Pod Insights Throughline The Anti-Vaccine Movement About this episode The alleged link between vaccines and autism is back in the news this week, being regularly speculated on by both President Trump and Health and Human Services secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. The claim has been repeatedly disproven: there is no evidence that vaccines and autism are related. But the myth is powerful. In this episode: the roots of the modern anti-vaccine movement, and of the fears that still fuel it – from a botched polio vaccine, to the discredited autism study, to today. This episode originally published in February 2025.
Guests:
Paul Offit, 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
Elena Conis, historian of medicine and public health and a professor in journalism and history at the University of California, Berkeley
Arthur Allen, senior correspondent for nonprofit KFF Health News and author of Vaccine: The Controversial Story of Medicine's Greatest Lifesaver
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Transcript 7,679 words · 27 speakers
Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.
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0:18 Speaker 01 Dr. Wakefield, would you like to start this panel?
0:23 Speaker 02 Yes, thank you, Mr. 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.
0:36 Rund Abdelfatah? April 6, 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.
0:53 Speaker 02 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.
1:04 Rund Abdelfatah? 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.
1:14 Speaker 04 A superb scientist who was at a superb institution.
1:16 Speaker 05 Sitting just to the left of Wakefield is...
1:19 Speaker 04 Paul Offit.
1:20 Speaker 05 Paul Offit.
1:22 Speaker 04 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.
1:30 Speaker 05 At the time, Paul was also part of a committee that advised the CDC about the use of vaccines.
1:37 Speaker 04 I was subpoenaed to testify about whether I thought it made biological sense that vaccines could cause autism, and I didn't.
1:44 Speaker 05 Paul listens as Wakefield launches into his testimony.
1:48 Speaker 02 Just as a little bit of background, this represents 12 years of intensive clinical and scientific research, collaborative research.
1:55 Speaker 05 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.
2:21 Rund Abdelfatah? When it's Paul's turn to speak, he doesn't waste any time beating around the bush.
2:26 Speaker 06 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.
2:48 Rund Abdelfatah? 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.
2:59 Speaker 04 I think Andrew Wakefield believed this was true. And even after study, after study showed that he was wrong, he believed he was right.
3:08 Speaker 04 But you could see that he was beloved at that meeting. He was, he was godlike, whereas we were the bad guys.
3:16 Rund Abdelfatah? This wouldn't be the last time Wakefield would be called in front of the US government to repeat his debunked findings. Wakefield's paper gave the myth that vaccines cause autism real traction and staying power, the consequences of which we're still dealing with today.
3:33 Speaker 04 Once you've rung a bell like that, it's very hard to unring it.
3:38 Speaker 05 It was a moment that health professionals and the medical field point to as evidence that people who are skeptical of the safety of vaccines are making it all up. But this moment also became a proxy for fears that have been around as long as vaccines have, fears that in recent decades have intensified as the pharmaceutical industry has grown in size and influence, as the COVID-19 pandemic upended American life, as state mandated vaccination programs have faced backlash, and as a polarized political climate and a deluge of misinformation has made it harder for many people to know who to trust.
4:19 Rund Abdelfatah? Today, those fears go beyond just the MMR vaccine and autism, with some powerful people casting doubt on vaccine safety in general.
4:28 Speaker 07 Your president-elect Trump has just announced on his Truth Social account that he is picking Robert F. Kennedy Jr. to be the next Secretary of Health and Human Services.
4:38 Rund Abdelfatah? The Senate confirmed RFK Jr., a well-known vaccine skeptic, in February 2025. During his confirmation hearings, senators asked about his beliefs.
4:49 Speaker 08 I support the measles vaccine. I support the polio vaccine. I will do nothing as HHS Secretary. That makes it difficult or discourages people from taking either of those vaccines.
5:01 Rund Abdelfatah? Since his confirmation, he has made major and often controversial changes.
5:07 Speaker 07 In an unprecedented move, Secretary of Health and Human Services Robert F. Kennedy Jr. is replacing all members of the Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices, or ACIP. The Trump administration is out today with a report on children's health. The report calls for investigating what it calls "vaccine injuries."
5:27 Rund Abdelfatah? I'm Randa Abdel Fattah.
5:29 Speaker 05 And I'm Ramtin Arablouei. On this episode of Throughline from NPR, the roots of the modern anti-vaccine movement and of the fears that still fuel it. From a botched polio vaccine, to the 1998 Lancet paper, to today.
5:48 Speaker 09 Dylan calling from Denver, Colorado. Throughline's my favorite show, and I listen every week.
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7:27 Speaker 11 Part One.
7:29 Speaker 11 Vaccine Roulette.
7:31 Speaker 05 Dr. Paul Offit has been working in the field of infectious disease for over 40 years. His focus on vaccines, like many peoples, began in the shadow of polio.
7:44 Speaker 12 This year, the enemy, poliomyelitis, struck with such impact and fury that it shook the entire nation.
7:51 Speaker 04 I certainly remember polio.
7:53 Speaker 05 When Paul was five years old, he got surgery on his foot.
7:57 Speaker 04 When you're in an orthopedic hospital in the mid-1950s, you're in a polio ward.
8:00 Speaker 05 Newsreels about polio show kids in wards filled with rows of beds, the kind with the iron headboards that you always see in old hospitals.
