Vaccines and Autism: A Measured Response

[wholesome music] [tense music] [HBOMB laughing] Don't worry. Vaccines are perfectly safe, according to me. You might notice a little prick. [laughing maniacally] Oh! Hello, and welcome back to Hell. I'm just vaccinating my profiteroles, immunizing them against the horrendous disease Known only as Not Enough Cream-itis. Unfortunately, while vaccines are great at stimulating my balls, in humans they've become quite the controversial topic. In the late '90s an anti-vaccine movement started to pick up steam claiming that they cause autism, and the movement has plenty of washed-up celebrities flushing it including what's-his-name, and that one, and some more. Here's

45th President of the United States Donald Trump coming out against medicine. He once famously twet: I mean, of course they aren't. Horses aren't even real. But if there's an entire movement of people with documentaries and web sites and Facebook pages with thousands and thousands of members backed by the former U.S. President, why does everyone else seem to think they're obviously wrong? Has the mainstream medical establishment science-cucked a majority of people into thinking they're safe so they can keep making money selling them? The vaccine debate is complex and multi-layered, and hasn't been resolved for over two

decades So obviously it needs me to come and put an end to it in the space of a single YouTube video by doing what I'm best at: destroying things with my mouth. [chewing loudly and aggressively] Oh, hi, Mum! Was I vaccinated? [Mum exhales sharply] Have you been looking into moving out lately, son? HBOMB: N-- [upbeat music] Now, the clever clogs among you will know that there was An anti-vaccine movement of sorts in the 1800s when they were first introduced, but that movement died out on its own a long time ago of small pox. The main

argument in the modern movement is that they might cause autism, so let's see what on paper this claim is supported by. Yes, I just ended a sentence with a preposition and if that annoyed you, we get it. Your school was expensive. We're all very happy for you. Part One: The Easy Version, in case you don't feel like watching This whole fucking video. [booming] In 1998, a study came out alleging a link between the MMR vaccine and autism. MMR vaccinates against measles, mumps, and rubella, which saves kids from having to get multiple painful shots and parents

from having to know what rubella is. It was published in "The Lancet," a very well-known medical journal which made it seem credible. However, the paper was eventually found guilty of being bad. The science turned out to be bonkers And multiple other studies on literally millions of children did not show that there was a link and the paper was eventually retracted by the journal that published it. [booming] So retracted that it literally has "retracted" written all across every page in big red letters. My printer just does black and white, so I've actually got an artist's impression

of the real version. So far that's some pretty shaky ground on the anti-vaccine side, but later new evidence came out that-- Oh, that's it. That's all the evidence. This segment is over now-- Part Two: The Existential Horror of-- wait, that's it? No, seriously. That's all the evidence. There is nothing else even remotely credible. There are some fringe pet theories as to what chemical in the vaccines causes the autism, but since vaccines don't cause autism, they're kind of putting the cart before the squid, here. The anti-vax movement had next to no evidence 20 years ago and

now they have even less. But hold on there, daddy-o. Sure, you can sum up the entire issue in--52 seconds, wow. But really I don't think that's good enough. Everyone who's anti-vax at this point has probably already heard and isn't convinced by the easy version. I mean, if you're on the fence about vaccines, you're not gonna change your mind because someone told you there was a paper once but it got retracted, no matter how much they pitch-shift their voice in post. [playing slowly] Bonkers! But what if you did want to change someone's mind On topics like

this? The data on this issue is discouraging. Research shows that when someone becomes personally invested in an idea they can become very closed-minded or worse: a YouTuber. Political science professor Brendan Nyhan and his team spent three years studying how over 1,700 parents reacted to various different attempts to convince them to vaccinate their children and found that no matter what they tried, parents who started out against vaccination didn't change their minds, and worse, Trying to correct false claims about vaccines actually made some parents more against vaccinating. Nyhan told "The New Yorker," "It's depressing. We were definitely

depressed." Now, as a fellow fan of logic and reason, I'm also doing great, but in today's particular-- shall we say… [flames roaring, people screaming] It's extra pressing that we figure out how to get everyone on the same page with regards to public health. So the purpose of this video isn't just to point out a group that's wrong about something. The real question is, when someone is wrong about something-- not just this-- how do you change their mind? Now, personally, I'm not sure how to do that. If it was easy for humans to change their mind

about stuff then this video wouldn't need to exist, would it? But maybe we'll find some answers by exploring what convinced people vaccines might be dangerous in the first place. We should probably begin with that old 1998 study because let's be honest: How many people on either side of this discussion have actually read it? People don't read scientific papers. They check out the blogs or videos of people who they already agree with and they tell them what the science said. And, I mean, same. I heard all the other people say the science was bad and I

believed them, and the anti-vax people probably just believed whoever told them it was true, so to be unbiased about this, let's really start at the beginning, Look at the original paper-- and that's the wrong page. Let's actually read this old paper and see what it has to say and come to an honest conclusion about its findi-- [WOMAN] Five minutes lat-- [HBOMB] What the fuck? This is why people are against vaccines? This is the worst fucking paper I've ever read in my li-- [groovy music] ♪ ♪ [HBOMB slurping from a cup] [exhales] [setting cup on table]

Right, let's talk about the study. I'm calling it "The Study" because its real title was, "Ileal-lymphoid-nodular hyperplasia, non-specific colitis, and pervasive developmental disorder in children," which is a bit of a tongue twister. I had to do a not-insignificant amount of Googling to find out whether it's pronounced ee-leal or eye-leal. Don't know why I bothered. If I got it wrong it's not like you would have noticed. The paper's lead author is Dr. Andrew Wakefield. I'm sorry. There's a mistake in my script. The paper's lead author is disgraced ex-doctor Andrew Wakefield. Wakefield is seen by many as

the founder of the modern anti-vaccine movement since he was behind the paper that started the whole thing. Let's keep an eye on that gu-- oh, fuck! The smoke machine occasionally goes off on its own for no reason and I can't be bothered to get up. The paper's supposed purpose was to investigate a connection between bowel disorders And developmental issues in children, in particular targeting signs of autism. So, first off, what's a colitis? Right, uh, hold on. [keyboard clacking] Okay, colitis is inflammation of the colon, one of the main symptoms of bowel diseases like Crohn's disease,

for example. [DEMONSTRATION WOMAN] Colitis. [HBOMB] By the way, we're gonna use words like bowel, colon, and intestine interchangeably in this video. Don't let it confuse you. They're mostly the same thing. If you're a doctor, pretend you didn't hear that. The paper says non-specific colitis because it's not looking for specific kinds of inflammation. It's looking at whatever inflammation these children happened to have and seeing how they compare because maybe they're all linked and maybe they're even linked to the autism. According to Wakefield, he just happened to notice a lot of kids with both autism and bowel

disorders and he launched the study to investigate a possible link. [fog machine hisses] [shouts] But what does all that have to do with vaccines? I mean, surely it must have found something for it to have caused all this controversy. Well, allow me to list the paper's highly scientific findings. Some of the parents of the children in the study think they remember the autism symptoms starting after the MMR vaccine. No, really. That's it. [READER] "Findings: Onset of behavioral symptoms "was associated, by the parents, With measles, mumps, and rubella vaccination." [HBOMB] For literally decades, right? I've been

hearing about this paper and I've assumed that there must have been something there. Like, something to at least explore or discuss or debunk. Everyone lost their fucking minds over it so surely there's something, and I finally go and read it, and it's just a bunch of fucking parents' opinions. There's nothing there! I can't fucking believe this! [soothing jazz music] Like, seriously, the disconnect between the attempts at real science and the stuff the parents think they remember is, like, so jarring. Like, next to colonoscopies and biopsies and graphs of urinary excretions, you'll suddenly get sentences like:

[HBOMB] A note from your mother isn't science. It's how you get out of P.E. I'm sorry, coach. I didn't really have polio. [exhales] Maybe some home decorating will relax me. I love this poster because I'm smart And now all my guests will know I'm smart. I have tons of guests. I'm a party animal. I have a charisma of at least six. [grunts] [quirky music] ♪ ♪ [grunting] ♪ ♪ I wonder why "The Economist" interviewed Contrapoints and not me. [grunts] There. Perfect. Does that look all right to you? No, Rachel, don't wave the camera. That's not

how people communicate. Page three of the study provides a table listing each child's behavioral diagnosis-- largely autism--and also what their parents identified as their exposure, the thing which-- in their opinion-- caused the diagnosis. Of course, most of them blame the vaccine. Now, while a bunch of opinions are about as useful in science as a bath made of teeth, we might as well explore how someone might end up having that opinion. [bright music] It's actually really common for us to-- actually, hey, Angie? [ANGIE] Yeah? [HBOMB] Could you draw me as a ferret, please? [ANGIE] Okay. W--why?

[HBOMB] I will not explain why. It's actually really common for us to assume two things that happened to us around the same time must be caused by one another. That's how we as ape people whose fur fell off one day think about things with our tiny, godless little monkey brains. If you ate some strange new berries and got sick that day, you're basically programmed to connect the two for the sake of your own survival. This is the one in ten times that evolutionary psychology is real. The rest are fake, Malcolm. But these correlations we make

in our heads between events aren't necessarily true. It might not have been the berries. It could have been all the budget energy drinks you import from Thailand. You know what? Maybe you can have too much Carabao. Another big problem here is how humans relate to spans of time, just like how under quarantine, you might not even notice four months passing because nothing happens anymore. If someone coughs on you today and later in the evening you start to feel a bit sick, a lot of people might remember being coughed on and assume that's how they got

it, but illnesses can take days or weeks to incubate. Maybe you don't remember the time you got coughed on two weeks ago by the guy who was delivering The last crate of energy drinks. Oh, Carabao, why is it so hard to quit you? Win football tickets? I can't wait to be in a crowd of people again! [coughing] The table claims some of the parents noticed the symptoms a few weeks, days, or even hours after getting the vaccine, but I do have to wonder how easy it is for someone to recall something as complex as the

exact date of the onset of a child's behavioral symptoms. A BBC documentary from back in the day interviewed A parent and they said on camera that their son became autistic overnight after the vaccine. [MOTHER] He had the fever, the high temp-- [MOTHER] He was never the same again. [HBOMB] Even the interviewer was like, "Literally? Literally overnight? Like, are you sure?" The signs of autism appear gradually and grow over time. When parents first take notice, there could easily be other signs they missed. Another better documentary about all this we'll get to later actually found parents who

realized they'd made This exact mistake. [NARRATOR] Stacy and Damien no longer believe that their daughter's autism was caused by MMR. After researching and remembering Rebecca as a baby, they realized that she had already shown symptoms before she was vaccinated. [HBOMB] Parents don't necessarily notice the symptoms until they're fairly obvious, but that doesn't mean the symptoms weren't there or their child wasn't autistic beforehand. I'm bringing this up because it's important to make the distinction that whenever someone describes something Like their child's first symptom, what they are really describing is the first symptom they personally noticed. Here's

a timeline of the first two years of a child's development. Statistically, the average age that symptoms of autism become noticeable to parents is around 12 to 18 months. Children in the UK receive a dose of the MMR vaccine from between 12 to 15 months. Isn't it possible that these parents are blaming a coincidental event? You can even see evidence that this happens in the paper because some of the other parents blame other totally coincidental events. One of them blames their child's autism on an ear infection they got a week before they first noticed the symptoms.

