The Anti-Vaccine Movement

This message comes from Progressive Insurance. Progressive makes it easy to see if you could save when you bundle your home and auto policies. Try it at progressive.com. Progressive Casualty Insurance Company and affiliates. Potential savings will vary. Not available in all states. Doctor Wakefield, would you like to, start this panel? Yes. Thank you, mister chairman. Members of the committee, it's a great privilege to be here. The purpose of my testimony is to report the results of the clinical and scientific investigation of a series of children with autism. 04/06/2000. Doctors, researchers, and parents of children with autism have been called in front of Congress to testify about a potential link between autism and vaccines. Now nothing in this testimony should be construed as anti vaccine. Rather, I advocate the safest vaccination strategies for the protection of children and the control of communicable disease. That's Andrew Wakefield. At this moment, in the year 2000, he's a researcher from the Royal Free and University College Medical School in London. A superb scientist who is at a superb institution. Sitting just to the left of Wakefield is Paul Offit. Paul Offit. I am the director of the Vaccine Education Center at the Children's Hospital of Philadelphia and a professor of pediatrics at the University of Pennsylvania School of Medicine. At the time, Paul was also part of a committee that advised the CDC about the use of vaccines. I was subpoenaed to testify, about whether I thought it made biological sense that vaccines could cause autism, and I didn't. Paul listens as Wakefield launches into his testimony. I just, as a little bit of background, this represent twelve twelve years of intensive clinical and scientific research, collaborative research. Wakefield is summarizing the results of research he conducted at the Royal Free Hospital, research that first got the medical community's attention in 1998 when he published a paper in a renowned British medical journal called The Lancet. In that paper, Wakefield hypothesized that the measles, mumps, and rubella vaccine could be connected to the development of autism in children. When it's Paul's turn to speak, he doesn't waste any time beating around the bush. My role in these proceedings is to explore the theories that have arisen due to concerns by the public that autism might be caused by the combination of measles, mumps, and rubella vaccines known as MMR. No evidence exists that proves this association. Paul is right. By the time Wakefield landed in front of Congress, his paper had been debunked, and one of the scientists who had debunked it was even sitting on the panel alongside him. I think Andrew Wakefield believed this was true. And he's even after study after study showed that he was wrong, he believed he was right. But you could see that he was beloved at that meeting. He was he was godlike, whereas we were the bad guys. This wouldn't be the last time Wakefield would be called in front of …