8:09 Speaker 04 I remember children screaming. I remember the children in iron lungs. It was really like something out of a Charles Dickens novel.
8:18 Speaker 12 It spread its crippling tentacles from ocean to ocean and border to border.
8:23 Speaker 04 That is not a disease you want to relive.
8:26 Rund Abdelfatah? Starting in the late 1940s, polio outbreaks were just getting worse and worse. This is Elena Conis.
8:33 Speaker 13 And I'm a historian of medicine and public health and a professor in journalism and history at the University of California, Berkeley.
8:41 Rund Abdelfatah? She wrote the book Vaccine Nation: America's Changing Relationship with Immunization.
8:47 Speaker 05 Polio was a serious threat. A single case could send a community into a panic because polio is really contagious. It can spread through saliva, mucus, feces, contaminated water, or food.
9:00 Speaker 12 It has closed the gates on normal childhood. It has swept our beaches, stilled our boats, and emptied our parks.
9:07 Speaker 13 Because a single case meant that an outbreak was sure to come, and an outbreak meant that dozens, if not hundreds or thousands of people would be infected. People who were infected with it could end up paralyzed from the waist down, and many, many scores of them would die.
9:28 Speaker 13 So when the polio vaccine is approved for use by the federal government in 1955, it is literally this moment where like everybody pauses, people run into the streets, church bells ring, sirens go off, and then this massive effort gets underway to distribute this vaccine. And parents bring their kids and they line up in droves and they get this vaccine.
9:58 Speaker 05 The science behind the polio vaccine worked the same way some types of vaccines do today.
10:04 Speaker 04 So the goal of a vaccine is to induce the immunity that is typically acquired from natural infection without paying the price of natural infection.
10:13 Speaker 05 Vaccines do that by introducing your body to a version of the virus so your body can learn to recognize it and fight it off. Today, vaccines contain a weakened or dead bacteria, or virus, or bits of a virus's genetic material. Any of those things can help your body develop immunity.
10:31 Speaker 13 The effective polio vaccine contained a version of the polio virus that had been inactivated or "killed with chemicals."
10:47 Speaker 13 The problem is, that's definitely a way to make an effective vaccine, but you've really got to kill the virus.
10:55 Rund Abdelfatah? So by April of 1955, the polio vaccine was being produced at a mass scale.
11:01 Speaker 13 And in this one lab here in Berkeley, there was a batch that went out. Nobody realized that the virus hadn't been fully inactivated.
11:11 Rund Abdelfatah? Oh, my god.
11:12 Speaker 13 Yeah, so people who believed that they were turning out for a perfectly safe and effective vaccine ended up contracting polio.
11:23 Rund Abdelfatah? Because in that case, they just, they literally injected people with polio accidentally?
11:27 Speaker 13 Yes, they did. They did. So this came to be known as the Cutter Incident. And while it caused many, many cases of polio that likely went undetected, it caused 200-plus cases of paralytic polio and led to just under a dozen deaths.
11:48 Speaker 13 The federal government stepped in to say, "Okay, there's more we can do in the space of regulation and safety." And we had this relatively new government agency, the CDC, that stepped in and said, "We are going to keep track of all of these vaccines. We're going to work with the FDA and other agencies to make sure that all vaccines are safe."
12:11 Rund Abdelfatah? In May 1955, the government paused all polio vaccinations for over a week while they rechecked the vaccines for safety. The Cutter Incident led to a comprehensive investigation and increased federal safety protocols aimed at ensuring that something like this never happened again. The government wanted to send a message.
12:31 Speaker 13 You can count on the federal government to ensure your personal safety and this won't happen again. And in the late 1950s, this was a really effective message.
12:42 Rund Abdelfatah? Despite the Cutter incident, polio vaccination continued. By 1961, more than 85% of all school-aged children had received a polio vaccine.
12:53 Speaker 13 It's so hard for us to put ourselves in the shoes of somebody living through 1955. They were so terrified of polio. They just might have taken their chances with the vaccine with a lot of fear in their hearts, but different from how we might react today. Today, something like that, we would never get past.
13:19 Rund Abdelfatah? Cases of polio began to plummet. The polio vaccine became an example of a national triumph.
13:26 Speaker 13 And at this point, immunization and health professionals were saying, we are definitely on our way into an era of just biomedical supremacy and freedom from infectious diseases like measles, smallpox, chickenpox, mumps, polio. We're just going to become a dustbin of history.
13:46 Speaker 05 But that's not what happened.
13:49 Speaker 13 So we get to the end of the 1960s, and what becomes apparent is that nobody's turning out for these vaccines the way they did for the polio vaccine.
13:57 Rund Abdelfatah? Huh.
13:58 Speaker 13 People feared polio.
13:59 Rund Abdelfatah? Yeah.
14:00 Speaker 13 But they had a very different relationship with mumps, with measles, with rubella.
14:05 Speaker 05 They weren't as afraid, so more people skipped the shots.
14:09 Speaker 13 And what scientists and epidemiologists start noticing also is that where you have communities that are highly vaccinated, you aren't really seeing outbreaks of things like measles anymore. But where communities aren't highly vaccinated, you're getting outbreaks of polio and measles. So at the end of the 1960s, there's such to be more and more of a push to strengthen the enforcement of mandates.