Do ear infections cause autism now? No. No, of course not, but if it was the only other thing that you remembered happening to your child, you can see how someone might end up assuming they're related. Before this study was released, there were a few very small clusters of parents that thought vaccines caused autism or other illnesses. JABS--the Justice, Awareness and Basic Support group-- wow, they really worked hard to make their name say JABS-- had been around for a few years beforehand. The founder of JABS-- Jackie Fletcher-- asserts to this day that her son suddenly became

severely autistic ten days after his MMR vaccination, And has frequently tried to sue the government and MMR manufacturers for money over it. It's important to recognize that statistically even if vaccines are perfectly safe, you're going to get a small amount of parents like her who are convinced that vaccines are harmful because they got one right before something like this happened. Before there was a scientific paper and thousands of news pieces telling them to, there really weren't that many parents of autistic children who blamed the vaccine. According to a pro-JABS piece made in May 2002 when

the scare was happening, there were thousands of members, but before all that, there were only about 30 sets of parents at best, and speaking of groups being too small to be statistically meaningful, another big problem-- or to put it another way, a small problem, is sample size. [laughs] Please hold your applause until the end. On its own, a study of a small sample size like 12 children can't prove anything about the rest of a population. I've made this point about people drawing sweeping conclusions from small studies before. However, it's important to understand sample size criticism

in the proper context. Studies on small groups happen all the time in science for a good reason. They're often called pilot studies and they're useful for figuring out how A bigger study should work in preparation for the real thing or for checking to see if there's something worth looking into in the first place. A fraction of parents of the tens of millions of children who've had this vaccine saying they think there might be a connection is at best grounds to do a better study on a bigger group of children to find out if this connection

actually exists. We're going to come back to this later because someone had the opportunity to do one of those and what they did with that opportunity is very interesting. That was an awful take. Let me do that again. In summary, the science is really bad. It's bonkers. The study even admits it doesn't prove anything at the end. [HBOMB] The next sentence is hilarious. [HBOMB] The issue being that they don't have any proof. In science it's expected to admit the limitations of your study. Papers and medical journals have high standards for what constitutes solid proof. However,

Wakefield is using this as a shield. By hiding behind the defense that he hasn't claimed to prove anything, he can then speculate about a lot of things he hasn't proved. For example, these children appear to share similar-- though non-specific-- bowel problems. I say appeared because, well, we'll come back to that, but Wakefield takes this vague collection of similar things and concludes with the theory that could make his career, that the vaccine may cause autism And it happens through the bowels. [NARRATOR] "We have identified a chronic enterocolitis "in children that may be related "to neuropsychiactric dysfunction.

"In most cases, onset of symptoms was after measles, "mumps, and rubella immunization. "Further investigations are needed to examine "this syndrome and its possible relation to this vaccine." [HBOMB] In literally the final sentences of the paper, Wakefield invents a new disease that combines bowel disorders and autism and then speculates that MMR vaccination Might cause the disease he just made up. This is absolutely buck wild, as some would put it. It's like medical fan fiction. Sure, he admitted it just may be and said we need more research to prove anything, but now his made-up disease is in

a published scientific paper in one of the most prestigious medical journals in the world. Journalists with little to no scientific knowledge go on to report on this paper as if it's discovering this new disease. [NARRATOR] Doctors at the Royal Free Hospital believe they may have discovered a link between The combination vaccine and a bowel disease that can progress to autism. [HBOMB] What are you talking about? He admitted he didn't prove anything and then wildly speculated at the end! No! There is one last really weird thing about this paper we haven't mentioned yet, which most people

don't seem to mention, which I find a little bit weird and indicates that no one has actually read it. Towards the end of the paper-- [groans] Wakefield tries to find other papers that kind of support his findings, so he really has to scrape the bottom of the barrel. [NARRATOR] "Fudenberg noted that for 15 of 20 autistic children, the first symptoms developed within a week of vaccination." [HBOMB] Wow, that's a really interesting thing to "note," isn't it? We should probably actually go read Fudenberg's paper and see what it has to say for itself. [quiet rumbling] Fudenberg's

1996 paper cited here is from "Biotherapy," A fringe journal for quacks that actually went out of business two years later. The paper is a pilot study on the effects of a substance called Dialysable Lymphocyte Extract on children with autism. In addition to alleging that several of the children had become autistic within a week of getting vaccinated-- are you ready for this? Fudenberg claimed that this extract he'd created could cure autism. [NARRATOR] "Of the 22 with classic autism, "10 became normal in that they were main-streamed in school And clinical characteristics were fully normalized." [HBOMB] "Became normal!"

Holy shit! And you wanna know something funny? You wanna know something funny? At the time that the study was published, Fudenberg didn't have a medical license! It was revoked the year before because he was caught stealing controlled substances from his job for "personal use!" The South Carolina Medical Board found him guilty of engaging in dishonorable, unethical, or unprofessional conduct. He admitted he'd done it in the hearing, too. So he got caught stealing drugs, admitted it, got fired, lost all credibility, probably wasn't even allowed within 100 yards of a stethoscope, and then a year later, he

cured autism, according to him, and you know he's trustworthy because he admitted to stealing all those medical supplies. What I'm trying to say here is, ex-doctor Hugh Fudenberg's paper is one of the most obviously bullshit things I've ever read, and Wakefield had to cite it to create a precedent for his findings. This is the best he could get. You can see why it's a bit weird no one brings this up, right? In scientific circles, everyone who read Wakefield's paper--or worse, bothered to check the sources it cited-- had, you know, a few minor concerns. It was

so concerning that The Lancet published-- in the same issue--a response to the paper. "Vaccine adverse events: casual or coincidental?" It points out numerous problems, some of which we've discussed here already, and has some words to say about fear-mongering About vaccines like this. [NARRATOR] "Vaccine-safety concerns such as that reported "by Wakefield and colleagues may snowball "into societal tragedies when the media and the public "confuse association with causality "and shun immunization. "This would be tragic because passion would then conquer reason and the facts again in the UK." [HBOMB] This commentary would probably have seemed darkly apocalyptic at

the time, but in retrospect, it was a shockingly accurate prediction. Like, they knew. They fucking warned us. So even before the paper was in the public eye, other doctors and scientists were looking at it and saying, "This ain't it, chief." Is that still a current reference? I've aged ten years in the last two weeks. Time is meaningless. But despite a lot of obvious concerns and clear weaknesses, Wakefield published the study anyway, and then--and this is weird-- he immediately held a press conference about it. This isn't something that anyone normally does in science, Especially not after

publishing a five-page study that admits it didn't prove anything. The paper was so small and its findings so insignificant that it barely even qualifies as a paper. In fact, it was published in "The Lancet" as an early report. See? The top left corner? Zoom in on it. It's--it's there. [dramatic music] You gotta be quicker on the draw than that. Holding a press conference for this is something you do if you want attention for your controversial paper, Not if you're trying to do science. And here's where the whole thing really started. During the press conference, Wakefield

pretended his study had discovered a risk so earth-shaking that the government should stop using the MMR vaccine and replace it with measles, mumps, and rubella vaccines given separately. [HBOMB] This is the moment that changed everything. Wakefield told a room full of reporters that based on his study, he felt the MMR vaccine Could be putting millions of children at risk. The mainstream media were in love with the notion that the paper had found something so they ran with it all the way into Hell. [tense music] ♪ ♪ The paper was bad, sure, but mass movements against

vaccines don't start because of the release of a paper. Like we discussed, people don't read papers. I didn't read it for, like, 20 years, and you know who else didn't read it? Every journalist who reported on it. But when a doctor publicly says the government is putting millions of children at risk with vaccine rolled out nationwide. Even if his papers are load of all shit, you gotta report on that. The possibility was too tantalizing to ignore. It's really hard to get across how unavoidable the issue was. If you even glanced at a TV or a

newspaper in the mid-2000s, it was, "MMR might cause autism," or it was, "Princess Diana is still dead." [REPORTER] Measles kills thousands Of people every year, but today questions about the vaccine. [REPORTER] Vaccination could be linked to a new side effect, a combination of bowel disease and autism. [HBOMB] Hundreds of articles, news pieces, and documentaries were made about the potential significance of this study. They rarely show or discuss the contents of the paper itself, but the doctor behind it came out against MMR! There's a potential link! There's a potential link, everybody! Panic! And you know what

happens when every news resource is screaming about the potential risks of a vaccine? You make millions of people terrified to vaccinate their children. I was growing up during the MMR scare, and the main thing I remember from the TV news at that time was big shots of pointy needles and children screaming as they get given an injection and ominous voice over saying, "Oh, these vaccines might be dangerous." It's almost like TV deliberately scares people for ratings because that's how this works. That's the entire point. If you want to know why thousands of parents think MMR

gave their children autism, it's not because they came to that conclusion on their own. We've seen how, before all of this reporting happened, only a teeny tiny minority of parents made the connection between autism and the vaccine. They could only find seven parents of autistic children who blamed MMR in the original study, even. The only thing that changed was how many news outlets Were telling everyone the vaccine might cause it. After years of the media telling them it could have been the jab, some parents started to believe it. [JOURNALIST] The symptoms started to appear when

he was two, soon after he had his MMR. [HBOMB] His parents didn't believe it was a coincidence because every news resource was telling them it might have something to do with the vaccine and trusting that the media had done the work and knew what they were talking about. They believed what they were being told. The end result of publications and broadcasts like this was a lot of concerned parents, a lot of unvaccinated children, and a whole lot of new cases of measles. [JOURNALIST] With inoculation rates falling to dangerous levels-- [JOURNALIST] In Ireland, the debate over

MMR has been fueled still further by a measles outbreak which killed three children. Whatever the official evidence, which rejected a link between MMR and autism, fewer parents were prepared to take a risk. [HBOMB] I wonder why that might be. Could it be because every time you turned on the television, there's footage of a screaming child with a needle in its arm? Once literally every other doctor had come out saying, "Look, there's no proof. Please stop doing this," a lot of journalists got really defensive suddenly and started putting out pieces like, "No, I will not stop

reporting scare-mongering bullshit!" Wait, the same journalist wrote both of these. She just spent, like, six months of her career complaining about people criticizing her. Amazing. So, what was Andrew Wakefield doing during all this? Well, he was getting interviewed nonstop and having clips played in almost all of these news pieces. He was like a celebrity, especially to the growing list of parents newly convinced by the media's reporting that he'd discovered why their children had autism. For a couple of years, Andrew Wakefield was the sort of guy who you filmed in slow motion in black and white.

