Andrew Wakefield and the journalists and editors who enabled him.

January 29, 2026 - 07:23 UTC

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Profiteering, child-torturing fraud is what he is; the grand saint of the antivax movement.
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In the aftermath of each of these scandals (we're in the middle of a couple of them right now), everyone conveniently forgets about the enthusiastic enablers who 'only reported' and uncritically platformed figures who often openly manipulated the media.

Corrections come quietly, and late if at all.
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I loathe him on a level few can comprehend
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i was born not long after the 1998 lancet paper, so my parents opted to get me and my little sister separate vaccines payed for privately. i got autism anyways and they couldn’t afford all my sisters second doses so it wasn’t until her early teens that she was fully immunised against all 3 viruses.
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jesus

fuck that guy and his enablers, argh
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Yeah I didn't get the MMR, am autistic anyway and got measles when I was 6!
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tldr fuck you andrew wakefield for wasting my parents money and nearly getting my sister ill
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100.000 years of Blood War upon the british journalist class
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I wasn't aware the anti-vax stuff originated in the UK till I saw hbomberguy's big video on it, and man was I getting constant deja vu with how the UK media reported on the anti-vax nonsense and how they report on trans people. Uncritically pushing junk science to harm people.
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You’re right, I didn’t make that connection, but it’s all the same tactics.
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It was also pre social media I think.

I remember the MMR and autism thing.

FFS there was a conspiracy theory spread about aspartame in the 90s, on disc and email.
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Strictly speaking, Wakefield didn't create anti-vax sentiment - in the 1980s, there was a moral panic in the US about whether the pertussis vaccine caused encephalopathy in children.

Congress passed a law to protect pharmaceutical companies from nuisance lawsuits.

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_Childhood_Vaccine_Injury_Act
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History repeats. The very first wave of anti-vaccine propaganda also arose first in the UK, almost immediately after the creation of the first widely recognised vaccine by Edward Jenner. It doesn't diminish their responsibility, but Wakefield and those who championed him reopened an old wound.
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There was already an anti-vax movement in the US at the time, there's been frequent transatlantic cross-pollination in the anti-vax movement just as there is in the anti-trans movement.
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and the lawyer who paid him to do it!
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One of the many reasons I loathe Private Eye.
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Should be tried in The Hague
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And the politicians. None of them give a crap about science.
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The Guardian has always been a fucking rag.
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He definitely paved the way for RFK Jr
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Some part of me thinks that if Roald Dahl were still alive by the turn of the millennium, he'd wage a holy war of letters on Wakefield and the institutions who aided and abetted him.
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