Bests & Worsts Reviews from Amazon

I watched this movie in the theater. There was one other person present. This movie is misleading, and a very bad source of information on vaccines. Worse, it lies in ways that could directly mislead people into putting children at risk, and it dehumanizes and degrades children with autism. How does it mislead you? A. It focuses on a claim of fraud (baseless, but we will get to that around a relatively small 2004 study looking at MMR and autism - and nowhere tells you that we have studies in hundreds of thousands of children that also looked at MMR and autism and found no link. So even if the claims about this study were true, the evidence is still that there's no link - but the movie doesn't tell you those studies exist. B. It mentions a paper by Brian Hooker - and doesn't tell you that that paper was retracted. C. It claims the 2004 study protocol was changed before data analysis started. But looking at the actual documents show that the study protocol was finalized in September 2001, and that's the one shown in the movie, but the data analysis started November 2001. In other words, no changes after the data was analyzed. No wrongdoing. D. It claims a result was omitted - the result about isolated autism. But the result was included in the paper under the heading of autism without mental retardation - with the same numbers. No omission. Another misrepresentation. E. It makes false claims about vaccine testing. F. It splices conversations with the alleged whistleblower - that does not appear in the movie - in ways that give them a different meaning. To cover these many misrepresentations,the movie uses stories of distressed parents who believe their child's autism was caused by vaccines. Several of these stories rely on temporal connection and belief - and in some case, as with Brian Hooker, we know court records show that the symptoms were, in fact, there from around four months, and the parents' belief they started after the vaccine was in error. In short, the movie uses emotional manipulation and direct misrepresentation to scare parents from vaccinating and protecting their children from disease. If there is wrongdoing found in this story, it's not by the CDC researchers, but by the makers of this movie and the conspiracy theory behind it.