Holy shi-- Wakefield used his time in the spotlight to spread even more doubt about MMR and continued to repeat the recommendation that parents get separate vaccines instead. At the press conference, in interviews in the aftermath, and four whole times on a 23-minute video tape he sent to journalists, he claims he thinks separate vaccines would avoid the risk of autism. [JOURNALIST] Andrew Wakefield says he appealed to the chief medical officer more than six months ago to give worried parents the option Of the single vaccine. [ANDREW] My recommendation has been that children should continue to be vaccinated

but to separate the vaccines. There is sufficient anxiety in my own mind that with the safety-- the long-term safety of the polyvalent--that is the MMR vaccination and combination-- uh, that I think that it should be suspended in favor of the single vaccines. There is sufficient anxiety in my own mind that it would be sensible to divide them into separate doses. There is sufficient anxiety that the parents must have a choice of how they protect their children. [HBOMB] It's really kind of interesting that while the modern anti-vaccine movement insists that all vaccines are dangerous in some

way, the guy who started the fear and anxiety that led to this was pro-vaccine. [ANDREW] We advocate vaccination. This is not anti-vaccine in any way. [HBOMB] He was really specific about the fact that he thought parents should keep vaccinating, just that they should use alternatives to MMR. [ANDREW] The single vaccines are likely in this constec-- uh, context to be safer. [HBOMB] Remember that disease he speculated about at the end of his paper? That there might be some kind of bowel disorder caused by MMR that then leads to autism? This came up in the media a

lot as well. [JOURNALIST] Could the MMR jab be causing a strange new kind of bowel disease that was turning the children autistic. [ANDREW] Measles, mumps, and rubella given together may be too much for the immune system Of some children to handle. There is a--a bowel disease, a new syndrome associated with regressive autism and that that may be related to MMR. [HBOMB] Eventually he even came up with a name for it: Autistic Enterocolitis. Wakefield's theory when he tries to explain it is that the almost dead measles virus present in the MMR vaccine can get stuck in

the intestine somehow causing all that inflammation they apparently found in the study-- more on that later-- which leads to it not digesting certain foods Like bread and milk properly, turning them into--his words-- a morphine-like substance which then leaks out of the bowel and into the brain causing autism. [ANDREW] Morphine-like substances from the gut that you and I produce in our diet from milk and wheat are actually getting access through that leaky gut into the developing brain. [HBOMB] This theory is, uh, very strange. One of the many strange things about it is that it specifically implicates

the measles part of the vaccine. If measles, when it's in a vaccine, can cause a syndrome that leads to autism, How could you possibly be so certain that the separate vaccine for measles would be safe? [ANDREW] The risk of this particular syndrome developing is related to the combined vaccine--the MMR-- rather than the single vaccines. [HBOMB] Okay, sure, but why? On what basis are you saying that, Andy? How could a doctor so easily make that recommendation? [ANDREW] And it may be that giving the measles on its own reduces the risk of this particular syndrome developing. [HBOMB]

He just keeps saying it! [ANDREW] My opinion, again, is that the monovalent-- The single vaccines, measles, mumps, and rubella-- are likely in this consten-- uh, context to be safer than the polyvalent vaccine. [JOURNALIST] That's the MMR vaccine? [HBOMB] There's actually a real reason why he recommended the separate vaccines so much. Uh, we'll get to that later. Here's the one example I could find of an interview asking him to explain himself. [INTERVIEWER] But even supposing the measles element of the MMR vaccine had deposited the virus in the intestinal tissue of these children, A single jab of

measles might do the same. [ANDREW] Theoretically, it might. [INTERVIEWER] But you're advocating a jab-- single jabs instead of MMR. [ANDREW] I said theoretically. [HBOMB] Oh, only theoretically. Well, that's fine, then. What a great scientist. [INTERVIEWER] But if you say it may do, then how can you advocate a single jab of measles even if there's only a theoretical possibility that it might damage, uh, a child? [ANDREW] While that question mark exists, at the very least, Parents deserve a choice for how they protect their children against these infections, whether it be with the-- the MMR vaccine or

whether it is with a single vaccine. [HBOMB] He always finds a way to pivot back to how in the midst of all of these questions and concerns-- which he started--parents should at least have the option of a separate vaccine. Honestly, you'd think he was some kind of salesman for alternative vaccines. Autistic Enterocolitis is not-- and has never been-- accepted as real by Gastroenterology, The field specializing in the stomach and intestines. But an ordinary person-- or worse, a journalist-- might not understand it enough to know that it doesn't make sense. So of course it got reported

as an interesting new idea. [NARRATOR] It was a bold and controversial theory. [HBOMB] That's an interesting choice of words. This piece by that really defensive lady Melanie Phillips--one of the most well-paid journalists in Britain at the time-- is still continuing to spread it in this very article about being criticized for spreading it. She calls it a "unique gut-brain disease." When you imagine a new disease, of course it's gonna sound unique, Melanie. No red flags popping up around the fact that no disease has ever functioned like this before? No? Fucking hell! This completely unprove-- "unique, bold,

and controversial" theory was irresistible to Phillips, a "Bigot of the Year" award-winning writer famous for also denying climate change, calling Obama an Islamist, describing a group of liberal Jews as "Jews for genocide," And opposing both Irish independence and gay rights, which she dismissed as an attack on the traditional family by cultural Marxism. It's not shocking that Phillips was wrong about MMR. It's her job to be wrong about everything. The truly shocking thing about this is that for once the entire rest of the British media were on the same side as her, uncritically regurgitating everything Wakefield

said to millions of people. This completely irresponsible reporting caused fear, Vaccine hesitancy, kick started an anti-vaccine movement that's still here today, and resulted in the deaths of children from completely preventable diseases. And that's the tea, sis. [slurps] There's real liquid in there. I'm not doing a bit. I will spill it if I try and show it to you. I'm sorry, but there's--look. See? It's real. It's not tea, though. It's coffee. I'm not a farmer. Perhaps the only thing more frustrating than seeing the media do everything it can to push pseudoscience was how everyone actually addressed

the topic of autism. Autism is a complex condition we still don't fully understand with many variations and symptoms and severity, but the media never mentioned that. They deliberately went looking for the most severe and extreme cases they could find and then filmed them to exploit for television. Children who couldn't communicate verbally Or had severe physical disabilities as well. The intent to make the "MMR question" as serious as possible resulted in an almost pornographic obsession with suffering children. They went out of their way to portray autism as a horrific tragedy that it's worth risking a disease

to avoid, and yeah, measles is a disease. Like, it kills people. It can cause incredibly severe complications that are with people for life. We as a society are no longer really aware of just how dangerous measles can be because we don't see all those complications as much because of vaccinations. Measles, mumps, and rubella are legitimately dangerous and potentially life-threatening diseases and it says a lot about how we think about neurodivergence that it's worth risking that to avoid being autistic to some people. Hell, I was in Waitrose a few months ago. I never shop there but

I pretend to so I can use their unnecessarily massive parking space, and I saw them selling a magazine With this on the cover. "Reignite your child's brain with alternative treatments." What they mean there is, "alternatives to treatment." This is not how a healthy society discusses its people. Autistic people have to navigate a world that refuses to accommodate them in the slightest to the point they're regularly confronted with the idea other people think their brain has gone out. Come on. Get it together, Waitrose. You're the up-market upper class rich people supermarket. You're supposed to be the

smartest. What's going on there? The only thing that needs igniting here is your fucking shops. Did we get clearance to say that? Okay, that was a joke. While the MMR scare was at its height, the entire media landscape was a unified front in saying wrongly that autism is the worst fate imaginable for a child and much worse than dying of measles. So a lot of kids didn't get vaccinated. Then again, it wasn't all bad. Some parents just vaccinated their children for measles, mumps, and rubella separately. Which, by the way, was pretty expensive. [JOURNALIST] But they

don't want their child to have MMR. They'd rather pay for single vaccines at £60 a shot. [HBOMB] 60 quid? By jolly, gov'na! Imagine millions of parents wanting an expensive alternative vaccine because all of a sudden a study had come out saying that the regular one might cause autism and a prominent scientist was cautioning against it! [JOURNALIST] He'd urged the government To split MMR into separate vaccines. [ANDREW] Giving the measles on its own reduces the risk of this particular syndrome developing. [HBOMB] Why, whoever was producing and selling the alternative vaccine would be in for a fucking

gold mine, wouldn't they? They'd make an absolute fortune! Here's the funny thing about that. Part four: Andrew Wakefield is a Lying Conman who wanted your mone--oh, sorry. That puts me at risk of libel, doesn't it? Hold on. Let's revise that. [keyboard clacking] Part 4: In My Opinion, Andrew Wakefield is a Lying Conman Who Wanted Your Money. So we have Wakefield's paper and the implication that MMR might cause autism in there, and you have Wakefield saying, "Hey, get separate vaccines." You and I can both agree that there might be a conflict of interest there if-- if

Wakefield was selling an alternative vaccine, right? We can all agree that would be fucked up, wouldn't it? Here's Wakefield's patent on an alternative measles vaccine. This little piece of shit was filed six months before the study was released, so, uh, what's going on there, Andy? Something you want to tell us, buddy? [booming] It's time to introduce someone new to the story. Brian Deer is an award-winning investigative reporter with a long history of exposing medical fraud, specializing in the pharmaceutical industry, and the perfect sort of person for the middle Of this health scare. Deer was one

of the few journalists who didn't simply accept what Wakefield was saying at face value and thought to dig a little deeper into the study and what he was really up to. Deer called the hospital Wakefield worked at with some basic questions, the kind that Wakefield apparently wasn't used to getting. Within three hours of doing so, Wakefield's publicist--you know, doctors hiring publicists to promote them. That happens all the time-- had made a complaint about Deer to the newspaper he worked at. Deer, of course, only grew more interested. His eventual 2004 documentary-- "MMR: What They Didn't Tell

