The rock star | Dr Anti-vax Ep 2

Transcript

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Speaker 31 Tortoise.

Speaker 33 By 2011, Andrew Wakefield is on the rocks. He's been struck off by Britain's medical regulator, and in America, a US vaccine court has trashed his theory that the MMR jab causes autism.

Speaker 33 In January, Wakefield is accused of fraud.

Speaker 33 The British Medical Journal alleges that he falsified data in the run-up to his 1998 paper, the one published by The Lancet that started off the whole MMR scare.

Speaker 33 Wakefield sues the medical journal, but he fails and he's left with a large legal bill.

Speaker 33 What keeps him afloat during this difficult period is the support of ordinary parents, foot soldiers in his anti-vax army.

Speaker 33 Remember how in episode one, we heard how these parents of profoundly autistic kids, anguished and looking for answers, have become completely dedicated to Wakefield's cause.

Speaker 33 Well now they come through for him, organising fundraisers and gathering donations for his legal defense fund.

Speaker 33 But it's not only parents who keep Wakefield's flag flying. Anti-vax sentiment is growing in another important demographic, celebrities.

Speaker 33 People like Jenny McCarthy, a former Playboy model turned actor. McCarthy has a son, Evan, who's autistic.
She's convinced that the MMR jab triggered his condition.

Speaker 33 With her A-list partner, Jim Carey, they appear on programs like The View, Larry King, Oprah.

Speaker 34 Tonight, exclusive Jim Carey and Jenny McCarthy, partners in life and partners in the search for answers to autism.

Speaker 35 What number will it take for people just to start listening to what the mothers of children who have autism have been saying for years?

Speaker 33 I don't think we can afford to assume that the people who are charged with our public health any longer have our best interests at heart all the time.

Speaker 33 Ordinary parents and outspoken celebrities, foot soldiers and flag bearers, these are the people who keep Wakefield going through his dark years.

Speaker 33 They keep money coming in and they keep their hero in the public eye.

Speaker 33 So that when Wakefield's luck turns a few years later, He's in a position to exploit his good fortune and transform himself into an anti-vax superstar.

Speaker 38 Controversy brewing over this documentary.

Speaker 39 Protesters turned out in support of the documentary Vax.

Speaker 40 This is fantastic. I mean, I want the headlines to continue.
We need this to keep going.

Speaker 33 I'm Alexei Mostrus, and from Tortoise Media, you're listening to Dr. Anti-Vax, episode two:

Speaker 33 The Rockstar.

Speaker 33 Francesca Alessi is a producer, camera operator and editor. She worked with Andrew Wakefield on and off for almost 10 years, starting from around 2010.

Speaker 41 When I was out of school, I was looking for work like everybody else. And one day, I was on a website that used to be used a lot at that time, and Craigslist.

Speaker 41 I'm on Craigslist and I see this ad, and somebody's looking for a videographer, and it's looking for somebody who's compassionate, somebody who understands children and children with disabilities.

Speaker 41 And I send an email to this person.

Speaker 33 At some point after he's struck off, Wakefield gets the idea of filming some of the parents he's meeting, parents of children with autism. He's casting around for a way to make an impact.

Speaker 33 Perhaps he can still convince people of his original theory that vaccines trigger bowel problems and autism.

Speaker 41 At that time, Andrew Wakefield did not have a project in mind per se.

Speaker 41 He was was trying to film different kids that are very, very sick to show the world that if you do look at them internally, you will be seeing that there is a connection between autism and bowel syndrome.

Speaker 41 And this is the same thing he was trying to prove in England when he was still there working as a doctor. So he was just taking clips.
He wasn't even sure yet what he was going to do with them.

Speaker 33 At this stage, Francesca doesn't know much about Wakefield's history or about the science. But the project makes her feel like she's doing something good, helping people who need it.

Speaker 41 The mothers were so passionate about it and their hearts were bleeding completely. So naturally my compassion moved towards them and trying

Speaker 41 to tell them, you know, even though the world is not listening, I'm listening. My heart is with you.

Speaker 33 It doesn't take long for Francesca to become a professional soldier in Wakefield's army.

Speaker 41 And of course, I'm sold. I'm like, yeah, I want to save the world.
Of course I want to help the children. Of course I'm going to do this, no matter what.