14:36 Speaker 05 Vaccine mandates. Over the next decade, this became a priority. And in 1977, President Jimmy Carter launched a national initiative to increase childhood vaccination rates. States began to enforce mandates that required children to get a set of vaccinations before they enrolled in school.
14:56 Rund Abdelfatah? When we think of the word mandate, right, it's very much sort of top-down, right?
15:02 Speaker 13 Yes.
15:03 Rund Abdelfatah? And I think especially when it comes to children, that seems like it could strike a nerve for parents in particular, right? That some authority is telling them, I know what's best for your child.
15:17 Speaker 13 Absolutely.
15:18 Rund Abdelfatah? More so than you do.
15:19 Speaker 13 Absolutely. We were a country founded on libertarian values. Those values shaped the medical landscape of the 19th century and really like the medical landscape up to today. There's a tension between the authority of the parent and the authority of the state. And this has implications for all different kinds of sectors and questions in society, from mandatory schooling down to bike helmet laws and other public health measures. And yes, vaccination.
15:57 Speaker 05 And in 1982, that tension would come to a head around a vaccine against diphtheria, tetanus, and pertussis, known as the DPT vaccine.
16:09 Speaker 04 The diphtheria, tetanus, pertussis vaccine had a difficult safety profile when it was first invented.
16:18 Rund Abdelfatah? The vaccine could cause rare but severe side effects, like prolonged crying and seizures in infants. These symptoms were temporary, but claims began to circulate that the vaccine was doing permanent damage to children.
16:32 Speaker 13 So in the early 1980s, there is a reporter, Leigh Thompson.
16:40 Rund Abdelfatah? A reporter at NBC affiliate WRC TV in Washington DC, who catches wind of these claims.
16:47 Speaker 13 And she embarks on this reporting project. And it ends up becoming the basis for a 1982 hour-long news broadcast titled Vaccine Roulette.
16:58 Speaker 05 DPT Vaccine Roulette.
17:01 Rund Abdelfatah? Just to note here, the people call this vaccine both DTP and DPT. So you'll hear both in the episode, but they're referring to the same thing.
17:12 Speaker 13 And what Thompson reports is that scientists have known for some time that there are adverse events associated with this vaccine, but that they aren't disclosing them to parents and that parents are therefore, as she put it, playing a game of roulette with their children.
17:36 Speaker 13 If we kind of keep the Cutter incident in mind, we just marvel at the fact that parents at that moment in time knew that there was this horrible chance that something could go wrong. And yet, people still got their kids vaccinated against polio anyway. But a couple decades later, the early 1980s, that's not what the parent population of the US is ready to sign on for at that point.
18:03 Speaker 05 Between the Cutter incident and DPT vaccine roulette, a lot had changed in the US. There was a string of government cover-ups. Watergate, the Pentagon Papers. These things had put the American people on edge. And there was a series of protest movements, from civil rights to the anti-Vietnam War movement, that changed the attitudes of the country towards their government.
18:26 Speaker 13 Their attitude in the wake of the anti-authoritarian movements is, "Hold on, there were risks and we weren't informed? Why weren't we informed?"
18:36 Speaker 05 After seeing the documentary, some parents began to allege publicly that their children had suffered permanent harm after getting the vaccine.
18:45 Speaker 13 They organized themselves into a group that they called Dissatisfied Parents Together.
18:50 Speaker 05 DPT. They picked that acronym on purpose.
18:54 Speaker 13 And they were a pretty formidable group.
18:56 Speaker 05 Parents also began to sue pharmaceutical companies.
19:00 Speaker 14 The whole issue was like, it was very complicated to determine with certainty whether it was the reaction that a kid had was coincidental with the vaccine or was it some underlying condition that was triggered by the fever that they got as a result of this vaccine?
19:14 Rund Abdelfatah? This is Arthur Allen. He's a senior correspondent for nonprofit KFF Health News and author of the book, "Vaccine: The Controversial Story of Medicine's Greatest Lifesaver."
19:25 Speaker 14 You wouldn't really blame the vaccine for that because maybe if they'd had a fever the next week from a regular viral illness, the same thing would have happened to them.
19:36 Speaker 14 So there's the scientific like answer to that. And then there's the legal answer to that.
19:42 Rund Abdelfatah? The scientific answer became clear pretty quickly.
19:45 Speaker 04 Studies actually fairly quickly showed that that that wasn't the vaccine that was doing it. If you looked at children who got the vaccine or didn't, there was no increased incidence of any permanent defects associated with that vaccine.
19:57 Rund Abdelfatah? The legal answer was a little murkier.
20:00 Speaker 14 I mean, vaccines are supposed to be really safe and they should be, you know, much safer than almost any medication you can think of. But that doesn't mean that they're completely safe. It doesn't mean that there's no harms.
20:11 Rund Abdelfatah? Parents were winning personal injury lawsuits against the vaccine makers, with the average claim rising to tens of millions of dollars by 1984.
20:21 Speaker 04 It really drove vaccine makers from the market.
20:23 Rund Abdelfatah? But the activists powering dissatisfied parents together also wanted alternatives to lawsuits. They wanted a law on the books that would protect children from harm.