You--" is the better documentary I mentioned before, and by better I mean blew the doors off of Andrew Wakefield's whole scheme. It was Deer who discovered Wakefield's patent. Let's take a look at that patent now. [NARRATOR] "The present invention relates "to a new vaccine/immunization for the prevention And/or prophylaxis against measles virus infection." [HBOMB] Now, I'm not a big time science-talking fancy guy, but this sounds a little bit like a measles vaccine. The patent was submitted in June, 1997 so Wakefield had done most of the study and then rushed to patent a method of making a

competing vaccine he could sell later, and guess what? If you look closely at the patent, you can see a familiar name on there next to Wakefield's. Remember Hugh Fudenberg? The quack who thought he could cure autism after having His medical license revoked? His name is also on the patent! He's credited as a co-inventor of this vaccine! Fudenberg's company-- the very real and legitimate-sounding Neuro Immuno Therapeutics Research Foundation-- is listed on the patent along with a business address. In the documentary where he revealed the existence of this patent, Brian Deer went to that address to try

to find Fudenberg and discovered the company had already shut down and the building had become a real estate agency. Looking that address up now it appears to be a hairdresser's. [BRIAN] Doesn't look like one of America's premiere research foundations. [HBOMB] When he did find him, Deer asked Fudenberg about the whole thought-he-could-cure-autism thing and, well, I-- [laughs] [dramatic music] [HBOMB] Just to quickly remind you, this man is the co-inventor of Wakefield's alternative vaccine. You know what? You got me. Vaccines might be dangerous! And just in case it wasn't extremely obvious what a hasty fucking scam Wacky-field

and his one friend who agreed with him were putting together, F--Fudenberg's name is spelled wrong on the patent! The other inventor of this vaccine besides Andrew "Jeremy" Wakefield is one Hugh Fundenberg. Nice one, Jeremy. By 1999, Wakefield was the director of several medical businesses. Immunospecifics Biotechnologies, LTD, and Carmel Healthcare, LTD, named after his wife at the time. She later divorced him. He started shopping these companies around for investors based on the very convenient patent he'd got right before the health scare he caused. But in addition to the vaccine, Wakefield had another product in mind. If

Autistic Enterocolitis turned out to be real-- big if there, I know-- that would mean there would be a completely new market In the form of testing for this new disease. Wakefield planned on producing and selling diagnostic kits meant to test for Autistic Enterocolitis. A private and confidential prospectus for potential investors acquired by Brian Deer claimed: [HBOMB] Describing the target audiences as: [HBOMB] These prospectuses also calculated how much these businesses would be worth. [HBOMB] Adjusting for inflation, that upper estimate is about $72 million. If you think that's bad, years earlier, he estimated a much larger number

To the for-profit branch of the Royal Free Medical School. £72.5 million per year-- almost $200 million in today's money. In an inventor school investor meeting document that Deer obtained, Wakefield teased they could charge premium prices for the technology he intended to develop. Wakefield also became director of a third business, Unigenetics, LTD., in the Irish Republic. Wakefield applied for and was successfully given £800,000-- More than $2 million today-- in government funding to begin developing the test, and this is all on top of how much money Wakefield would get if he managed to get the funding to

manufacture his alternative vaccine. Companies like Axcan Pharma in Canada were paying to fly him out to discuss his business plans. According to Brian Deer, he was also negotiating a consultancy with Johnson & Johnson and developing connections with both Merck and SmithKline Beecham. This guy was sure he was gonna be rolling in money. I wonder if this might point to a financial incentive to discredit MMR. [inhales deeply] Hmm… [screams] Watching Wakefield repeatedly push for getting alternative vaccines "just in case" is really chilling to watch now. You have to watch him sit there and create demand for

his planned future products, and no one watching knows what he's up to. They think he's a doctor just asking questions about MMR. No wonder he wasn't anti-vaccine. He wanted you to buy his! That said, there were a few roadblocks to the success of these businesses. The first is that Autistic Enterocolitis is a fake disease he just made up, which means it's very hard to invent a test for it. [booming] In Ireland at Unigenetics, Wakefield brought in a colleague, John O'Leary, to try to get the testing kits to work. O'Leary claimed his test could find measles

virus In the bowels of autistic children. [JOURNALIST] He'd found measles virus in most of the samples he'd tested from children with autism and bowel disease. [HBOMB] This is the closest Wakefield or any of his cohorts would ever come to proving Autistic Enterocolitis exists, but this quickly fell apart. Every other lab that tried to recreated his results found the same thing. The only way his equipment could get the results he was getting Is if there was contamination or if his machine had been calibrated wrong. It turned out later it was both! Test tubes that didn't have

measles in them tested positive for measles. O'Leary had an 11.1% stake in Immunospecifics, the company which would be selling the kits which would have made him incredibly rich if the test had eventually worked, but strangely he stopped being able to get these results once people started scrutinizing his work, so that's £800,000 Of tax payer money down the drain. The second problem was that potential investors who looked into this alternative vaccine even slightly would notice that the guy who co-invented it was a doctor who had just been fired and thought he could cure autism using his

fucking bone marrow! So I guess what I'm saying is there was a slight delay in finding people willing to fund it. Finally as Wakefield tried to launch his businesses, there was a critical shake-up at the hospital he was working at. While many of the Royal Free Hospitals Higher-ups were fans of Wakefield's controversial paper and the attention it brought to the hospital and medical school, and some of them were even involved directly with his new businesses, in late 1999, the school got a new head of medicine named Mark Pepys. Pepys was a specialist in fields close

to what Wakefield was speculating about in his papers, and like most scientists who knew anything about the subject, could tell something was up. Wakefield was sent a letter voicing concerns about The scientifically unjustified basis of the work the companies were doing along with the incredibly obvious conflicts of interest happening here. You know, you kinda have a vested interest in proving a link between vaccines, bowel disorders, and autism, when you intend to make millions of pounds off it. Even then, they volunteered to support Wakefield more but not in the way he wanted. Remember that thing I

said about pilot studies? I'm sure you do. You have a good memory. I really respect that about you. They offered to continue employing him but only if he undertook a new, much bigger study to actually explore the original study's findings properly. He was offered help with a study on 150 patients to confirm what he had only really speculated about so far with a study of 12. [HBOMB scoffs] "Autistic Enterocolitis" is in quotes. They don't believe him. It's great. This would be any legitimate scientist's dream. The freedom and support to fully explore a hypothesis and discover

the truth. Wakefield agreed to perform the study but then he never actually did it. Pepys would later go on to say Wakefield was "a wanker and a fraud." Eventually in 2001, after repeatedly ignoring calls to do the study he'd agreed to do, he was told to leave. Check out this article all about-- oh, I love journalism! [JOURNALIST] Last November, Andrew Wakefield left the Royal Free Hospital by mutual agreement. [HBOMB] Capitalizing on his perceived reputation with the public as a man who had discovered a link between vaccines and autism, Wakefield said: [HBOMB] This was meant to

sound conspiratorial like, "They let me go because I'm making MMR look bad," but it seems like he was just unpopular with people because they could tell he was a fraud, and a wanker. At this point, Wakefield's career as far as real medicine was concerned was over and his businesses failed to get off the ground because he no longer had any legitimacy left. What pharmaceutical company or other investor is gonna give money to a doctor who just got fired for refusing to prove the thing he's trying to get funding for even exists? In 2003, Deer's investigation

was in full swing and beginning to uncover all of this. He also made a really interesting discovery about something that took place during the original study. You know that whole Autistic Enterocolitis thing? Both his theories about MMR's danger and his new businesses making testing kits For the disease rested on being able to find the measles virus in the intestines of children with autism. [ANDREW] The question we've been asking, is measles virus present in the intestine of these children? The BBC documentary covered this search extensively with Wakefield saying in an interview that proving it was there

would require finding the RNA of the virus in tissue samples. [ANDREW] The gold standard now is to find the gene of the virus in there. [HBOMB] The big deal here is if Wakefield can't find the gene of the virus then his theory is wrong. In these interviews, Wakefield is trying to imply that they've only just started looking for the virus so they haven't found it yet but that's okay. They've only just started looking, right? This turned out to be a lie. Deer discovered that Wakefield had already looked for it and it's not there! Dr. Nick

Chadwick worked on Wakefield's paper and was a specialist on methods of finding measles RNA In tissue samples. Wakefield actually helped co-author some of his work, so of course Wakefield had Chadwick look for measles RNA in the tissue samples taken from the children in the study. These were the children Wakefield was sure must have measles somewhere in their guts since he was blaming their autism on it. However, when he looked, he never found any measles whatsoever. [HBOMB] This means that Wakefield already knew before he even published the paper that measles couldn't Be found in the guts

of autistic children. [Brian] Dr. Wakefield's theory was that it was measles virus itself that was responsible for a bowel disease and then leading on to some kinds of autism and you found no measles virus? [NICK] That's correct. [HBOMB] The final published version of the 1998 study doesn't have Dr. Chadwick's name on it even though he did a lot of work for it. Chadwick later wrote in a signed declaration that he specifically asked for his name to be left off the paper because he wasn't comfortable With how Wakefield was still pushing his theory even though he'd

found zero positive tests for measles. By this point he was already planning to launch a business selling testing kits based on this theory, so he ignored the work in his own lab that disproved him and kept saying he thought measles could cause a bowel disease that leads to autism and kept looking there for measles for years afterwards. The BBC documentary is about his hunt for the measles virus because even four years after launching his paper, He still hadn't found anything else to back up what he was saying. I actually have to give some credit now

to this BBC documentary. Even though they mostly side with Wakefield and assume he's going to find the proof soon, there is one segment where the interviewer's like, "Wait a second!" [INTERVIEWER] Shouldn't you have proved it before you said it? [ANDREW] As I say, proof may be 10, 15 years away in terms of definitive scientific proof. [INTERVIEWER] So shouldn't you have waited? [ANDREW] No. [HBOMB] Obviously after discovering all this, Brian Deer had even more questions for Wakefield, which Wakefield was continuing to avoid. [BRIAN] I've been trying now to speak with him for a year. We even

wrote but he didn't reply. [HBOMB] Deer eventually just went to an autism conference Wakefield was speaking at. After his presentation, Deer approached him with questions. [HBOMB] There's something kind of cathartic about just How guilty Wakefield acts here. Like, he's happily hanging around after his talk casually answering questions from concerned parents and other reporters and then the instant he recognizes Brian Deer-- the guy he's been actively avoiding for over a year--he turns and leaves the room as fast as he can. Wakefield's only defense against his clear financial incentive to discredit MMR is to run away and

