If only there were a way to prevent measles [/s]

And the father of it all - Andrew Wakefield

Andrew Wakefield has been a boon for the tiny coffin industry. The motherfucker belongs in prison. Don’t recognize the name? He created the modern antivaccine movement.

--On This Day in History Shit Went Down: February 28, 1998--

Antivaxxers have been around since the first vaccine, but in the late 20th century we were doing okay. Measles was eradicated in the U.S. In the UK, measles vaccination rates were at 92%. Then this hateful fuckstick published a bullshit paper in the prestigious UK journal The Lancet saying vaccines are dangerous and the antivaccine movement was reinvigorated. We’re still suffering the consequences today.

In 1993 Wakefield, a gastroenterologist, suggest that the MMR (measles/mumps/rubella) vaccine caused Crohn’s disease, but it was the Lancet paper that really screwed us. Wakefield was lead author on a paper with a dozen others. It alleged the vaccine caused both bowel issues and “pervasive development disorder in children.” Published on February 28, 1998, the bullshit vaccine-autism link was born. Then the piece of shit held a press conference to spread the fear.

The following month the Medical Research Council said no there is no such link shut the fuck up. A month after that, Finnish scientists completed a 14-year study on MMR showing it was safe. A shit-ton of other studies followed revealing the vaccine was safe and Wakefield to be full of shit. But the lies spread with the help of media, like that shitrag The Daily Mail and celebrities such as Jenny McCarthy who supported Wakefield. Within half a dozen years MMR uptake in the UK had fallen to 81%, and measles was making a resurgence in the U.S.

In February 2004 journalist Brian Deer of The Sunday Times exposed the flawed science of Wakefield’s paper as well as a shocking—and undisclosed—conflict of interest. The parents of the kids in Wakefield’s study were recruited by a lawyer—who Wakefield was in cahoots with—launching a class-action lawsuit against MMR manufacturers. The following month ten of Wakefield’s co-authors issued a retraction and The Lancet said yeah we really shouldn’t have published that. What’s more, Wakefield’s conclusions were that putting three vaccines in one was the problem and he advocated doing them one at a time. AND THE MOTHERFUCKER HAD APPLIED FOR A PATENT FOR A SINGLE-JAB MEASLES VACCINE!

Despite revealing that Wakefield manipulated the evidence to his own ends, violating numerous ethical codes in the process, it took until 2010 before the paper was fully retracted and Wakefield lost his license to practice medicine. And yet, this outhouse gloryhole of a person is still spreading lies, directing a full-of-shit antivaccine movie in 2016 and continuing to speak at antivaccine rallies. His bullshit spread beyond instilling fear about MMR to fear of all vaccines, including the flu shot and Covid vaccines. Add to this his maligning of autism by making it seem it was better to risk death from a preventable disease than to be autistic.

The number of deaths Wakefield is responsible for is uncountable.

And then a former Playboy model got in on the act ....