20:33 Speaker 13 They, over the course of the next four years, worked tirelessly in the Capitol to introduce new laws that said that the federal government would do even more to ensure that the vaccine supply was safe.
20:53 Speaker 05 In 1986, they had a breakthrough, a new law called the National Childhood Vaccine Injury Act, which creates the Vaccine Injury Compensation Program, commonly known as the Vaccine Court.
21:08 Rund Abdelfatah? It was designed to compensate individuals or their families who were injured by certain vaccines. It was a no-fault court, and the compensation money came from a government trust fund, funded by attacks on vaccine manufacturers. But the Vaccine Court also protected those vaccine manufacturers from lawsuits that threatened to hold up their production or even drive them out of business.
21:32 Speaker 13 So it's really important to pause here and look at this moment. The parents who came together were from across the political spectrum, and they did something that we'd seen happen before. They turned to Washington, they turned to the federal government and said, "Do more to ensure that vaccines are safe."
21:51 Speaker 13 This is really distinct in the history of anti-vaccination, and I hesitate to call it that because it does not seem accurate at all. This is a movement that's saying, you know, some of our members actually have real reservations about vaccines, but we are the parents who got our kids vaccinated, and we want future parents to get vaccines for their children and feel absolutely confident in those vaccines.
22:19 Rund Abdelfatah? Huh. Oh, see, that's a really important nuance.
22:23 Speaker 13 Mm-hmm.
22:24 Rund Abdelfatah? That it wasn't a, I don't want to vaccinate my child, and you shouldn't vaccinate your child. It's, we need to demand that we are continuing to improve these vaccines and make sure that they are as foolproof as possible.
22:38 Speaker 13 Exactly, exactly. It's a lot easier to tell a story of simple anti-vaccinationism. It, you know, boils everything down to black and white.
22:50 Speaker 13 This parent group.
22:51 Speaker 05 Dissatisfied Parents Together.
22:53 Speaker 13 Fractured after a while. There were those who found themselves just absolutely devoted to the cause and stuck with it and kept pushing and pushing and pushing. And then there were parents who said, okay, we got what we wanted, and now I'm moving on.
23:09 Speaker 05 Dissatisfied Parents Together would later morph into the National Vaccine Information Center, a group that today has been criticized for spreading misleading information about vaccine safety. The movement spawned by the documentary DBT Vaccine Roulette lived on.
23:28 Speaker 04 Really, in many ways, that vaccine caused the birth of the modern American anti-vaccine movement.
23:33 Speaker 05 Some parents began to draw connections between vaccines and any unexpected diagnoses.
23:40 Speaker 13 When Vaccine Roulette aired in 1982, it resonated with parents who feared that we were seeing as a nation more and more learning differences and developmental delays and disabilities in children. And they were really struggling to understand, like, why their kids had disabilities like this when they didn't, and nobody in their family did. And vaccines started to suddenly seem like a possible explanation.
24:12 Speaker 13 Concerns about the connection between vaccines and autism were circulating for close to two decades before they were published in The Lancet.
24:24 Speaker 05 Coming up, Andrew Wakefield publishes his paper, giving the movement new life.
24:37 Speaker 15 Hello, I'm calling from Milwaukee, Wisconsin. And the only reason I'm calling is to say that I heard the program called through line last Friday night, and it was the most wonderful program I've ever heard. Thank you. Thank you so much.
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26:15 Speaker 11 Part Two, The Lancet Paper.
26:20 Rund Abdelfatah? In 1996, a man named Richard Barr approached a doctor named Andrew Wakefield with an offer. Barr was a personal injury lawyer with ties to an anti-vaccine group. He offered to pay Wakefield to research a link between the MMR vaccine and autism, so that he could use Wakefield's research as evidence in his lawsuits.
26:42 Speaker 05 Wakefield's paper was published in 1998 in The Lancet, one of the world's leading medical journals, sending shockwaves through the medical community.
26:51 Speaker 04 Now, his paper wasn't a study.
26:54 Rund Abdelfatah? It was a case series, which is different from a full-blown scientific study. A case series is when doctors notice a trend in their field, maybe like a group of patients exhibiting mysterious symptoms, and they think there could be something more to look into. So they write up a paper on a very limited group of people detailing their findings.
27:14 Speaker 04 It was 12 children, eight of whom had developed signs and symptoms of autism.
27:20 Rund Abdelfatah? Wakefield's paper suggested a link to the MMR vaccine.
27:24 Speaker 04 For which he had no evidence.
27:26 Speaker 05 Again, this is Paul Offit, director of the Vaccine Education Center at the Children's Hospital of Philadelphia.
27:34 Speaker 04 You could have published a paper saying, "Here's eight children who recently ate a peanut butter and jelly sandwich that now have signs and symptoms of autism." Because it was really no better than that.
27:44 Speaker 05 But when it was published, people in the medical field took it seriously, because that's how a case series is supposed to work. Someone notices a strange pattern, publishes a paper about it, and it prompts other scientists to look into it.
27:58 Speaker 04 Because it's fair enough, right? My child was fine, they got this vaccine, now they're not fine. Could the vaccine have done it? That is an answerable question. It's a scientific question that can be answered in a scientific venue, and was. And so, study after study after study, more than a dozen studies, done in seven countries, on three continents, involving thousands of thousands of children.