hope you leave him alone, and since Deer clearly wasn't doing that, Wakefield decided to escalate. A few months after this footage of him heroically running away like a baby from basic inquiry was broadcast, wacky Andy filed a defamation lawsuit against Channel 4, who produced the documentary, "The Sunday Times" who published some of Deer's reporting, and additionally he sued Brian Deer's personal web site, briandeer.com. Can you imagine being that petty? In 2004, ten of the paper's original 13 authors came forward to publicly retract the interpretation section of the paper. Half a decade after its publication, a

vast majority of the people who worked with Wakefield on his paper have gone on record to say they think his conclusions are bollocks. At this point Wakefield's study's coffin has fallen through the floor from the sheer weight of all the nails that have been hammered in it. So that's the foundational study of the anti-vaccine movement: a hack fraud's bullshit paper claiming that a handful of parents knew better than all doctors so he could sell an alternative competing vaccine that he patented, W--which he thought he was gonna make millions selling! The evidence against the movement can't

get much worse than that, can it? That was a joke! Part Five: It Gets Much Worse. Brian Deer didn't stop there. Wakefield was trying to sue him to get him to stop digging, and guess what? One of the first rules of investigative reporting is that if they try and sue you for finding things out, you're probably onto something. [BRIAN] I mean, he brought me into the story via virtue Of the fact that years ago he sued me. [HBOMB] He discovered that two years before the paper was published, Wakefield had been hired by a lawyer to

conduct the study. The lawyer, Richard Barr, had realized there was potentially millions and millions of pounds in bringing a class action lawsuit against MMR manufacturers on behalf of parents of autistic children, but since there was no actual evidence the vaccine did this, He paid Wakefield to find some. Wakefield charged Barr £150 an hour for the time he spent working on the study, eventually totaling over £435,000. In today's money that's more than $1.1 million. This was more than eight times his yearly salary at his job at the hospital. Six months before "The Lancet" published the study,

Barr sent Wakefield a letter saying--and I quote-- actually, I got Shaun to say it. [HBOMB] Oh, okay. This whole thing was bullshit, wasn't it? And hey, remember JABS? JABS was involved with the lawsuit and it turned out their members helped to recruit many of the parents to the study in the first place. I swear to God, this isn't one of the joke logos we made. This is actually the header on their Facebook page, this low resolution shitty nightmare. Jackie Fletcher, the founder of JABS, was also a litigant in the lawsuit. They needed her connections to

the dozen or so other parents who actually blamed MMR to be able to do all of this. Some of the parents were even involved with the lawsuit, too. It's kind of clever, if you think about it. A couple of parents blamed vaccines for their child's autism and wanted to sue its manufacturer, but there was no evidence it wasn't just a coincidence, so they told their opinions to a doctor their lawyer had hired who would then report those opinions in a paper, and now in court, you can say there's scientific evidence implying a link between vaccines

and autism, Even though the link is just those opinions from before. There's probably a word for this trick. Idea laundering? I dunno. Not all of the parents knew the study was being done to help a lawsuit, but they were all chosen deliberately. However, like we explored earlier, not many parents in 1996 blamed vaccines for autism, so they had to cast a wide net to even find the couple of parents they did. Child 11 wasn't even from England. He was from California. If a contact of JABS or Richard Barr thought you might suspect vaccines made your

child autistic, you and your child were being flown around the world to take part in this study, and even then, some of the parents still turned out not to blame the vaccine. I cannot stress enough what a fucking shambles this paper was. Most of the other doctors working on the study had no idea the guy running it had been paid hundreds of thousands of pounds to discredit MMR. According to Chadwick's later testimony, Wakefield worked separately with each individual scientist Working on the study instead of bringing them all together which would have been the normal thing

to do. This afforded Wakefield a good level of secrecy about his motives. The other scientists must have largely thought they really were looking into a connection between autism and bowel disorders in children. So even the doctors and scientists involved were being lied to and tricked into lending their time and effort to a study being done To help a lawsuit make some lawyers a lot of money. Once all of this came out, Wakefield was, medically-speaking, fucked. While he'd been asked to leave his post years earlier, he still had a license to practice medicine in the UK,

but amidst all of these discoveries, the General Medical Council began a fitness to practice hearing against Wakefield, going through the records of the study to evaluate whether his behavior had been ethical. [JOURNALIST] The row he started dominated the headlines. Now his conduct--not his views-- will be making the news. [HBOMB] This hearing would go on to last for 217 days making it the longest in General Medical Council history and longer than the O.J. Simpson trial. This is Wakefield's only legitimate achievement. He made such a fucking mess, it took that long to pick through it all. Meanwhile,

remember when Wakefield sued Brian Deer? This would turn out to be the worst mistake he ever made in his life. [gavel clacks] Because Wakefield's libel case was related to accusations of what he did during his study, that meant that the records of what happened in the study Were evidence in the case now. I mean, how else were they gonna prove it was libel or not? The judge agreed that Deer had to be granted access to the confidential un-redacted medical records of the children from the study. By trying to sue a journalist into shutting up, Wakefield

had accidentally given him permission to see everything. Deer recalls being sat in a room with his lawyer reading the medical records of the children and other records of what happened in the study while Wakefield's legal team were rushing to get a cab To take them to the courthouse so they could drop the suit and stop him reading it as fast as they could. [engine revs, booming] Deer got home that night to a call from his lawyer saying the case-- [Windows update chimes] New firmware available? Thanks, Windows. Deer got home that night to a call from

his lawyer telling him the case was over, and as a fun bonus, because of how lawsuits work in the UK, Wakefield had to pay Deer's legal costs, the check for which Deer keeps proudly displayed On his website, but Deer wasn't done yet. Wakefield had just dropped a lawsuit to stop him finding things out. [BRIAN] But in the context of that lawsuit, a great deal of information was disclosed to me by Wakefield's lawyers and it was quite clear I had to continue. [HBOMB] Deer continued his research and also attended many of the GMC's hearings about Wakefield's

conduct which discussed many of the same records he just dropped a lawsuit to hide, and based on all of this, He put the pieces together and figured out exactly what happened during the study. The result of his work is an absolutely incredible series of articles first published in the British Medical Journal. [Windows update chimes] There's another fucking firmware-- why is there so much firmware? Deer figured out who some of the previously-anonymous parents of the children in the study were and showed some of them what the study said about their children And it turned out the

paper was lying. For example, he showed the medical records to the father of child 11. [BRIAN] And he looked at the paper and he just looked at what it said about his own child and he said, "That's not true." And that was, uh, one of the parents of one of these children in the paper. [HBOMB] In a correspondence with Deer, he literally wrote: [HBOMB] He told Deer Wakefield had said his son was the 13th child they'd looked at And wasn't included in the paper, and that's why none of the information in the study seemed to

describe his son. According to Brian Deer, Wakefield had rewritten his son's medical history and lied to him to cover it up, and this wasn't the only parent who had their story changed by Wakefield. You see, for the study to be useful in Barr's lawsuit, they needed to establish a "temporal link" with the vaccine. Since this is the age autism usually develops, They needed it to be within 14 days, and if possible, even closer. I mean, otherwise it might seem like it was just a coincidence, which it is, but like child 11, the onset of autism

wasn't convenient enough in almost any of the other children. The table suggests that eight of the 12 children's parents claimed the symptoms happened within 14 days but according to Brian Deer's reporting from the Medical Council hearings, many of the parents never said this, and most of the children's medical records put Their symptoms starting way after this time period with some of them showing symptoms of what could have been autism before they were vaccinated. Almost every child's autistic symptoms either started way too late to be useful in the lawsuit or way too soon. Wakefield just lied

and changed the times and allegations of the parents around until the paper said what he needed it to say. This is the thing that makes so much of what he said during the scare really fucking infuriating. Like, he would constantly bring up how he was just listening To the parents and reporting what they were saying. [ANDREW] We believe--we trust in the parents' story. [HBOMB] If you think there was a problem with my shitty study, you're calling all of those parents liars. How dare you? [ANDREW] When they say to you, "I believe my child regressed after

the MMR vaccine," do you take that seriously or not? Damn right, you do. Damn right, you do. [HBOMB] He got all high and mighty about how you need to believe the parents when he had made up most Of what the parents had said, and the media fucking ate it up, too. [JOURNALIST] Andrew Wakefield is one of the few doctors to listen to parents who believe their children were damaged by MMR. [HBOMB] He's the only doctor who listens to the lies that he wrote for a lawsuit he was being paid to help with. Fucking hell! Remember

that new syndrome Wakefield came up with? Now we know why he did that. To pursue a class action lawsuit against the vaccine's manufacturers and convince the court Of the vaccine's danger, to quote a judge, "Barr needed it to cause a distinct and specific clinical syndrome." If all the kids just had random bowel disorders, there wouldn't be a clear enough link to the vaccine, but if they all had a fancy new disease he could argue they were all caused by the same thing. Wakefield invented Autistic Enterocolitis which he repeatedly called a genuinely new syndrome in the

media so the lawsuit could justify itself. Of course, to do this, All the children's bowel disorders would have to actually look similar enough that they could reasonably be called the same thing. The paper listed 11 of the 12 children having some form of non-specific colitis creating the illusion that they all had a similar disorder. According to the actual medical records, only three of them had any major inflammation whatsoever. The study had a pathologist on board to determine what sort of bowel diseases the children had. When she and her team ruled out colitis in over half

of the children, Which would obviously have been bad for the lawsuit, Wakefield brought in a second pathologist who had worked with him before to run the tests again. When the second pathologist didn't even make mention of colitis in his reports, Wakefield ignored both of them and just wrote in the paper that 11 of the 12 children had similar non-specific colitis. Wakefield went over the heads of everyone on his team who didn't find any colitis and decided by himself that all the children had a special new gut disorder that causes autism! What the fu-- [echoing] But

that's not all! You know how most of the children in the study were diagnosed with a form of autism and how, like, that's the entire point, that most of them had autism? Like, that's the whole thing? [inhales sharply] Well, it turns out that some of the children reported as autistic in the study didn't even have autism! [DEATH STAR GUY] Standing by. [booming] [HBOMB] Child seven was never diagnosed With autism before, during, or after this study. He was referred to the study because child six-- his brother--was diagnosed with autism. Wakefield reported that this child was also

autistic and started showing signs of autism 24 hours after being vaccinated! I mean, why not if you're just making shit up, right? Child 12 had also never been given an autism diagnosis. The developmental specialist who diagnosed them said they had: But did not diagnose them with autism. Wakefield, who, just to remind you, is a gut surgeon with no Psychiatric expertise whatsoever, decided this was enough for him to say they were autistic, and since their parents didn't blame the vaccine, he said: And made sure to mention the child had MMR at 15 months just so you

