<@KeithInc.> #171683
Along with what @Skide said, there was a guy named Andrew Wakefield. He really wanted there to be a link between vaccines and autism, mainly because he was being paid to find it. He and 11 other colleagues did a study that supposedly proved this - even though the study was poorly designed, the sample size was very small, and the conclusions were mostly speculation. After that a number of epidemiological studies were conducted that directly refuted the findings of Wakefield et al 1998, and no one with a well designed study was able to reproduce the findings. Because of this, the paper was retracted and even 10 of 12 of the original researchers involved in the paper supported that retraction, stating that the paper provided insufficient evidence with regard to the link between autism and vaccination, specifically the MMR vaccine. They admitted that the reason there was even thought to be a link was an issue of timing - both the appearance of autism and vaccination occur in early childhood.
It also turned out that Wakefield failed to disclose financial interests - he was being funded by a group of lawyers who had been hired by parents to suit the pharmaceutical companies that produce the MMR vaccine.
In 2010 it was found that not only did Wakefield not disclose his financial conflict of interest, it turned out he also had committed several ethics violations, including going into the sample children’s medical history without permissions. Later that year it turned out that he had committed outright fraud - he cherry picked data that only served his purpose and when he didn’t have that, he just plain made things up. He has now had his medical license revoked and is not allowed to conduct research, all of which RFKJ has said is unfair and actually the result of the influence of Big Pharma on government. It turns out that Wakefield did all of this to make money.
This is the paper that people who don’t understand this science refer to when they are saying that there is a definite link between autism and vaccines, and RFKJ has done a lot to spread the misinformation this paper helped create and support.
There is no two sides to this. This vaccines = autism has done incredible harm to the autistic community, to the neurodivergent community at large, and to the wider community in the form of spreading both disease and fear of neurodivergent people. What these people have done, entirely for the purpose of making money, is a fucking catastrophe.