28:21 Speaker 05 None of them found any evidence that linked the MMR vaccine to the development of autism.
28:28 Speaker 04 So, asked and answered.
28:34 Speaker 05 But the doubts Andrew Wakefield had sowed were powerful. And that's what landed Paul in front of Congress testifying opposite Andrew Wakefield in April 2000.
28:46 Speaker 06 My concern, Mr. Chairman, is that parents listening to or reading about this hearing might incorrectly conclude that vaccines cause autism. This is not the case. Vaccines are extremely safe and highly effective.
29:00 Rund Abdelfatah? I'd love to get a sense of even more of what it was like to be in that room listening to him.
29:05 Speaker 04 It was like the world had turned upside down. In my world, it's always the data that mattered. And it's fair to ask a question. It's fair to have a hypothesis. But if it's a testable hypothesis, which this was, does have a mark of autism, you're not asking how many angels can dance on the head of a pin. This was a question that could be answered in a scientific venue and was being answered in a scientific venue. And it just... And so I saw this man standing up, ignoring those data and just declaring his own truths, including scientific truths. And I just couldn't believe it. I wasn't used to that. I'm getting much more used to it now, but I wasn't used to that then.
29:40 Rund Abdelfatah? Did you have any interaction directly with him?
29:44 Speaker 04 Yes. As he was walking out, I shook his hand. And he looked at me and sort of kept his eyes parallel, as if he was looking at something behind me, which was unnerving.
29:57 Rund Abdelfatah? In that moment, did you have a sense of just how big this idea that he had launched into the world, that vaccines cause autism, was going to become?
30:07 Speaker 04 No, not at all. I still believed at that time, in a world dominated by logic and reason, that it's okay to ask the question, it's okay to have the hypothesis, but that when that question has been thoroughly answered, that that would end it. And I was just naive. I was wrong. It didn't end it at all. If anything, it's gotten worse over time, as we have less and less trust in public health agencies.
30:37 Speaker 04 I will never forget that when that meeting was over, and there was an overflow room for parents, because parents really wanted to hear this, as parents of children with autism. And afterwards, you know, there were a number of parents that came up to tell me what a jerk I was for sort of standing up for what I thought was the science of vaccines.
30:54 Speaker 04 The thing that struck me then, and still strikes me, is that we were like the scientists, or we were the doctors. But here, he was representing the parents. And, you know, we were parents too. So we care deeply about vaccine safety.
31:09 Rund Abdelfatah? Wakefield seems like he he knew how to command a room. He knew how to shape the narrative. And that seems to have been really important in terms of getting this idea traction.
31:21 Speaker 04 He comes off as someone who's speaking truth to power, and that power is pharmaceutical companies who are never going to be seen as sympathetic. So if you're on the other side, I mean, you're just saying, "Look, this isn't true. I mean, this isn't causing autism." But you don't have anything to offer. You don't have a clear cause or causes of autism. He does. He's offering parents something, and we're not.
31:44 Speaker 05 The prevalence of autism diagnoses was rising dramatically during this time. From the 1970s to the 1990s, the US had seen a tenfold increase. Some people attributed the rise, at least in part, to greater awareness and changes in diagnostic criteria. But there wasn't a conclusive explanation.
32:05 Rund Abdelfatah? Wakefield's theory was just one theory. Others started to emerge. Some parents latched onto an ingredient in some vaccines called thimerosal. It's a preservative used to keep germs from growing in some vaccines. It was never used in the MMR vaccine, but it was used in others, and it contains levels of mercury. Some parents believed exposing children to thimerosal could cause autism.
32:33 Rund Abdelfatah? This has been studied extensively since then, and there has been no scientific evidence linking the two. Still, the concerns about mercury led to change. There are now thimerosal-free versions of most vaccines available to people.
32:48 Speaker 05 Even if Wakefield's theory and thimerosal theory were pretty different, the people who believed in them had a common enemy.
32:56 Speaker 13 In the early 2000s, what we have is this moment in which a handful of things have been happening.
33:04 Speaker 05 Elena Conis, professor of journalism and history at the University of California, Berkeley.
33:10 Speaker 13 There's been growing attention to mercury exposure, growing crackdown on it. There's been growing attention to the abuses of the pharmaceutical industry. And what I mean by that is like, very broadly, the practices of the pharmaceutical industry in courting doctors and selling diseases in order to sell drugs, in like concealing data, in turning out-
33:36 Rund Abdelfatah? It's the opioid crisis, right?
33:38 Speaker 13 Yes, but like, long before the opioid crisis. Like, you know, we even have like, the editor of the esteemed New England Journal of Medicine writing a whole book about things that Big Pharma had done wrong. It has become like a national punching bag. There are these myriad concerns that parents and others have been raising about vaccines. The fact that autism rates were just skyrocketing in a mind-blowing way. Like, it just, in the early 2000s, everywhere you looked, every classroom, there were kids with autism diagnoses. They were all across the spectrum.
34:19 Speaker 13 The statistics coming out of the CDC were absolutely terrifying, and they just went higher and higher, like, the rate of-
34:27 Rund Abdelfatah? With no good explanation.
34:28 Speaker 13 No explanation, at first. And gradually, like, partial explanations coming together.