know it started soon after the vaccine even though the parents didn't blame it. Oh, and while he was there, he diagnosed them with chronic non-specific colitis, too. You can see why Wakefield dropped his lawsuit as fast as he could when Deer got permission to read these, right? This is likely why he never did the larger study when he was asked to. Once this fraudulent paper was out, all the extra attention and scrutiny he gained would have made it impossible to lie and get away with it again. To this day, no attempt to recreate Wakefield's findings

has ever succeeded. The paper that started the obsession with the connection between autism and vaccines was a total fraud, Crafted by a lawyer and the opportunistic doctor who he bought, and in the last 20 years, data from millions and millions of children all over the world indicates no link whatsoever. The only paper that came close to showing that link is a study so full of lies that even before it was out, scientists who worked on it were asking to have their names taken off. The paper wasn't just badly made. It wasn't just questionable. It wasn't

bold and controversial. It was a lie for money, But the worst thing about this study was that somehow even that wasn't the worst thing. [haunting wind blowing] Hey, folks, the next section deals with some pretty heavy stuff so if you're not into stories of child abuse, uh, skip to the next chapter. As we've already explored, Wakefield was trying to discover a new disease linking autism and bowel disorders, so during the study, he did everything he could to find that link. For this reason, each child underwent a rough battery of invasive procedures. The children spent a

full week at the hospital, during which they were frequently sedated, given laxatives, had blood samples taken, and then they were given colonoscopies, lumbar punctures where a needle is inserted between the bones of your spine to extract fluid, MRI scans--again, under sedation-- electroencephalograms where wires and electrodes are run to the patient's head, and a variety of other uncomfortable procedures. A doctor once described this list of tests as a lot even for adults to go through, Never mind autistic children. Now, there's this thing in medicine called informed consent. Doctors can't just do invasive procedures on people. You

have to inform the patient of the potential risks and dangers and you can only move forward with their approval. In this study, the children were very young, and some of them-- emphasis on some--were autistic. This meant the children's parents had to give informed consent for them. Andrew Wakefield wrote a handout to parents To go with the consent form describing the procedures and their potential risks. CIRCARE, a human rights organization, acquired a copy of this handout, and while the form does mention almost every procedure Wakefield intended to do, it doesn't mention any of the risks associated

with them. I'm serious. The word "risk" is literally not written anywhere on the form. So let's talk about the risks Of some of these procedures. For those of you who don't know, a colonoscopy is when a large tube with a camera in it is inserted through your rectum all the way up into your guts. Normally, this is an important and safe diagnostic procedure. It's the most accurate test for rectal and colon cancer and this saves a lot of lives. Sorry, I'm gonna take a moment and turn this video into a public service announcement for colonoscopies.

Um, get one. I'm being serious. If you're an adult, especially over the age of 45, And you've never had a colonoscopy, please seriously consider getting one. I've lost an uncle and a close friend to bowel cancer at shockingly young ages. It's a really common cause of death, and if they catch it early, it's treatable. Colonoscopies are perfectly safe and often life-saving procedures, but in children whose intestines are smaller and weaker and harder to maneuver in, there are risks of serious complications. The scope can puncture the intestine Which causes bacteria from the gut to leak out

and cause infection and other serious internal damage. Risks of complications are significantly higher for children five years or younger. [DOCTOR] We try to be very careful to come around corners. [HBOMB] And these risks are genuine. As part of the attempts to find more evidence later and follow up on the original 1998 study, a five-year-old autistic boy was given a colonoscopy that went exceedingly wrong and was left fighting For his life with multiple organ failure after his bowel was perforated in 12 places during the procedure. There was no medical reason this child needed this procedure. He

was just being used as a guinea pig to find any proof they could that Autistic Enterocolitis was real. The Royal Free had to pay almost £500,000-- roughly $1 million today-- in damages to the boy and his parents for causing lifelong disabilities that required full-time care. His parents reported that when they gave consent, they had not been told of the risks. If this is true, what happened here is an assault. They almost killed this child, and in the 1998 study, they inflicted this procedure on children as young as three. Wakefield's consent form insists that these procedures

are usually tolerated well by children and that it is entirely painless. It gives zero mention of the very real risks of inserting several feet of a scope into a child. It even says, "If your child becomes distressed "or the procedure proves too difficult, it will be performed under general anesthetic." The form doesn't mention the risks of this anesthetic, either. This normal consent form for a colonoscopy makes incredibly clear that there are risks of perforation and bleeding and the possible adverse reactions to being sedated, too. In case you're watching, Andy, this is what informed consent looks

like, you piece of shi-- Wakefield needed these parents to consent to these procedures. His paycheck was resting on finding something in the bowels of these children that could possibly point to the disease he was trying to invent, so he wrote a handout that conveniently didn't mention how risky some of these procedures actually were, and from other accounts given to Deer about what happened during the study, the children's experiences were far from safe and painless. [BRIAN] "Nurses were leaving and saying they didn't like "what was being done to these children. "Junior doctors were unhappy. "It needed

three people to hold these kids down "in some cases just to have blood taken. "These are difficult children to explain to what is going on. "I feel very sorry for the children who I feel were being abused." [HBOMB] Children were fainting and vomiting and trying to resist the testing. They had to be force-fed some of the fluids required for the tests. They couldn't give one child their lumbar puncture because he was uncontrollably vomiting from all the other procedures that had been done on him and he was sent home. Another child's lumbar puncture went so badly

that he had to be rushed to a different hospital for treatment If you do stuff like this to kids in your study for no clinically justified reason, that's child abuse! Wakefield treated the children as if they had genuine bowel conditions. To that end, almost all of them were given anti-inflammatory drugs for the disorders he'd made up for them. These medications often have an increased risk to children, particularly under the age of six. The risks of adverse events includes life-threatening complications including increased bleeding, increased risk of infections, and other severe side effects. Some of these kids

had problems communicating, which would make reporting any side effects they were experiencing very difficult, further increasing the risk of severe problems if something went wrong. Considering that barely any of these children actually had bowel disorders, Wakefield was essentially putting children at risk of the side effects of these drugs for no reason while he looked for proof of the disease he was trying to invent to make a lawsuit look good. The Medical Council also discovered that during the study, Wakefield gave an experimental drug to one of the children without waiting for approval from an ethics committee.

The drug was called… [tape clicks] Wait a second. [high pitched high-speed playback] The paper is a pilot study on the effects of a substance called Dialysable Lymphocyte Extract on children with autism. [tape clicks] Did Wakefield test one of Fudenbergs autism-curing drugs on one of the children in his study? What the fuck? Thanks, Andy. I'm sure whatever you gave those kids was perfectly safe. I mean, if this genius was behind it-- [BRIAN] Where--where does that come from? [FUDENBERG] My bone marrow. [HBOMB] To convince the child's father to agree to let him administer this drug to his

child, Wakefield offered him a job as managing director of a company making and selling the drug. [tape clicks] Um, okay. My producer told me I can't say that. There's no way of proving that happened behind closed doors, so just to clarify, we don't have evidence that Wakefield offered A man a job to give his son a drug. It might just be a coincidence that the father became managing director of a company that would profit from selling the drug if it worked. Maybe he just happened to have equity in the company that would be making the

drug that was experimentally given to his child. We will never know for sure how that happened. [clears throat] [tape clicks] Let's just walk through that again. Andrew Wakefield might have offered a cushy job to a guy to let him experiment on his kid with a drug That he probably got from a guy who got fired for stealing medical supplies, wasn't a doctor anymore, and thought he could cure autism using his bone marrow. The Aristocrats! [chuckles] On top of all of this, during the investigation, the Medical Council found out that during one of his own children's

birthday parties, Andrew Jeremy Wakefield lined up all the other kids at the party and offered them money for their blood! I--I have to try and explain this. In order to find any potentially useful evidence for his study for the lawsuit, He needed the blood of non-autistic children so he could compare it and see what he could find, but to get the blood instead of, like, putting in a request for non-autistic children's blood, or, like, calling for volunteers to--to come to the hospital and give their blood, and without running it past an ethics committee, he offered

his children's friends five pounds for their blood! [laughing] And no, that's not, like, an allegation that someone might have made up. Wakefield told people that story At a conference in 1999. [crowd laughing] [HBOMB] At the hearing he claimed to have made up the part about throwing up and fainting for dramatic effect. His best defense of his extremely unethical and weird behavior was that he made some of it up. Shockingly, telling the ethics committee that he was a fucking liar didn't help his case. Speaking later in an interview, Wakefield defended the birthday party child blood bribes

saying it was all totally fine. [ANDREW] The only problem was that it did not have an approval from the hospital ethics committee. That does not make it unethical. [HBOMB] He's trying to "well actually" a fucking ethics board! After reviewing all of this in 2010, the longest inquiry in General Medical Council history, concluded that Andrew Wakefield had failed in his duties as a doctor, acted against the interests of his patients, and was, you know, a lying conman. Sorry, that one was me. And he was struck off the medical register making him no longer able to practice

medicine and officially not a doctor, so whenever someone calls him a doctor in videos now, they're making a mistake. Look, I don't wanna single this guy out, but you--you--don't put "doctor" in his name. He's not a doctor now! Even in the documentary he made about himself in 2016, he can't put doctor in front of his name. He has to put MB, BS. Well, we know he's at least one kind of BS, if you know what I'm saying. To quote the Council's charges, he showed "callous disregard for any distress or pain the children might suffer." That

same year, "The Lancet" finally formally retracted the original study. According to "The Lancet's" editor, Richard Horton… Well done, Richard. Here's a round of applause for you. [hand slaps] Better too late than never, I guess. That's not really an expression, is it? The conclusion of the inquiry is protested by Wakefield's remaining supporters. [CHANTING] We're with Wakefield. We're with Wakefield. [HBOMB] While a news crew attempts to interview one of his critics, one of his supporters attempts to shout him down and make sure he can't say anything while another off-screen holds up a book insisting it is they

who are being silenced. The irony is, apparently, lost on them. Wakefield appeared before his flock To say this was all completely unjust. [ANDREW] And I invite anyone to examine the contents of these proceedings and come to their own conclusions [HBOMB] I think we just did, buddy. Wakefield did lose a lot of his popularity when the extent of his abuse and fraud was made known, but he still had a few dedicated fans, often the parents of autistic children who'd followed him so far that they refuse to accept what he did. To Wakefield, these desperate people are

the perfect market. I suspect the main reason he turned up in the last few days of his hearing was to advertise the book he'd written all about it on national TV. The book alleges that the Medical Council hearings are just trying to crush him to protect vaccines. He titled the book "Callous Disregard" after one of the Council's comments about him. It's trying to be an ironic reference like he's accusing mainstream medicine of callously disregarding the victims of MMR, but I don't think he considered the implications Of quoting a doctor pointing out he abused children on

the cover of a book with a big picture of his face on it. It's a real "If I Did It" situation." Also in the dedication, he thanks his long-suffering wife who's with him here on the cover. She's not his wife anymore, though. I guess she suffered enough. And like separate vaccines before it, Wakefield made sure to recommend his book in every interview he got. [GUPTA] These numbers, the dates were all fabricated To sort of make a case. [ANDREW] Dr. Gupta, please, I urge you, go and read my book. You will understand it. Many people don't.