Speaker 33 Wakefield and Francesca keep working. He's trying to find a home for all the footage.
They don't really have a clear focus. But then, in 2014, Wakefield gets a call from a man called Brian Hooker.

Speaker 33 Hooker is a biochemical engineer by training. At the time, he's a professor at a small Christian liberal arts college in California.

Speaker 33 But he's also a father, struggling to look after his profoundly autistic son. Like the other parents, like Jenny McCarthy, Hooker is convinced that childhood vaccines caused his son's condition.

Speaker 33 But unlike them, he's spent years trying to get information out of America's public health agency, the CDC.

Speaker 33 That's the agency responsible for monitoring vaccine safety.

Speaker 33 Before he's ever met Andrew Wakefield, Hooker spends his time submitting hundreds of Freedom of Information requests to the CDC, trying to force them to disclose data.

Speaker 33 Hooker remembers that period well.

Speaker 39 I was publishing the results of these Freedom of Information Act requests. I was writing articles, not scientific articles.

Speaker 39 And then suddenly in 2013, I get a phone call from a CDC official named William Thompson.

Speaker 39 He started to share background documents and he started to share details of where specifically where the CDC committed fraud

Speaker 39 in a paper that was published in 2004 on the MMR vaccine.

Speaker 33 Thompson says that the CDC intentionally covered up evidence about the MMR jab.

Speaker 33 He claims that in 2004, the agency omitted data suggesting that some African-American boys who received the MMR vaccine were at an increased risk of autism.

Speaker 33 Hooker doesn't know much about the MMR MMR vaccine, but he knows someone who's been obsessed with it for a while.

Speaker 39 When the whistleblower, Dr. Thompson, started talking about the MMR vaccine, I contacted Andy straight away.

Speaker 33 It's exactly what Wakefield has been looking for. In his mind, this is a smoking gun, evidence of a massive CDC cover-up, confirmation that he was right all along.

Speaker 33 So Wakefield persuades Hooker to start recording his phone calls with Thompson and he begins to make a film but he needs help wakefield is not an experienced filmmaker he just doesn't have the contacts or the clout to get it all together but he gets himself into the right room

Speaker 40 the phone rings and it's this pr person donna shuman she said do you know who dr andy wakefield is i said yes uh what what's going on she said we're meeting in the hollywood hills andy wakefield's gonna be there and so i you know of course showed up.

Speaker 33 This is Del Bictri. At the time, he was a producer on a daytime TV talk show called The Doctors.
He was already convinced that vaccines are harmful.

Speaker 33 But right before meeting Wakefield, he'd been hearing whispers about the CDC whistleblower, and he was intrigued.

Speaker 40 I'll never forget somebody walked up and said, hey, Andy, you got to do your pitch.

Speaker 40 And then you said, you know, what I'm doing about it is I'm making a documentary about a whistleblower at the CDC named Dr. William Thompson.

Speaker 40 I think you said you'd been working on the documentary for over a year and you needed funding to finish it up.

Speaker 40 And I'll never forget just thinking, I mean, it's impossible to describe what a moment like that feels like.

Speaker 40 You know, in film, we do that trick where you sort of dolly forward but focus pull back so the background slides in around you and the ray of sunshine beats down on the character.

Speaker 40 You know, I felt like this thought, wow, all right. Well,

Speaker 33 this is one of those filmic you know spiritual encounter moments in 2016 Wakefield and Big Tree with Francesca's help released the film it's called Vaxed

Speaker 42 there's a whistleblower from the CDC who's going to come out and say that the CDC had committed fraud on the MMR study and that they knew that vaccines were actually causing autism Conspiracy at the CDC.

Speaker 33 That's the film's central thread. But the real emotional force of Vax comes from the personal stories of the parents.
Stories that anyone, scene skeptic or advocate, would find heartbreaking.

Speaker 31 My oldest son, Ian, was walking and running. After the vaccine, he was no longer able to do that.

Speaker 43 So I called a clinic and I said, I think my child's had an adverse reaction to those shots.

Speaker 33 The parents' stories are compelling. but they're not quite enough.
It needs a celebrity, a flag bearer, for the film to really take off.

Speaker 33 In 2016, Robert De Niro invites Vaxed to be part of his Tribeca Film Festival, an annual event held in New York since 2002.

