ARI SHAPIRO, HOST:
The Secretary of Health and Human Services, Robert F. Kennedy Jr., has been a vocal skeptic of vaccination for years. In a Fox 瓜神app editorial regarding the measles outbreak in West Texas, he did write that vaccines are, quote, "crucial to avoiding potentially deadly disease," but he also stopped short of actually recommending them, writing, the decision to vaccinate is a personal one. Elsewhere, he has repeatedly made the debunked claim that there could be a link between vaccines and autism. That particular myth long predates RFK Jr. The hosts of NPR's Throughline, Rund Abdelfatah and Ramtin Arablouei, have the history behind one of public health's most enduring falsehoods.
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DAN BURTON: Dr. Wakefield, would you like to start this panel?
ANDREW WAKEFIELD: 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.
RUND ABDELFATAH, BYLINE: 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.
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ABDELFATAH: Andrew Wakefield was among them. At this moment, in the year 2000, he's a researcher from the Royal Free and University College Medical School in London.
PAUL OFFIT: A superb scientist who was at a superb institution.
RAMTIN ARABLOUEI, BYLINE: Sitting just to the left of Wakefield is...
OFFIT: Paul Offit.
ARABLOUEI: ...Paul Offit.
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.
ARABLOUEI: At the time, Paul was also part of a committee that advised the CDC about the use of vaccines.
OFFIT: I was subpoenaed to testify about whether I thought it made biological sense that vaccines could cause autism, and I didn't.
ARABLOUEI: Paul listens as Wakefield launches into his testimony.
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WAKEFIELD: I just - as a little bit of background, this represent 12 years of intensive clinical and scientific research, collaborative research...
ABDELFATAH: Wakefield is summarizing the results of research he published in 1998 in a renowned British medical journal called The Lancet. In that paper, Wakefield suggested a link between the measles, mumps and rubella vaccine, also known as MMR, and the development of autism in children.
OFFIT: For which he had no evidence. 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.
ARABLOUEI: But when it was published, people in the medical field took it seriously.
OFFIT: 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 a 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...
ARABLOUEI: None of them found any evidence that linked the MMR vaccine to the development of autism.
OFFIT: So asked and answered.
ARABLOUEI: 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.
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OFFIT: 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.
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?
OFFIT: No. Not at all. I still believed at that time, in a world dominated by logic and reason, that it's OK to ask the question. It's OK 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.
ABDELFATAH: Wakefield seems like 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.
OFFIT: 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.
ABDELFATAH: Wakefield's paper came out at a time when many parents were searching for answers.
ELENA CONIS: Autism rates were just skyrocketing in a mind-blowing way.
ABDELFATAH: This is Elena Conis, professor of journalism and history at the University of California Berkeley.
CONIS: In the early 2000s, everywhere you looked, every classroom, there were kids with autism diagnoses. They were all across the spectrum. The statistics coming out of the CDC were absolutely terrifying, and they just went higher and higher.
ARABLOUEI: From the 1970s to the 1990s, the U.S. 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.
CONIS: Concerns about the connection between vaccines and autism were circulating for close to two decades before they were published in The Lancet.
ABDELFATAH: And Wakefield's paper spoke directly to these concerns.
CONIS: Wakefield becomes this high-profile individual. He had been one in England.
ABDELFATAH: And he inspires other high-profile supporters.
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JENNY MCCARTHY: We do not need that many vaccines.
ABDELFATAH: Among the most vocal were...
CONIS: Jenny McCarthy and Jim Carrey.
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MCCARTHY: Without a doubt, in my mind, I believe vaccinations triggered Evan's autism.
ABDELFATAH: Actress Jenny McCarthy and comedian Jim Carrey were dating at the time, and Jenny's son had been diagnosed with autism. Together, they organized a rally in the nation's capital called Green Our Vaccines.
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JIM CARREY: I just want to start by asking the CDC one question. How stupid do you think we are?
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ABDELFATAH: RFK Jr. spoke at that rally.
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ROBERT F KENNEDY JR: And this is how they defend themselves. They hire these phony scientists. They produce these phony reports. So I know how to read them. So I did something that not a single member...
ABDELFATAH: National news outlets turned out story after story about vaccines.
ARABLOUEI: 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 Deer published an investigation, revealing that some children in the study had already exhibited signs of autism before getting vaccinated.
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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?
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OFFIT: 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.
ABDELFATAH: But were you surprised that, even after the retraction, that the narrative continued?
OFFIT: I'm not even sure if they'd retracted it a month later it would have mattered. I think the cage door got open, and the devil came out.
SHAPIRO: Ramtin Arablouei and Rund Abdelfatah, hosts of NPR's history podcast Throughline. You can hear the full episode on the origins of the myth that vaccines cause autism wherever you get your podcasts.
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