[HBOMB] It's very funny watching him try to sell his merchandise now that everyone knows he's a fraud. [ANDREW] If you read my book, you will be able to read the truth, and has the BMJ read my book? Have the doctors who apparently looked at all the records read my book? No, because the truth is in that book, "Callous Disregard." [ANDERSON] Well sir, I've read Brian Deer's report which is incredibly extensive. Sir, I'm not here to let you pitch your book. I'm here to have you answer questions. [ANDREW] If you read the record that I have

set out in the book, you will see the truth. [ANDERSON] But sir, if your lying, then your book is also a lie. [HBOMB] Wakefield's defense against Brian Deer's allegations-- now that suing him to shut him up has failed disastrously-- Is to say Deer is a hit man paid by vaccine manufacturers to ruin his career. [ANDREW] He is a hit man. He's been brought in to take me down because they are very, very concerned about the adverse reactions to vaccines that are occurring in children. [ANDERSON] Wait a minute, sir. Let me stop you right there. You

say he's a hit man and he's been brought in by they. Who is they? Who is he a hit man for? This is an independent journalist who's won many awards. [ANDREW] Yeah, he's-- [chuckles nervously] And he's, you know-- who bought this man in? Who is paying this man? I don't know. [HBOMB] Who is behind Brian Deer's reporting? Follow the money! Also, buy my book, please. [ANDERSON] Wakefield went on to claim later in the interview that you're being paid by the Association of British Pharmaceutical Industries. Are you? [BRIAN laughs] No, I'm not. [HBOMB] In 2011, "New

York Times Magazine" staff writer Susan Dominus caught up with Wakefield. Though Wakefield presents himself to her as someone whose career was destroyed for going against the dogma that vaccines are safe, Dominus is careful to point out that he does this while signing copies of his book for an enormous line of loyal followers, one of whom is a tearful mother who blames herself for not preventing her child's autism. At the time the article was written, Wakefield lived in a beautiful house In a reclusive and expensive neighborhood in Austin, Texas, surrounded by many acres of hills and

forest. [HBOMB] The book made him a decent amount of money as have his many paid speaking engagements at anti-vaccine conferences where he's lauded as the celebrity who got the movement started. There's the hundreds of thousands of pounds he got paid to do the study, of course, and the multiple documentaries about him and his life can't have been too shabby for him. It's genuinely shocking how obviously He's just grifting anti-vaccine people for as much money as he can. His 2016 film, "Vaxxed," is available at a discount on his web site if you buy it in a

pack of ten. "Give a copy to your local legislators, educators, and medical professionals!" Wakefield wants his followers to pay him to do advertising for him. When I look back at footage of the last day of Wakefield's hearing, I'm inevitably looking back at myself ten years ago When I saw the same footage live on TV. [TV hisses] At the time, I saw these people as Wakefield's defenders but in a way they were also his victims. For a decade now--no, since I was a teenager, I've been thinking about this woman with the sign saying, "Don't stifle uncomfortable

science." I remember I first noticed her because I saw her and thought, "Wait, is she wearing a Playboy scarf?" Surely the most uncomfortable thing for these people here must be the possibility the man they're here to defend has lied to them for money. For someone who'd sided with Wakefield during the scare, accepting that he had lied would mean taking on some of the guilt for helping to spread it. One of the worst things about Wakefield's actions is he's made these people complicit. Maybe Wakefield actually cares about these people. Maybe not. But either way, their money

spends just the same. I wonder how many of these people bought his books or his documentaries. I wonder if any of them stop and think about how they've made him rich. Some of these people are extremely vulnerable, parents of children with disabilities, some of which require full-time care, who fell for Wakefield because he was offering them an explanation for why these things happen. It brings me no joy to tell you they paid for this view. [CHANTING] We're with Wakefield. We're with Wakefield. We're with Wakefield. We're with Wakefield. [audio stuttering] [HBOMB] At the end of all

this, I ask the eternal question asked of every major fraudster in history. How could someone do all this? Cause all this fear and doubt that has led to real, tangible harm against your fellow human beings? Why would someone do that? Uh, money. Thank you for watching. [dramatic classical music] ♪ ♪ [guitar music strumming] There's probably a lot of people you could blame for anti-vaccine beliefs getting as far as they have. The anxieties people have right now didn't come from nowhere. Wakefield's legacy is built into the very DNA Of modern vaccine hesitancy. Or the RNA, am

I right? Nice one, Kat. This is very clever. Whenever you try to trace a trend of skepticism about vaccines far enough, it almost always leads back to the fear and anxiety that started in 1998 and the men behind it. Take for example Bill Maher. Maher is a proponent of the possible link between vaccines and autism and frequently has anti-vaccine activists on his show. Granted, he also has people on who think that's ridiculous, So that's kind of like being fair and balanced. His general stance is that vaccines can be good but he doesn't really go for

them because he's got a better idea. [BILL] Uh, I am not a germ theory denier. I understand that germs and viruses cause diseases. I may have been a little cocky about it because I discovered from first-hand experience that I could stave them off better with proper nutrition. [HBOMB] If your child dies of measles, it's because he didn't eat his vegetables. Bubonic plague? Skip a trip to McDonald's, sheeple! Throughout the years, Bill has repeated over and over his distrust of vaccines and the possible side effects they might pose. I've tried to find an example of him

citing a source or giving some kind of data, but no, it's always this general sense that people think something might be wrong. [BILL] There's all these parents who say, "I had a normal child, got the vaccine--" this story keeps coming over and over. [HBOMB] Lots of parents are saying stuff and that's basically evidence. And of course there's the old stand-out, "Lots of people feel like me." [BILL] I was attacked for saying we should look into this and I don't believe in it, and lots of people feel the same way. I've heard a lot of stuff

about feelings being more important than facts, so this is basically science, right? [ALEC] Bill, you having us on the show and rehashing all these problems you got yourself into On your last show, it's like going on a date and talking about your ex-wife. [cheers and applause] [HBOMB] If an intellectual titan like Bill Maher thinks vaccines might be dangerous, he must believe it for a good reason. I did a lot of digging on this and I found a time when he made a concrete scientific claim about vaccines. In 2005 he was interviewed on "Larry King Live."

This isn't footage of that interview. I couldn't find footage of this one, but there is a transcript on the CNN web site. During this interview they discussed the flu shot which King had been taking for 25 years. Maher tells him the best defense against disease is to have a strong immune system-- I guess that's where the proper nutrition comes in-- and says that the flu shot is actually bad for your immune system. He cites a strong distrust of what he calls western medicine, which is a bit of a Euro-centric misnomer. A lot of non-western countries

develop vaccines and other modern medicine, you know? Whatever, he doesn't care. The conversation then turns to the avian flu which was a real concern at the time. Bill states that he's not worried about bird flu and gives a fascinatingly vague list of reasons why. Which was a very clever insight right up until something like that really did happen. Uh, that's why people were worried about it, Bill. Bill is such a good public speaker. The fact that vaccines actually help stop the disease from spreading and therefor developing those mutations in the first place is lost on

him. Well, it was, but he got vaccinated for COVID-19 so clearly he sees the value now. This is attached to an announcement that he got the virus so this week's show has to be canceled. Apparently he's asymptomatic and feels fine, so I guess vaccines are pretty good, aren't they? Considering how at-risk unvaccinated 65-year-olds are for this virus, I'm really glad he got vaccinated for his sake, But they should probably just cancel his show completely. I mean, we don't want to risk losing a national treasure. The reality is a lot of pseudo-libertarian skepticism about "western medicine"

instantly falls apart the second it has to interact with reality where people really do die of diseases. For example, the man he is speaking to. Larry King passed away this year of complications from COVID-19. Anyway, Maher tells King that vaccines are just a trick to get money. [HBOMB] If bird flu had got bad enough, You can guarantee Maher would have paid top dollar for the vaccine. Anyway, the discussion goes downhill even further for Maher when King points out that vaccines are great and polio was virtually eradicated thanks to vaccination. Bill gives this-- [kisses] beautiful reply.

[HBOMB] I think Bill really does a good job of summing up a lot of people's belief about vaccination here. Maher thinks it's smart to be skeptical About vaccines right up until there's consequences for himself, of course, but his explanations are all unfounded and unscientific. The best he can say is there's probably books out there that prove he's right. Maybe, but he's not read them. This isn't skepticism. This is ignorance trying to sound like skepticism. To bring it all full-circle, it seems like Bill's beliefs about vaccines are really based on that big scare That started in

the late '90s. After all, the only factoid he seems to ever be able to remember is that lots of parents said they were bad that one time, and that's not even a fact. That's some opinions he remembers. I'd joke that it's a pity they don't make a vaccine for confirmation bias, but he wouldn't have got it, would he? There is, however, one time in this old interview where he really does attempt to make a scientific claim. He tells Larry that if you get the flu shot more than five years in a row, It tenfold increases

the risk of getting Alzheimer's. Hmm, that's a really specific thing to say. Maybe by checking this claim out we can figure out who he's getting his beliefs from. I looked and there are actually studies on the impact of vaccination on rates of Alzheimer's. Um, the risk of Alzheimer's goes down. Okay, so this clearly isn't his source. I did some more digging, though, and I found that in 1997 at a vaccine conference, in one guy's presentation he said that a scientist had found that this happens. There's no study cited here, but that's at least a source

for Bill's claims. Let's check the doctor's papers and see if we can find out for ourse--wait a second. I blurred the scientist's name out by accident. Let me fix that. [mouse clicks] Dr. Hugh Fudenberg? [Disturbed's "Down with the Sickness"] No matter how you look at it, a vast, vast majority of anti-vaccine rhetoric and pseudoscience can be traced directly back to these two guys. According to a survey Of US health care professionals in 2016, 77% of parents refusing vaccination for their children still cite a fear of a link with autism. When people refuse medicine for their