34:36 Speaker 13 But you can kind of start to see the issues here overlapping, like, hold on, mercury exposure, hold on, more and more vaccines, and these mandates, and autism. And this very active group of parents kind of join forces with some of the extant vaccine-critical groups and start bringing attention to, again, as they called it at the time, vaccine safety issues in a way that hadn't happened in a full 20-plus years. Like, things had gone really quiet after the passage of the 1986 law.
35:20 Speaker 13 All of this is kind of like coming to a boil at the same time. Like, imagine the stove with all of these pots, and they're all hitting, like, the boiling point.
35:31 Speaker 05 Soon, the pots on the stove would boil over, and concerns about vaccines and autism would spread much further.
35:39 Speaker 04 Around 2004, or FK Jr. called me.
35:44 Speaker 13 That's coming up.
35:50 Speaker 16 Hello, this is Steve from Tampa, Florida, and you're listening to Throughline from NPR.
35:58 Speaker 00 Stay tuned for the following announcements and messages from our sponsors. This message comes from Midi Health. Most women never get real answers about their hormonal health. Midi is changing that with virtual care covered by most major insurances. Understand your hormones. Visit joinmidi.com to book your first visit today. This message comes from Capella University. That spark you feel? That's your drive for more. Capella University's FlexPath learning format lets you earn your degree at your pace without putting life on pause. Learn more at capella.edu.
36:33 Speaker 10 This message comes from Live Right, publisher of John U. Bacon's New York Times bestseller, The Gales of November, a chronicle of the S.S. Edmund Fitzgerald's 1975 shipwreck. Never has it been told better than by Mr. Bacon in this colorful book, writes John J. Miller of The Wall Street Journal, while author Hampton Sides proclaims it's destined to be a classic. The Gales of November, now in paperback.
36:59 Speaker 11 Part three, deadly immunity.
37:03 Speaker 05 June 2005.
37:07 Speaker 05 Dr. Paul Offit wakes up to an article from Rolling Stone titled,
37:12 Speaker 04 Deadly Immunity.
37:14 Speaker 05 The author is a well-known environmental lawyer named Robert F. Kennedy Jr., who called him up while researching the article a year earlier.
37:22 Rund Abdelfatah? For years, RFK Jr. had been concerned about mercury in the environment. He'd pushed back on the coal industry to clean up rivers, where the mercury in fish had been found to have a harmful impact on humans who ate them. So when he learned there was mercury in vaccines, he decided to investigate, and he called up Paul.
37:42 Speaker 04 It was a good conversation. We talked for about an hour.
37:45 Rund Abdelfatah? At least, that's what he thought before he read the article.
37:49 Speaker 17 Although the vaccination industry insists that ethyl mercury poses little danger because it breaks down rapidly and is removed by the body, several studies suggest that ethyl mercury is actually more toxic.
38:02 Speaker 04 He just said that mercury is in vaccines at a level that's toxic. He had misstatement after misstatement after misstatement in that article.
38:10 Speaker 05 Paul had developed a vaccine for an illness called rotavirus. And as he says he told RFK on that call, study after study had shown that a child would ingest more mercury from breast milk than from any vaccine. There was no evidence that such small quantities caused damage.
38:29 Rund Abdelfatah? So back to the article. In it, RFK Jr. also repeated a claim from a scientific paper published in the late 90s by a doctor in England named Andrew Wakefield, the claim that vaccines are linked to autism.
38:46 Speaker 13 He was arguing another thing, namely that the pharmaceutical industry was aware of something and was concealing it.
38:53 Speaker 05 This is Elena Conis.
38:55 Speaker 13 And that corporations like that actually needed more regulation and oversight than they were getting.
39:03 Speaker 17 The scientists and researchers, many of them sincere, even idealistic, who are participating in efforts to hide the science on thimerosal, claim that they are trying to advance the lofty goal of protecting children in developing nations from disease pandemics. They're badly misguided. Their failure to come clean on thimerosal will come back horribly to haunt our country and the world's poorest populations. Deadly Immunity: Rolling Stone, June 2005.
39:33 Speaker 13 And coming from an environmental lawyer, that argument had a lot of traction.
39:38 Rund Abdelfatah? We reached out to both Andrew Wakefield and RFK Jr. Wakefield did not respond. A statement from the Department of Health and Human Services in response to our questions read in part, quote, "Secretary Kennedy is not anti-vaccine. He is pro-safety, pro-transparency, and pro-accountability." Okay, so back to 2005.
40:00 Speaker 05 RFK Jr.'s article reignited debates over vaccines, and Andrew Wakefield started to get noticed in the U.S.
40:11 Speaker 13 Wakefield becomes this high-profile individual. He had been one in England.
40:15 Rund Abdelfatah? And he inspires other high-profile supporters.
40:19 Speaker 18 We do not need that many vaccines.
40:22 Speaker 13 A number of celebrities start talking about their own concerns about vaccines, going on nationally televised talk shows.
40:31 Rund Abdelfatah? Among the most vocal were--
40:33 Speaker 13 Jenny McCarthy and Jim Carrey.
40:35 Speaker 18 Without a doubt in my mind, I believe vaccinations triggered Evan's autism.
