Personal grief over a child’s autism made a celebrity a vaccine skeptic

Evidence

In 2017, Wakefield scored an enormous public relations coup when he managed to get Robert De Niro interested in Vaxxed, an anti-vaccine documentary he had just made. (Its working title was the higher-pitched Injecting Lies.) De Niro has a son with autism, and Wakefield somehow managed to persuade him that there were open questions about vaccine safety. The Tribeca Film Festival, which De Niro cofounded, quietly added the film to its schedule, and it became clear in a series of eye-popping TV interviews that De Niro was a vaccine skeptic himself, and one of Wakefield’s biggest fans. — Anna Merlan, Republic of Lies, 511

Categorization

• CANDY: The working title of Vaxxed being ‘Injecting Lies’ is a deliciously weird nerdy tidbit for a cocktail conversation.
• XREF: connects to: Modern anti-vax activism grew from parents grieving autism diagnoses — Naomi Klein, Doppelganger: A Trip into the Mirror…, 637; Celebrity and philanthropy shielded a child abuser from scrutiny for decades — Albert Bandura, Moral Disengagement: How People Do Harm…, 572

Broader Connections

• Modern anti-vax activism grew from parents grieving autism diagnoses #exemplifies (0.85) — Naomi Klein, Doppelganger, 637
• Celebrity and philanthropy shielded a child abuser from scrutiny for decades #expands (0.72) — Albert Bandura, Moral Disengagement, 572