children, they largely point to the hazy memory of the scare Wakefield started for money. So, yeah, it's pretty important to point out they both lost their medical licenses and their science was garbage, and despite being an obvious hack fraud conman, Wakefield is still embraced by the anti-vaccine community. Wakefield was a guest of honor at Conspira-Sea, the week-long cruise for all kinds Of conspiracy theorists, where believers of all stripes gather to share their theories about climate change, the earth being flat, time travelers, and horses being real. The kind of funny thing is Wakefield himself seems pretty

embarrassed by this. A skeptic who went on the cruise noted how unhappy he looked with the implication of being a hero to a community that absolutely loves complete quacks. Luckily for Wakefield, the toilet is full of money, and all he has to do to get it is lean further and further away From science and deeper into this culture. He's had to pivot to saying all vaccines are dangerous because his new anti-vaccine audience aren't very receptive to the old claim that, "I'm not anti-vaccine. "Just one vaccine is dangerous, and I recommend mine instead." I don't think

these people would buy a ten-pack of that story. And of course in the middle of the pandemic that is currently happening, Wakefield emerged from his mansion To remind everyone that a virus that has so far killed over three million people is better than being vaccinated against it. [HBOMB] Presumably of COVID-19. I don't think that was too dramatic, do you? [HBOMB] The fact the movement he started is still based almost completely on his lies is pretty important to point out and in fact it's useful to point it out because despite how it might look, the truth

can be a powerful thing. Once Wakefield got chased out to America and had his medical license taken away, Vaccination rates in the UK recovered. I love this because you can basically see the effects of Brian Deer's reporting on a graph. Like, the scare starts and it gets worse and worse and worse, and then Brian Deer's reporting comes out, and bam, it's on its way back up. Like, the truth does make a difference. And then when Wakefield's license was taken away, we went right back up to pre-scare levels. Of course, getting chased out to America meant

he started peddling his lies in America. So, sorry about that. But it does seem pretty clear that the truth helps people make up their minds about this stuff. Fascinatingly, a lot of Britons seem to remember the MMR scare and the revelation that it was based on lies and learned a lesson about vaccine alarmism. According to polls of global willingness to take the COVID-19 vaccine, other countries start relatively low, Perhaps dimly remembering some people saying vaccines are bad. Then acceptance grows as it becomes increasingly clear the new vaccines are safe. Wait, where's the UK? Well, boys,

we're just chilling up here. We've been through this before, you see. That's my British accent? It seems like our past experience with bullshit vaccine scares has inoculated us against future ones. Kat wrote that line. I didn't find the one weird trick doctors hate To de-converting people from being against vaccines and changing their minds or anything here. What we've really discovered is that if you lay the whole story out like this, people can do a good job of making up their own minds. The actual scientific community works very hard to be receptive to potential side effects.

When even the potential maybe possibility maybe of one of the vaccines having side effects came up, the FDA and the CDC briefly recommended not getting it for a while until later when they checked and were sure it was fine. Vaccine safety is taken extremely seriously by medical scientists and doctors for obvious reasons. Actually, here's a fun example of how stringent the community is about vaccines. Wakefield's alternative vaccine was based on such bad science it would never have made it out of clinical trials. The medical work behind it was awful. I mean, one of its author's

names is spelled wrong on page one. The science on the following pages is roughly what you'd expect from something like that. I think I might actually make a bonus video for patrons Just covering this vaccine patent because it is wack. Really, Andrew Wakefield was always doomed to end up as a scam artist. He wasn't very good at the science when he was a doctor. All the Coronavirus vaccines currently in use have passed tests and checks that his alternative measles vaccine would never have done. Wakefield can pretend he's not gonna get the vaccine and appear at

health freedom summits that recommend you don't get it and instead eliminate toxins with only affordable products And cooking hacks. [chuckles] But I certainly hope for his sake that he just gets the vaccine in secret because otherwise the next cruise is gonna have a fucking body count. There is another way the truth can change people's minds; living proof. If someone thinks the Coronavirus vaccines might be dangerous, one of the best ways to help seems to be people around them getting it and showing them how it's fine. In early polls before a vaccine was out, A lot

of people in the USA claimed they were going to hold off until they were sure it was safe, which is a pretty risky decision considering the danger of the virus versus any possible side effects of the vaccine. Like, a third of people who get infected even if it's minor are left with long-term complications. Like, long-distance runners are left unable to climb stairs without getting out of breath. People have lost eyesight, people have lost teeth, and of course a lot of people have died of the disease, but over time, as more and more people did get

the vaccine, That by itself changed a lot of minds. The truth is, it was easy in 2020 to have your doubts about a theoretical vaccine that no one had had yet, but now when half the people around you already have it and they're obviously fine, it's a whole lot harder to have those doubts. Over time the people waiting and seeing seem to have decided they've seen enough and they want what those guys are having. So this is my call to action in case anyone needs it. You should get a COVID vaccine if you can. You

know, get one while you're there for your colonoscopy. The vaccine makes life safer for you and reduces the possibility of passing the virus to someone more vulnerable. So you won't have that on your conscience, either. I know having a conscience is virtue signaling now, but still, it's a nice bonus. And on top of that, if there are people in your life who could be at risk who need convincing of the vaccine's safety, you could be the evidence they need. It's amazing how compelling seeing other people Get vaccinated can be. There is sadly one concerning thing

about the data. There are some people who started out saying no to vaccination and have largely stayed that way. Maybe some of them will budge as more and more people get vaccinated but there's probably a group who are so distrustful of vaccines because of everything we've discussed so fa that they can't have their minds changed even by the hundreds of millions of obviously completely safely vaccinated people all around them. People can invest a lot of ego and pride in not accepting evidence that contradicts their beliefs about the world, and it really doesn't help that there

are hundreds of people exactly like Andrew Wakefield who are ready to tell them everything they believe is already true and they just need to buy their supplements or DVDs or cooking hacks and enable people to convince themselves that they don't need to do any more thinking. For a small fee, of course. Ah, come on, though. Comparing Wakefield to Alex Jones, that's a bit much. There's no way Wakefield would stoop to-- [laughs] Have you learned nothing? [ALEX] Good to have you here with us. [ANDREW] It's great to be here, Alex. Thank you very much. [HBOMB] Changing

these people's minds really should be their job and it's nobody else's fault that they're struggling with it, But I think the future of this kind of discussion resides in finding more compelling ways of communicating the truth to people who aren't used to hearing it. I hope in some way this video has helped. In the meantime, while we figure out how to convince people who seem committed to being never convinced, at least the vaccine intended for them can go to someone who's sure they want it. Specifically, me. Please send me their vaccine. I was glad they

were testing it on the old people first but it's been months now, and I want it. I wanna go outside! Be able to go outside! I want to pretend I shop at Waitrose again. I wanna use my free football tickets! I wanna taunt my former hairdresser with how useless she is to me now and threaten to turn her building back into a research foundation! Give me the vaccine, doctor! Hell, give me all of them! Let me combine their power! Soon I will be unstoppable! It's easy to get depressed and begin to believe that you're basically

locked in a room with thousands of fucking idiots who're just willing to say stupid shit constantly-- just committed to just being wrong, but actually, the more I think about it, I'm actually locked in a planet with millions of people who do know better than these people but they're just so busy being depressed like me at them. Maybe the answer here is that we just need to accept that we should put the depression energy into making a difference, into changing the minds of the people who can be, and into doing what we can to improve the

state of our world around these people and just let them be mad and let them continue to be stupid but in a world where their kids won't die of polio because we got rid of it for them. Good for them, ignorant little wankers. Because maybe the hard thing to do when we're confronted by the scope of these problems is accept that we really can do something about it. No matter how hopeless things may seem, the world always can get better, and maybe together someday we can invent a way of cleaning up this fucking mess in

my mum's gara-- in my garage! [lively music] ♪ ♪ Hey, thank you for watching. That was pretty good, wasn't it? I managed to avoid getting too preachy at the end there. I'd like to thank my patrons whose names are scrolling past the screen right now. You guys literally keep the lights on. I'd like to thank the sensitivity reader who took a look at some of the segments and made sure that we were using the appropriate language when we were talking about autism. I'd also really like to thank Brian Deer who's basically a superhero. He's the

guy who found out most of this stuff, really saved the day, and just thank you so much, man. And also while we were making this video, Brian Deer released a book about the whole thing. Deer's book, "The Doctor Who Fooled the World," is basically the most definitive source on Andrew Wakefield and all the damage he did. I literally cannot recommend it enough if the topic interests you at all. Deer is by far the most knowledgeable person on everything that happened. I mean, he's the guy who discovered most of it himself through actual decades of investigative

reporting. I had no idea he was doing a book until it came out when I was writing this video, and we just barely scratched the surface Of the stuff he covers. There's a link to his site in the description and it's not an affiliate link or anything. We're not being paid to do this. I've decided he deserves your money. I want him to be able to chart the release of this video on a graph of his sales figures. That's my personal fantasy. Tell him Hbomb says hi. If you wanna know more about this whole topic

or just check out Brian Dear's honestly heroic reporting, you should really go read his book and go to briandeer.com because it survived the lawsuit And there's some great stuff there. So thanks to Kat for doing all of that additional research and for cowriting a lot of these segments and just generally fact-checking me. I got a lot of facts wrong. And I'd like to thank my, uh, intern Rachel, uh, who did great work with the camera. D--don't do that. [chuckles] Oh, wow, there are more credits. Oh, my God. Thank you so much for being so patient

with this video. I'm actually surprised we got it done so quickly, To be honest. We had a whole production. Like, we had to work with fact checkers, lawyers in two different countries to make sure we couldn't get sued for anything we were saying about these people, because, you know, you might have noticed some of the characters in this story are litigious. We conferred with vaccine experts, doctors, science communicators, medical researchers, sensitivity readers, animators--you know, someone had to draw the internal anatomy for that one thing. I made an award-winning cartoonist for "The New Yorker" spend hours

of her life drawing the courtroom from "Phoenix Wright" for a joke that went by in, like, 10 seconds. Sorry about that, by the way. And my poor long-suffering producer Kat had to coordinate most of this for me because I was busy editing the actual video. And thank you to my patrons for watching an early draft of this and giving me feedback. It turns out a bunch of people who watch my videos are, like, scientists so we got some really good notes from them. All in all I'm pretty happy with how this video turned out. So,

yeah, that's nice. That said I'm never putting this much effort into a video again. Forget it. ♪ ♪ Can you believe that Brian David Gilbert did voices in this video? That's great. It's amazing. He sent me just video footage of him dressed as Andrew Wakefield. I didn't ask for him to do that. He just sent that to me. Like, what a cool guy. That's great. Oh! [cackling]