40:41 Rund Abdelfatah? Actress Jenny McCarthy and comedian Jim Carrey were dating at the time, and Jenny's son had been diagnosed with autism.
40:48 Speaker 18 So I think they need to wake up and stop hurting our kids.
40:53 Rund Abdelfatah? Together, they organized a rally in the nation's capital called Green Our Vaccines.
40:58 Speaker 19 I just want to start by asking the CDC one question. How stupid do you think we are?
41:04 Rund Abdelfatah? RFK Jr. spoke at that rally.
41:07 Speaker 19 They've removed the thimerosal from the vaccines, and autism rates have not gone down. How many times have you read that, repeated by these people from the press? That is an industry talking point that the industry knows is a lie. Everybody knows that's a lie.
41:23 Rund Abdelfatah? National news outlets turned out story after story about vaccines.
41:27 Speaker 13 Local newsrooms were closing down and there was increasing competition for news consumers and the vaccine story was one of these stories that resonated broadly.
41:42 Rund Abdelfatah? And meanwhile.
41:44 Speaker 13 Social media is taking off. The public can actually weigh in. And so this thing really snowballs and it's really creating a mass movement.
41:55 Speaker 05 So as this mass movement continued to make headlines in the 2000s, it also began to face more scrutiny.
42:07 Speaker 13 A lot of really critical media attention then starts to focus on the kind of characterization of vaccine skeptics as ignorant, selfish, uninformed, and worse. And it's become kind of a moral position that many in media and politics have become comfortable taking vaccines save lives if you don't get vaccines, you don't care about people, and you don't believe in science without including any of the vast context around the question.
42:48 Speaker 20 Yesterday, a respected British medical journal retracted a study that said the MMR vaccine may trigger autism. CBS News correspondent Richard Roth.
42:58 Speaker 05 With more eyes on the movement, the Wakefield paper came under more scrutiny. The Lancet retracted it in 2010 and a British journalist named Brian Dear published an investigation revealing that it wasn't just flawed, but omitted key facts. Dear had already confirmed that Wakefield was paid to conduct his research by people with an interest in its outcome. His new work revealed that some children in the study had already exhibited signs of autism before getting vaccinated. RFK Junior's article in Rolling Stone was also removed.
43:34 Rund Abdelfatah? You went through the sort of fallacies of the Wakefield paper. Do you remember when it was retracted and what your reaction to the retraction was? And what happens to Wakefield?
43:48 Speaker 04 My reaction was, it's too late. It should have never been published. You can't say anything about causality because there's no control group.
43:56 Rund Abdelfatah? But were you surprised that even after the retraction, the narrative continued?
44:01 Speaker 04 I'm not even sure if they'd retracted it a month later. It would have mattered. I think the cage door got opened and the devil came out.
44:10 Speaker 05 After the retraction, Wakefield lost his medical license in the UK. But he had already moved to the US and gotten involved in the anti-vaccine movement. Eventually, he made a documentary, which controversially reiterated the claims in both his paper and RFK Junior's article. As for RFK Junior, he launched an organization called the World Mercury Project that was committed to, quote, "exposing the government and corporate corruption that has led to increasing exposures to neurotoxic mercury in foods and medicines."
44:46 Speaker 13 And in the meantime, vaccine-preventable diseases are starting to break out in really troubling numbers.
44:55 Speaker 21 Health officials fear thousands may have been exposed to the measles at Disneyland and Disney California Adventure last month.
45:03 Speaker 13 Then in 2014, there's this measles outbreak that starts at Disneyland.
45:08 Speaker 04 I think the original case may have come in from outside of this country because measles is still prevalent in the world.
45:14 Rund Abdelfatah? Measles had been eliminated in the US by the year 2000, which meant enough people were vaccinated that even if someone came into the country with measles, it wouldn't be able to spread. Think of it as like a bunch of people holding up umbrellas in a group. So even if a few people don't have an umbrella, they're still shielded from the rain.
45:33 Speaker 04 There was essentially a moat around them.
45:35 Rund Abdelfatah? But that protection wouldn't last forever. For decades, California had allowed some people to opt out of vaccines for non-medical reasons. The state actually created that exemption when it started mandating that kids get the polio vaccine before enrolling in school, back in the 1960s.
45:53 Speaker 04 California had a philosophical exemption to vaccination.
45:57 Rund Abdelfatah? And vaccination rates had begun to fall.
46:00 Speaker 04 Once vaccination rates fray, that moat disappears.
46:03 Speaker 22 Eye fever, aching eyes, hacking cough, and after a week, every square inch of you covered by red dots. Measles. Tonight, the CDC warns it's back and it's spreading.
46:15 Speaker 23 So Oregon is now the latest state to have a case of measles traced back to that outbreak that started at Disneyland.
46:22 Speaker 24 As health officials try and contain the virus.
46:24 Speaker 13 From late 2014 into 2015, health professionals and lawmakers come together in California and elsewhere and say, like, enough is enough. We have had enough vaccine skepticism. We have had enough use of vaccine exemptions. And so they start cracking down on exemption clauses. But there was a backlash.
46:48 Speaker 25 Jim Carrey is really upset with California Governor Jerry Brown for signing a new vaccination law this week. The rule makes vaccines mandatory for all schoolchildren, regardless of their religious and personal beliefs. Carrey went off on Twitter and called Governor Brown "a corporate fascist who must be stopped."