Speaker 33 But when the other Tribeca participants find out that Vaxed is part of the festival, they threaten to pull out. They don't want to be associated with something that they see as anti-science.

Speaker 33 Under pressure, De Niro eventually pulls the film, but it's clear he doesn't want to. The actor has an autistic son himself.

Speaker 38 There was a bit of controversy, some headlines at the beginning of this year's festival when it was announced that this film called Baxed would be screened at the festival.

Speaker 38 Later, the festival pulled it. Was it because of the backlash?

Speaker 44 I think the movie is something that people should see. I, as a parent of a child who has autism, I'm concerned and I want to know the truth.

Speaker 38 I think the film was controversial because people felt that the filmmaker had been discredited.

Speaker 44 Even he, I'm not so sure about. At the end of the day, even him.

Speaker 33 The film is dropped from Tribeca, but thanks to De Niro, it receives national media attention.

Speaker 45 Okay, leading us off is controversy surrounding Robert De Niro.

Speaker 37 Controversial documentary's been pulled from the Tribeca Film Festival. Filmmakers tried to share the film.

Speaker 47 Protesters turned out in support of the documentary facts, but a film, it is about reported links between a particular vaccine and an increase in cases of autism.

Speaker 33 It's the best thing that could have happened.

Speaker 40 This is fantastic. I mean, I want the headlines to continue.
We need this to keep going. I mean,

Speaker 40 we wanted that fire. It put us in the mainstream.

Speaker 33 To Wakefield's supporters, it plays directly into this narrative of censorship and conspiracy. With all this media attention, another cinema quickly snaps it up.

Speaker 41 The premiere of Vax was in New York. A lot of people came.

Speaker 41 So many people came to see it to the point that the theater had to arrange security because there were too many people outside. They couldn't manage.

Speaker 33 Within months, Vaxed is being shown on screens around the world.

Speaker 41 I convinced him to have the movie translated in Italian and I did the Italian translation myself. So we put subtitles in Italian, then we did subtitles in other languages, in French and so forth.

Speaker 41 And once that happened, the movie exploded worldwide tenfold.

Speaker 33 When mainstream reviews come out, most are scathing.

Speaker 33 Some mention important points that FAXT just omits, like the statement issued by William Thompson, the CDC's supposed whistleblower, saying that he believes vaccines have saved and continue to save countless lives.

Speaker 33 Or more details about the study that was supposedly fixed, the one that found that autism rates were higher in African-American boys.

Speaker 33 Critics of Fax pointed out that the disparity in this study was more due to how the data was collected.

Speaker 33 It was more like a disagreement between colleagues than a massive conspiracy, an argument about one outcome in one subgroup in just one study.

Speaker 33 What's more, the supposed whistleblower, Thompson, remains as a CDC employee after Vaxed. He even gets a promotion.
And his later work exploring any links between MMR and autism finds no relationship.

Speaker 33 But scathing reviews and fact checks don't really matter. This time around, Wakefield doesn't have to rely on the mainstream press to endorse his message.

Speaker 33 2016 is the golden age of social media and online vaxed is going viral.

Speaker 41 I did this promo in which I filmed people watching the movie and a little bit of the Q ⁇ A after the movie. And that video went viral.

Speaker 41 And we were literally sitting at dinner and every five minutes that thing went up 5,000 likes. We were getting 1,000 likes a minute.
And I had videos that were watched like millions of times.

Speaker 33 According to Francesca, Vaxed is a turning point for Andrew Wakefield.

Speaker 33 18 years after his original paper in The Lancet, and despite judges and doctors and experts all saying he's wrong, by 2016, he's back and bigger than ever.

Speaker 41 It's what made him. He was like ever before treated like the biggest rock star in the race.

Speaker 41 And I've been in places walking down the street or airports that people turn around and just say, oh my god, is that you?

Speaker 41 Randomly, as if I was walking with David Bowie.

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Speaker 31 Hey, I'm Paige DeSorbo, and I'm always thinking about underwear.

Speaker 32 I'm Hannah Berner, and I'm also thinking about underwear, but I prefer full coverage. I like to call them my granny panties.

Speaker 31 Actually, I never think about underwear. That's the magic of Tommy John.

Speaker 32 Same, they're so light and so comfy, and if it's not comfortable, I'm not wearing it.

Speaker 31 And the bras, soft, supportive, and actually breathable.

