing panencephalitis (SSPE), an untreatable and irreversible, inflammatory brain disease, that, by the time it begins to advance, is universally fatal. As the graph shows, cases of measles lag immunisation rates, and fatalities lag still further due to SSPE.
Since 1998, there have been numerous extremely large studies which have comprehensively demonstrated that there is no association between vaccines and ASD. Yet the claim persists.
Dangerous dead-end theories
One of the mechanisms by which vaccines supposedly cause ASD was the presence of “mercury” as a preservative. The argument goes that ASD looks (if you squint hard enough) a bit like the effects of mercury toxicity, therefore thiomersal, an ethyl mercury compound, is the cause. Makes sense, right? Except that, the more toxic form of mercury is methyl mercury. The difference is akin to that between ethanol, which is surely toxic but also the nation’s most popular recreational chemical, and methylated spirits, which is incredibly toxic and drunk only by fictional tramps. The mercury hypothesis led to a fad for subjecting children to chelation therapy – an unpleasant and potentially fatal treatment for acute heavy metal toxicity – leading to a regulatory crackdown. Still, out of an abundance of caution, thiomersal was removed from virtually all childhood vaccines, starting in 1999 with, as you probably guessed, no effect whatsoever on ASD diagnosis rates.
Case closed, right? Oh, wait, this is anti-vaxers we’re talking about. An anti-vaccination group hired well-known anti-aluminium crusader Christopher Exley to author an “utterly awful” study, showing that, oh, sorry, it was aluminium all along! The claim “is absurd”.
Nothing anyone can prove will change their minds
By now, the idea that vaccines cause ASD is so deeply entrenched in the anti-vaccine movement that there is probably no level of refutation that will cause them to drop it. Andrew Wakefield’s propaganda film Vaxxed: From cover-up to catastrophe, is based on an alleged cover-up by the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, where one scientist found a subgroup of children with a higher correlation between vaccination and ASD. However, the group (African-American boys vaccinated later than the normal 24 months) was too small for meaningful analysis, and in any case, it turned out that many of the boys had been vaccinated after diagnosis. Never mind that most children with ASD are white. Never mind that late vaccination is the exception. This is their ‘final clinching proof,’ and they went on tour with a bus on the outside of which parents of “vaccine-injured” children wrote their names. And, yes of course, they carefully vetted everyone to make sure it was a medically diagnosed vaccine injury? Oh, wait! No, of course they didn’t.
And the fallout of all this?
For anti-vaccinationists, the holy grail is to add autism to the schedule of compensable injuries under the US National Vaccine Injury Compensation Program, a system that offers a low-cost route to compensation for known vaccine side effects. Years of litigation, using questionable experts, has failed to deliver this. If Robert F. Kennedy Jr. succeeds with his piece of policy-based evidence making, then it will almost certainly become economically unviable to market a vaccine in the United States – and there will be knock-on effects around the globe.
Wakefield, incidentally, is doing very nicely thank you. He can’t practise medicine any more, but he lives in a mansion, has dated supermodels, and his self-serving memoir is actually titled Callous disregard, referencing the GMC findings. Tell me again, how Big Pharma is in it for the money.
PS
For the avoidance of doubt: Charlatans prey on the parents of children diagnosed with ASD. It is those charlatans who deserve our contempt, not the parents they exploit. Vaccine injuries are real, it’s just that ASD is not one of them.
