Bests & Worsts Reviews from Amazon

Don't be misled by the sheer number of positive reviews posted on Amazon.com into believing that the central arguments of this film have not been thoroughly debunked. They have, and you can verify this by searching the internet for a good critical review which backs up its claims with links. There are a number of such reviews, but if I mention any of them by name, Amazon.com will consider my review to contain "promotional content" and reject it. (That's what happened with the original version of this review.) So you'll have to search for them yourself. Just a few brief points. The director of Vaxxed, Andrew Wakefield, was found guilty of research misconduct, and as a result, his 1998 paper was retracted (his co-authors had already dis-avowed it) and his medical license revoked. Brian Hooker's reanalysis of a CDC paper was also retracted, because it was done incompetently. (This incompetent reanalysis is the basis for the film's claim of a CDC cover-up.) Hooker also lost his case in vaccine court, because the otherwise sympathetic judge could not accept the theory that MMR caused his child's autism, in the face of evidence that the child had developmental delays pre-dating the MMR vaccine and a lack of evidence for the dramatic regression which, it was claimed, immediately followed the MMR vaccine. The film presents Wakefield as if he were an honest doctor, Hooker's reanalysis as if it were competent, a CDC cover-up as if it were plausibly supported by evidence, Hooker's child's autism as if it were caused by MMR (conveniently ignoring the contrary evidence), and so on. Once I realized how deceptive this film was, I assumed that every point which had seemed convincing had probably been debunked somewhere, and then attempted to verify this. One point at a time, I succeeded, until all that were left were the countless stories of parents who observed their children develop signs of autism soon after receiving MMR or another vaccine. How could this be explained? Then I found a mathematical assessment of how often these two events — receipt of a vaccine and first signs of autism — might occur within a short period, purely by chance. There could easily be thousands of children each year in the US whose first signs of autism were, by chance, observed within a week or two of receiving a vaccine, even if we knew with absolute certainty that vaccines could never cause autism. This can help to explain why there are so many anecdotes where parents believe their children developed autism as a result of a vaccine, even when extensive high-quality studies from many countries and organizations investigating a possible connection between vaccines and autism have found no link. The parents are correct about the timing; the studies are correct about the lack of causation. Because of people like Wakefield and films like Vaxxed and all the people who love them, thousands of parents will continue to assume that their child's vaccine-autism link is not just temporal but causal. And they will search for evidence to justify this belief, evidence of the kind which fills Vaxxed and can be debunked one point at a time.