Speaker 32 Yes, Lord knows the girls need to breathe. Also, I need my PJs to breathe and be buttery soft and stretchy enough for my dramatic tossing and turning at night.

Speaker 32 That's why I live in my Tommy John pajamas.

Speaker 31 Plus, they're so cute because they fit perfectly. Upgrade your drawer with Tommy John.
Save 30% for a limited time at tommyjohn.com/slash comfort. See site for details.

Speaker 33 Okay, so it's time for a sense check. When I started looking into Andrew Wakefield, I'll confess that I was not coming at it from a neutral perspective.

Speaker 33 I support vaccines, and I'd read enough about Wakefield to know that he was discredited.

Speaker 33 But it's hard not to watch endless videos of upset parents, parents who are convinced that vaccines damage their children without questioning your assumptions.

Speaker 33 And then, when you see that autism rates have also gone up significantly in the last 20 years, like really significantly, you begin, or at least I begun, to feel a tiny sliver of doubt.

Speaker 33 What if there was something to all this? I wanted to chat all this through with Ilan, my producer, who's spent some time getting immersed into the science.

Speaker 33 So if we start off with the autism rates, do we know, are they actually going up? And if so, why?

Speaker 36 Yes, all right. So the headline answer to that is yes, they do appear to have gone up a lot.

Speaker 36 The CDC has an extensive monitoring program. Their estimates suggest that the proportion of kids with autism

Speaker 36 has gone from around 0.7%

Speaker 36 in 2000 to just under 3%

Speaker 36 in 2020. That's a very big

Speaker 36 increase. It's almost sort of quadrupling in the space of 20 years.

Speaker 36 And, you know, studies in the UK give slightly different estimates, but broadly the trend is the same.

Speaker 36 But I spoke to some experts about this and they suggested the situation isn't quite as straightforward as that.

Speaker 36 So one chap I spoke to is Professor Eric von Bon, who was one of the expert witnesses at the Sedillo trial.

Speaker 33 Yeah, yeah, he gave evidence that he did, yeah.

Speaker 36 And he's actually done a lot of research on autism prevalence around the world. So he's really a sort of top expert on this.

Speaker 36 And I asked him, is this a real increase or is there something else going on? And this is what he had to say.

Speaker 48 We now diagnose children that we would not have diagnosed before. If you look at the over time,

Speaker 48 the proportion of children in epidemiological surveys who have autism and no intellectual disability has increased.

Speaker 48 So the recent studies include a much higher proportion of high-functioning or non-intellectually disabled children with autism compared to the disabled parts.

Speaker 48 So the increase is, you could say, is almost entirely accounted for by inclusion in the case definition of high-functioning forms, but there is no evidence that the low functioning or profound autism or non-verbal autism has increased during that period.

Speaker 36 Okay, so that's one really crucial point that he made. We are now diagnosing children who would not have been diagnosed.

Speaker 33 Okay. But doctors are kind of more aware of the condition, more ready to diagnose it.
And at the same time, the sort of official criteria has kind of expanded. Exactly.

Speaker 36 But

Speaker 36 there is still uncertainty and and disagreement as to whether this rise in prevalence is entirely accounted for by those things, or if there is still some real increase going on that we need to be worried about.

Speaker 33 So there could be something happening that is actually increasing the number of autistic kids.

Speaker 36 There could be. And my impression of the kind of scientific consensus on that is that it's not settled.
They're looking at it as difference of opinion.

Speaker 33 Okay.

Speaker 33 So can you understand why vaccine skeptics say that vaccines might be causing autism?

Speaker 36 Well, the one area that has been investigated is whether vaccines are causing this rise. So, you know, Andrew Wakefield is threaded through this series.
We've found him, you know, everywhere.

Speaker 36 And his kind of career-defining claim was to link the MMR vaccine in particular. to autism.

Speaker 36 That is a topic that's been incredibly well investigated. And I want to give you a flavour of the kind of research that's been done.

Speaker 36 There are these two particularly famous studies, right, which came out of Denmark. So the first one came out in 2002.
So that's quite a long time ago, right? This is before the Sidio trial.

Speaker 36 And they looked at all the children born in Denmark between 1991 and 1998. The second study...
came out in 2019 and they and that one looked at all the children born in Denmark between 1999 and 2010.

