Beyond religion
Vaccines
One retracted paper, one undisclosed patent, and two million children studied since.
The origin: one fraudulent paper
- Retracted by The Lancet in 2010. The retraction
- Wakefield was struck off the UK medical register for dishonesty. He is not a doctor.
- The data was fabricated. The BMJ's editorial: "Wakefield's article linking MMR vaccine and autism was fraudulent." The editorial
- He was being paid 435,643 pounds by a solicitor building litigation against vaccine makers, starting two years before the paper. Documentation
- He had filed a patent for a competing single measles vaccine before publication, explicitly claiming MMR causes "pervasive developmental disorder including autism." The actual patent
Lead with that last point. He had a financial stake in the vaccine he was attacking, and a product to sell in its place.
The study that started it, and the studies that checked it
Number of children in each study. Wakefield's paper, which was retracted for fraud, examined twelve.
Sources: PubMed records for each study; The Lancet retraction notice
Thimerosal was removed from US childhood vaccines by 2001 and autism diagnoses kept climbing. Denmark and Sweden removed it in 1992 with the same result. The correlation runs backwards.
The cost, in current numbers
2025: 2,255 US measles cases across 44 states, the largest year in over 30 years. Three deaths, all unvaccinated: two children aged 6 and 8 in Lubbock, Texas, and one adult in New Mexico. The first US measles deaths in a decade. Source
Myocarditis after mRNA COVID vaccines is real. English national data: excess cases per million in 28 days were 1 after a first Pfizer dose and 6 to 10 after Moderna. The at risk group is males 16 to 24 after the second dose. Nature Medicine
But the same study found 40 excess cases per million after a positive COVID test. The infection carries several times the risk of the thing people fear from the vaccine.
When they say
"Look at VAERS." VAERS's own website says it: "VAERS is a passive reporting system," "anyone can report an adverse event," and it "is not designed to determine if a vaccine caused a health problem." Read it yourself
"Too many, too soon." Infants encounter fewer antigens in today's schedule than 40 or 100 years ago, because purified antigens replaced crude whole cell preparations. Pediatrics
"Natural immunity is better." For measles this is backwards. Measles infection causes immune amnesia: it destroys 11 to 73 percent of the antibodies you had built against other pathogens. Science, 2019
"Formaldehyde." A two month old's blood contains about 1.1 mg from ordinary metabolism. The total from every vaccine in the first two years is 0.7 to 0.8 mg.