May 19, 2016
The controversial film "Vaxxed: From Cover-Up to Catastrophe," which was pulled from the Tribeca Film Festival in March, will play in Philadelphia, Newsworks reports.
The film is co-directed by Andrew Wakefield, who published a study in 1998 that claimed there was a link between the measles, mumps, rubella (MMR) vaccine and autism. However, that study was called "an elaborate fraud" and the medical journal it was published in retracted it. Wakefield lost his medical license in 2010.
The movie claims that officials from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention covered up crucial data in a 2004 study that would have shown a causal relationship between the MMR vaccine and autism.
Researcher Brian Hooker published a study in 2014 based on a re-analysis of that data, but that study too was retracted. An editor's note in the journal Translational Neurodegeneration said that there were "undeclared competing interests on the part of the author which compromised the peer review process" and that "post-publication peer review raised concerns about the validity of the methods and statistical analysis."
A study of 95,000 children, published in 2015 in JAMA and unaffiliated with the CDC study, found no link between autism and the MMR vaccine.
The movie will show at the Ritz Five theater. Read the full story here.