Speaker 36 And crudely what they did was they compared how many kids were diagnosed with autism in the group who received the MMR vaccine and how many kids were diagnosed with autism in the unvaccinated group.

Speaker 36 Because there is a small percentage, 5% or so, who hadn't received the vaccine of their own choice.

Speaker 36 So of course, if MMR triggers autism, you'd expect the rate of autism to be higher in the group who were vaccinated.

Speaker 36 But the conclusion in those really, really big studies was that the rates of autism were the same in each group. So it suggests no effect of the MMR vaccine.

Speaker 33 Right, right.

Speaker 36 And these are just two sort of particularly big, particularly famous studies, but there have been other studies by other groups around the world, Poland, Japan, Finland, the UK, and in the US, and they've come to similar conclusions that the MMR vaccine doesn't appear to have any effect on autism rates.

Speaker 33 Having looked at all of this evidence, when you hear these parents speak about their children,

Speaker 33 like if you were if you were sitting in a room with one of them, what would you say to them?

Speaker 36 Well,

Speaker 36 I would never contradict an individual parent's experience of their own child's medical history.

Speaker 36 But I guess I will hear those stories with the awareness that, you know, just as in the Sadio case, even the most dedicated and loving parents can be wrong about their own children's medical history or what's caused their own child's medical situation.

Speaker 36 It is possible.

Speaker 36 In addition to that,

Speaker 36 millions of children receive these vaccines and they receive them around the same age when characteristics of autism first start to emerge or more accurately, first start to be noticed or tend to be noticed.

Speaker 36 So you do expect a certain number of children to receive vaccines and have characteristics of autism start to emerge at the same time. That is an inevitability.
But let me just say this.

Speaker 36 Overall, you know, anecdote and experience are absolutely legitimate as a starting point for scientific investigation, right?

Speaker 36 But in this case, that scientific, that systematic investigation, it has been done and it is compelling.

Speaker 1 Hey, friends, it's Nikayla from the podcast Side Hustle Pro.

Speaker 14 Check it out at yotoplay.com, Y-O-T-O-P-L-A-Y dot com.

Speaker 19 With K-18 Molecular Repair Hair Mask, you can have strong, soft, bouncy hair and keep using the color, bleach, and heat.

Speaker 27 That's because patented K-18 peptide repairs damage on the molecular level, which is really, really deep.

Speaker 33 I come out of the conversation with Ilan feeling a bit better. The parents' stories are compelling.
There's no getting around it. These are not stupid people.
These aren't conspiracy theorists.

Speaker 33 They're genuine people who love their kids. But every serious scientific attempt to test whether vaccines cause autism has concluded that they don't.

Speaker 33 After Vaxed, donations to anti-vaccine groups shoot up, not just to groups set up by Wakefield, but those founded by other emerging anti-vaxxers like Del Bigtree, the film's producer.

Speaker 33 I wanted to see how much money Andrew Wakefield has made since coming to America and from Vaxed itself. So I start looking into his accounts.
Wakefield's financial setup is complex and confusing.

Speaker 33 Some of his companies don't have any publicly available records at all, but he also sets up several non-profit foundations which are required by law to post annual returns.

Speaker 33 In 2010, Wakefield creates the first of these non-profits. It's called the Strategic Autism Initiative, and it's set up to promote medical and autism research.

Speaker 33 You can see from documents filed online that in 2011 the organization receives $283,000 in donations. But you can also see that Wakefield gets paid $200,000.

Speaker 33 The next year the non-profit gets $113,000 in donations and Wakefield is paid $100,000.

Speaker 33 So in these two years alone, nearly all of the Strategic Autism Initiative's donations, 75% of them, go to pay the salary of Andrew Wakefield.

Speaker 33 By the time Fax comes out, Wakefield is running a new non-profit. This one's called the AMC Foundation.

Speaker 33 It's set up to produce documentaries about autism and it helped fund the Faxed movie itself.

Speaker 33 In 2016, AMC takes in $1.3 million.

Speaker 33 Donations the year after are $754,000. That's serious money.

Speaker 33 This time around, AMC's documents don't tell us how much Wakefield was paid in salary.

Speaker 33 Instead, they only show that almost all of its donations were transferred straight to a for-profit company called the Autism Media Channel, a company half-owned by Andrew Wakefield.

