As Britain loses its measles-free status and cases surge worldwide, the World Health Organisation has labelled ‘vaccine hesitancy’ one of the top ten threats to global health. But campaigners claim that vaccines are unsafe, and the cause of a health catastrophe. Decades of scientific research don’t back them up. Yet their ideas not only persist, they are reaching around the globe. This programme examines the arguments of those who campaign against vaccines, and hears from people at the heart of alleged conspiracies. It also analyses how vaccine-sceptic ideas are spreading, what gives them currency, and who may be benefiting.
The UK is the home of modern vaccine scares. In the 1970s a paediatric neurologist named John Wilson believed he had seen evidence of brain damage in children following vaccination against whooping cough. His ideas were broadcast in a documentary that plunged Britain into panic. Uptake of the vaccine collapsed, followed by years of whooping cough epidemics.
Years later, exhaustive studies proved that Wilson was wrong. But by then the panic had spread to America, where lawsuits brought the pharmaceutical industry to its knees. The Reagan government passed legislation that recognised vaccine injury, and set up a special court and compensation fund. It should have been a solution, but instead it birthed the notion that the government was acting in the interests not of its citizens but of the pharmaceutical industry.
The most famous vaccine scare followed soon after: the claim by British doctor Andrew Wakefield that the measles, mumps and rubella (MMR) vaccine was linked to autism. With lessons learned from the whooping cough crisis, Wakefield’s hypothesis was swiftly investigated by scientists, journalists, and lawyers in a decade-long trial in the vaccine court. But while evidence was piling up, grassroots organisations and celebrity campaigners took their claims of vaccine danger to public rallies and onto prime-time TV shows. And a scion of the world’s most famous political dynasty, Robert F Kennedy Jr, son of Bobby Kennedy, alleged that a form of mercury used in vaccines was toxic, and that the authorities were concealing the fact.
Wakefield would eventually be discredited and struck off, and the vaccine court definitively ruled there was no connection between vaccine mercury, the MMR, and autism. But the movement that had grown up – fuelled by grassroots campaigners who felt championed by Wakefield and Kennedy – didn’t disappear.
Wakefield’s last gamble for mainstream credibility came in a movie "Waxxed" alleging a research cover-up at the highest levels of the US scientific establishment, in which documents were destroyed in a dustbin. Following public outcry the film was pulled from Tribeca Film Festival. But claims of censorship gave it an afterlife, online. Upcoming Sequel to Wakefield's anti-vaccine film https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2019/10/31/sequel-andrew-wakefields-anti-vaccine-film-released-secret-venues/
The UK is the home of modern vaccine scares. In the 1970s a paediatric neurologist named John Wilson believed he had seen evidence of brain damage in children following vaccination against whooping cough. His ideas were broadcast in a documentary that plunged Britain into panic. Uptake of the vaccine collapsed, followed by years of whooping cough epidemics.
Years later, exhaustive studies proved that Wilson was wrong. But by then the panic had spread to America, where lawsuits brought the pharmaceutical industry to its knees. The Reagan government passed legislation that recognised vaccine injury, and set up a special court and compensation fund. It should have been a solution, but instead it birthed the notion that the government was acting in the interests not of its citizens but of the pharmaceutical industry.
The most famous vaccine scare followed soon after: the claim by British doctor Andrew Wakefield that the measles, mumps and rubella (MMR) vaccine was linked to autism. With lessons learned from the whooping cough crisis, Wakefield’s hypothesis was swiftly investigated by scientists, journalists, and lawyers in a decade-long trial in the vaccine court. But while evidence was piling up, grassroots organisations and celebrity campaigners took their claims of vaccine danger to public rallies and onto prime-time TV shows. And a scion of the world’s most famous political dynasty, Robert F Kennedy Jr, son of Bobby Kennedy, alleged that a form of mercury used in vaccines was toxic, and that the authorities were concealing the fact.
Wakefield would eventually be discredited and struck off, and the vaccine court definitively ruled there was no connection between vaccine mercury, the MMR, and autism. But the movement that had grown up – fuelled by grassroots campaigners who felt championed by Wakefield and Kennedy – didn’t disappear.
Wakefield’s last gamble for mainstream credibility came in a movie "Waxxed" alleging a research cover-up at the highest levels of the US scientific establishment, in which documents were destroyed in a dustbin. Following public outcry the film was pulled from Tribeca Film Festival. But claims of censorship gave it an afterlife, online. Upcoming Sequel to Wakefield's anti-vaccine film https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2019/10/31/sequel-andrew-wakefields-anti-vaccine-film-released-secret-venues/
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