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Related: Editorials & Other Articles, Issue Forums, Alliance Forums, Region ForumsAndrew Wakefield’s antivaccine propaganda film to be screened at the Tribeca Film Festival
Regular readers might remember my mentioning the documentary Andrew Wakefield was working on. It was going to be about the latest conspiracy theory coming out of the fever swamp of antivaccine pseudoscience, the so-called CDC Whistleblower William W. Thompson. Thompson, as you recall, is a the CDC scientist who complained to Brian Hooker, a biochemical engineer turned incompetent antivaccine epidemiologist, that the analysis of important study done by his colleagues at the CDC in 2004 and him (DeStefano et al) was manipulated to hide a real positive result correlating MMR vaccination with autism in African-Americans. As I said at the time, Hookers reanalysis of the DeStefano et al study basically proved Andrew Wakefield wrong in that, other than for a very small subgroup, there wasnt a hint of a whiff of a whisper of a positive correlation between the MMR vaccine and autism, and the one seemingly positive result was almost certainly spurious. It was only because of Hookers utter incompetence at epidemiology and statistics that he foolishly inferred an actual result from his reanalysis.
Because this story seemed to confirm what I like to call the central conspiracy theory of the antivaccine movement, namely that the CDC or other government agencies knew that vaccines cause autism but hid it from the people. Of course, only antivaccine activists are not sheeple. Only they know The Truth. Only they have figured the conspiracy out. Only they are not sheeple. And now Andrew Wakefield has made a movie about it, called Vaxxed: From Cover-up to Catastrophe.
Its going to premiere in New York on April 24.
full: http://scienceblogs.com/insolence/2016/03/22/wtf-andrew-wakefields-antivaccine-documentary-to-be-screened-at-the-tribeca-film-festival/
Salviati
(6,002 posts)But I see it's just this fraud again. It's really too bad there are people who still give this guy a voice outside of crank websites.
KamaAina
(78,249 posts)drm604
(16,230 posts)This film festival should be ashamed of itself.
msanthrope
(37,549 posts)Blasphemer
(3,261 posts)such nonsense, but the reality is that Hollywood is the perfect place for pseudoscience to fester. You have a lot of minimally educated people whose identities are built around a belief in the link between creativity and being unorthodox. For some, that means anything that goes against that which is commonly accepted must have credibility. It's the same reason people like Roman Polanski can remain celebrated in that town.