The debunked MMR-autism paper laid the foundation for the anti-Covid vaccine movement.

Evidence

Such is the power of what doctors refer to as the “vaccine-autism myth”—the viral narrative that insists that childhood immunizations for measles, mumps, and rubella, which children start getting after their first birthday, is the cause of autism. It’s a narrative that would, in many ways, lay the foundation for what would become the anti–Covid vaccine movement. The earlier claims rely on an entirely discredited paper suggesting that the measles, mumps, and rubella (MMR) vaccine may be associated with autism (and bowel disease), published in the prestigious British scientific journal The Lancet in 1998. Twelve years later, it was retracted by its publisher, who described the claims as “proven to be false.” Ten of the paper’s thirteen original coauthors had issued a note of retraction years earlier, in 2004, based on faulty “interpretation” of the study’s data. The main author, the gastroenterologist Andrew Wakefield, was banned from practicing medicine in Britain in light of undisclosed conflicts of interest and what Britain’s General Medical Council described as his “callous disregard” for the children in his study. … Yet almost a quarter century after Wakefield’s paper first appeared, and with no further evidence supporting the claim, the myth is more prevalent than ever. It continues to be spread by a global network of Facebook groups, YouTube channels, and slickly produced documentaries that do a fair job, for those untrained in reading scientific papers, of impersonating investigative journalism. — Naomi Klein, Doppelganger, 641

Categorization

• XREF: This connects the vaccine-autism myth to Klein’s broader diagonalism thesis about wellness culture and conspiracy converging. — connects to: Wakefield’s fraudulent Lancet paper linked MMR vaccine to autism — Sander van der Linden, Foolproof: Why Misinformation Infects…, 256; The MMR-autism study was fraudulent, with recruited patients and fabricated diagnoses. — Sander van der Linden, Foolproof: Why Misinformation Infects…, 257