47:12 Speaker 14 In 2017, you started to have these Republican-led legislatures that were very skeptical of vaccination.
47:21 Speaker 05 Arthur Allen is a senior correspondent for KFF Health News.
47:25 Speaker 14 Republicans had always been as pro-vaccine as anybody else. It was a reaction to this effort to sort of crack down on vaccine exemptions that were causing this measles outbreak. And it created incredible power in the anti-vaccine movement.
47:41 Speaker 05 The Disneyland outbreak led to 147 people being infected with measles across seven states, Mexico and Canada. No one died. But Paul Offit says if vaccination rates continue to decline, outbreaks like that could be much worse in the future.
47:59 Speaker 14 So I just, I just fear this. I think we're just so blasé about this. We don't remember these diseases. And I guess, having lived in a polio ward for six weeks, it's, that's still with me.
48:15 Rund Abdelfatah? Let's play out the scenario. What are we looking at if vaccination rates for these different diseases fall?
48:22 Speaker 04 Then you'll see children start to die from measles again, because that's always the first one to come back. It's already starting to come back. Measles is the single most contagious vaccine-preventable disease. The contagiousness index for viruses like influenza or SARS-CoV-2, the cause of COVID, is like 2 to 4, meaning you'll infect 2 to 4 people. The contagiousness index for measles is 18. It's much, much higher. You just have to be in the person's airspace within 2 hours of them being there. And sadly, that may be what it takes, that we have to see children suffer this, but I'm not even sure that will do it.
48:59 Rund Abdelfatah? Dr. Paul Offit was appointed to an FDA Vaccine Advisory Committee in 2017. In September 2025, he was removed from the committee. Dr. Offit has said that he believes he was dismissed because of his critiques of the Trump administration. The administration has said this is not the case.
49:19 Speaker 04 I think we have lost trust. I think a lot of that happened during the COVID pandemic,
49:26 Speaker 04 in part because we weren't always right,
49:30 Speaker 04 because we were learning as you go,
49:34 Speaker 04 because you're building the air penalty while it's still in the air.
49:39 Speaker 04 And we were sort of dictating things. And that really rubbed people the wrong way.
49:47 Rund Abdelfatah? Yeah, I have to say, I kind of, I feel that I had my first kid. And, you know, you're getting vaccines basically from the time they're, what, like 2 months old? And I have a new kind of empathy for that kind of fear that many parents have, because you have this desire to sort of control everything, you know, about their well-being and health and care and all of that.
50:10 Speaker 04 I think it's perfectly reasonable for a parent to be skeptical of anything that they put into their child's bodies, vaccines certainly among them. I mean, we ask parents to give as many as 25 shots in the first few years of life to prevent diseases most people don't see using biological fluids most people don't understand. I think it would be surprising if parents weren't skeptical of vaccines. But I think that there's a difference between skepticism and cynicism. And when you cross the line to cynicism, now you just don't believe what people are telling you. You don't believe the data. You don't believe the science. And that's different. All you have that separates truth from superstition are excellent scientific studies. And if you're throwing those out, then you feel like there's no hope.
50:54 Speaker 13 I will say that when you sit down to get a vaccine, you're placing an enormous amount of trust in a long chain of people and institutions that you may not know, you may never see, you may never understand. That trust is fundamental to that story of success. But that trust has been eroded across the board. Getting a vaccine is not just this simple, cut and dried, medical or political act. Like, it's a human act, and it can be painful. And when we do it to children and our little
51:39 Speaker 13 babies, it's emotional, too. All of that is part of the reality of getting vaccinated. So, yes, vaccines save lives. And I wish that could be the end of the story. But the entire reason why I study the history of vaccination is because it's not.
52:15 Rund Abdelfatah? That's it for this week's show. I'm Rund Abdelfatah.
52:19 Speaker 05 I'm Ramtin Arablouei. And you've been listening to Throughline from NPR.
52:24 Rund Abdelfatah? This episode was produced by me.
52:26 Speaker 05 And me, and? Lawrence Wu.
52:28 Speaker 11 Julie Kane. Anya Steinberg. Casey Minor. Christina Kim.
52:33 Speaker 17 Devon Katayama.
52:34 Speaker 11 Irene Noguchi.
52:38 Rund Abdelfatah? Voiceover work in this episode was done by Devon Katayama.
52:41 Speaker 05 Thank you to Greta Pittinger at RAD, Brett Neely, Scott Hensley, Johannes Dergi, Jonette Oakes, Keandre Starling, Tony Cavan, Nadia Lancy, Edith Chapin, and Colin Campbell.
52:55 Rund Abdelfatah? Fact checking for this episode was done by Kevin Vogel. This episode was mixed by Jimmy Keeley. Music for this episode was composed by Ramtin and his band, Drop Electric, which includes
53:06 Speaker 26 Neveed Marvi. Cho Fujiwara.
53:09 Speaker 23 Anya Mizani.
53:10 Speaker 05 And finally, if you have an idea or like something you heard on the show, please write us at [email protected] .
53:17 Rund Abdelfatah? Thanks for listening.
53:31 Rund Abdelfatah? Stay tuned for the following announcements and messages from our sponsors.
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