Saw it. The few people in the audience were clearly Wakefield fans.
As a film, it's tiresome.
As a documentary, it's just not. I've followed Andrew Wakefield closely for over 10 years. I've followed his telling of the William Thompson story since it broke.
Wakefield takes great liberties with the facts. In case that's not clear--he lies. He cuts and splices conversations out of context to tell the story he wants it to be, not what actually happened.
The main subject of the film is Andrew Wakefield--the redemption of Andrew Wakefield. The claimed subject is William Thompson, who appears from sound clips that are edited, spliced and taken out of context. Wakefield makes Thompson into his personal CDC Sock Puppet.
Wakefield tells us that one scientific decision by the CDC means that vaccines cause autism and the CDC are lying to the world. And, get this, apparently the CDC have some secret hit squad for dissidents. No, I'm not making this up. Wakefield tells us that he had to betray William Thompson (making his identity public) because if they didn't, we'd be "dredging the river for his body".
Wakefield tells us that we need to separate the MMR vaccine into three parts. Same story he's been telling us for 20 years, and same lack of evidence. There's been a ton of studies on the MMR and autism (money wasted because of the Wakefield scare) showing it doesn't cause autism. But because the CDC (remember, they are evil, they have hit squads) can't be trusted. Apparently neither can about a dozen other research groups around the world, because much if not most of the research on MMR is by non CDC teams. Wakefield doesn't discuss that at all.
Since it's Wakefield, we see parents in pain. This is to convince us through emotion that vaccines cause autism. But step back and recall that these parents believe because Wakefield and others have been lying for over 20 years. Look at the pain and you see one of Wakefield's greatest crimes.
While many decry the harm Wakefield has caused to public health (measles in endemic in the UK after having been eliminated, and it's very possible it will come back here in the US), it's the harm to the autism community that is where he's done the most damage. But that fact is usually forgotten in Wakefield discussions. Wakefield would like people to think that autism parents are all behind him, but it's really not that many of us.
As far as the one result from one small study that makes up the entire controversy here--it's meaningless. Wakefield claims that there's a link between the MMR and autism. Not only was the "result" he focuses on minor back in the day, many studies since then show that there's no link between the MMR and autism. Watch the film with the mostly white cast and ask yourself, "was it clear that this result was supposedly only about African American boys?" Even this study--even his buddy Brian Hooker's reanalysis--shows no hint of an association for most of the population. And Wakefield won't tell you that William Thompson has a public statement that this study doesn't show a causal link between the MMR and autism, even in African American boys.
This is one of those examples of Wakefield using Thompson as a sock puppet. Thompson isn't correcting Wakefield, so Wakefield says whatever he wants.
For people who want an idea of Wakefield the director/writer, he has a YouTube video on this topic. It's very, very bad. Wakefield spins a tale of the CDC running a new Tuskegee experiment, no really, and that CDC researchers are worse than Pol Pot, Stalin and (and!) Hitler. As a video, it's bad. Bad sound, bad writing, cheap production. But he was able to get a lot of people who hate vaccines to fund him to make a feature length film out of it and that's Vaxxed.
As a film, it's tiresome.
As a documentary, it's just not. I've followed Andrew Wakefield closely for over 10 years. I've followed his telling of the William Thompson story since it broke.
Wakefield takes great liberties with the facts. In case that's not clear--he lies. He cuts and splices conversations out of context to tell the story he wants it to be, not what actually happened.
The main subject of the film is Andrew Wakefield--the redemption of Andrew Wakefield. The claimed subject is William Thompson, who appears from sound clips that are edited, spliced and taken out of context. Wakefield makes Thompson into his personal CDC Sock Puppet.
Wakefield tells us that one scientific decision by the CDC means that vaccines cause autism and the CDC are lying to the world. And, get this, apparently the CDC have some secret hit squad for dissidents. No, I'm not making this up. Wakefield tells us that he had to betray William Thompson (making his identity public) because if they didn't, we'd be "dredging the river for his body".
Wakefield tells us that we need to separate the MMR vaccine into three parts. Same story he's been telling us for 20 years, and same lack of evidence. There's been a ton of studies on the MMR and autism (money wasted because of the Wakefield scare) showing it doesn't cause autism. But because the CDC (remember, they are evil, they have hit squads) can't be trusted. Apparently neither can about a dozen other research groups around the world, because much if not most of the research on MMR is by non CDC teams. Wakefield doesn't discuss that at all.
Since it's Wakefield, we see parents in pain. This is to convince us through emotion that vaccines cause autism. But step back and recall that these parents believe because Wakefield and others have been lying for over 20 years. Look at the pain and you see one of Wakefield's greatest crimes.
While many decry the harm Wakefield has caused to public health (measles in endemic in the UK after having been eliminated, and it's very possible it will come back here in the US), it's the harm to the autism community that is where he's done the most damage. But that fact is usually forgotten in Wakefield discussions. Wakefield would like people to think that autism parents are all behind him, but it's really not that many of us.
As far as the one result from one small study that makes up the entire controversy here--it's meaningless. Wakefield claims that there's a link between the MMR and autism. Not only was the "result" he focuses on minor back in the day, many studies since then show that there's no link between the MMR and autism. Watch the film with the mostly white cast and ask yourself, "was it clear that this result was supposedly only about African American boys?" Even this study--even his buddy Brian Hooker's reanalysis--shows no hint of an association for most of the population. And Wakefield won't tell you that William Thompson has a public statement that this study doesn't show a causal link between the MMR and autism, even in African American boys.
This is one of those examples of Wakefield using Thompson as a sock puppet. Thompson isn't correcting Wakefield, so Wakefield says whatever he wants.
For people who want an idea of Wakefield the director/writer, he has a YouTube video on this topic. It's very, very bad. Wakefield spins a tale of the CDC running a new Tuskegee experiment, no really, and that CDC researchers are worse than Pol Pot, Stalin and (and!) Hitler. As a video, it's bad. Bad sound, bad writing, cheap production. But he was able to get a lot of people who hate vaccines to fund him to make a feature length film out of it and that's Vaxxed.