Speaker 33 I want to know more about how controversial this setup is, so I call up U.S. financial journalist and investigator roddy boyd

Speaker 46 i cannot imagine any non-profit attorney or veteran non-profit executive looking at that situation and feeling anything other than

Speaker 46 panic look this is a most unusual transaction and it rings a lot of alarm bells in my head. It is possible that this might pass legal muster, but it does ring alarm bells.

Speaker 33 We put these allegations to Wakefield, but he didn't get back to us.

Speaker 33 Polly Tommy, the other half-owner of the Autism Media channel, has previously defended the transactions with AMC, saying that everything was cleared legally.

Speaker 33 By my calculations, Wakefield's non-profits have collectively registered income of well over $5 million.

Speaker 33 Most of that cash comes in and it's transferred straight out again to for-profit companies controlled by Wakefield himself.

Speaker 33 After Vax comes out, Andrew Wakefield finds himself playing in a whole new league.

Speaker 41 At the beginning, he struggled to raise $5,000

Speaker 41 and now he can raise easily $50,000 in one day just being at a dinner where somebody invites him for dinner, pays for the dinner, and then hands him over a check.

Speaker 41 I think that that has changed him completely. And also because of his new connections.

Speaker 33 He begins to move in political circles.

Speaker 37 In 2016, I had a meeting, a private meeting with Donald Trump in Kissimmee in Florida.

Speaker 37 And I went into the room and he said, let's get a picture. I thought, I like this guy.

Speaker 33 I like this guy.

Speaker 37 And we sat down and we talked, and we talked

Speaker 37 about vaccines and autism. And he said, stop.

Speaker 37 You don't need to tell me that vaccines cause autism.

Speaker 37 He said, I've experienced it personally. And we talked for the next 50 minutes about that subject.

Speaker 33 In 2017, Andrew Wakefield splits from his wife and starts dating Elle McPherson.

Speaker 33 Yeah, that's the Australian supermodel known as the body, the multi-millionaire businesswoman who's made the cover of Sports Illustrated a record five times.

Speaker 33 Wakefield and McPherson, Andy and Elle. They're pictured arm in arm at a farmer's market in LA.
She introduces him at press events for his movies. Good evening everybody.

Speaker 32 Nice to be up here. I feel very honoured to be sharing the stage with you.

Speaker 32 It's quite unusual.

Speaker 32 We walk down the street and more people recognise him than me, which goes to show how long my career is.

Speaker 32 way back when.

Speaker 33 It's really weird to me to see this world-famous supermodel dating this slightly awkward aging Brit, telling an audience that he's more famous than she is. But all that fame comes with a cost.

Speaker 41 There's actually a quote from Marcus Aurelius, the Roman emperor, that says, if you want to find out what a man is to the bottom, give him power.

Speaker 41 And this encapsulates the situation

Speaker 41 because

Speaker 41 in my experience in my opinion I think that he has evolved dramatically internally

Speaker 33 Francesca says that after Vaxed Wakefield changes in 2018 she's working with him on his latest film something called 1986 the act

Speaker 33 but she says by then he's become more arrogant more showy

Speaker 33 and after trump's warm welcome, increasingly political.

Speaker 41 So we are at the point of he's getting more radicalized towards the right. He's getting money and more and more money from these very radicalized people.

Speaker 41 He has a higher income and now different ideologies. The movie keeps changing.
I start to disagree with him and somebody said to me,

Speaker 41 somebody knows him very well, and he said to me, there is one thing you never tell Wakefield and that thing is no.

Speaker 33 Francesca's relationship with Wakefield over this period becomes really strained. Eventually, they fall out in spectacular fashion.

Speaker 33 They stop speaking and Francesca sues Wakefield in court, alleging that he's reneged on a promise to pay her and to cut her into the movie's profits.

Speaker 33 That claim was dismissed and Wakefield counter-sues, alleging that Francesca's incompetence has almost ruined his movie. A judge recently found in Wakefield's favor on part of his claim.

Speaker 33 The rest of the case is ongoing.

Speaker 33 What is clear is that if she loses, Francesca faces a big bill.

Speaker 33 When I speak to her, it's clear that the court case has taken its toll.

Speaker 41 So he left me with the rent to pay on my own, of a two-bedroom apartment that I didn't need. I was left without a job.
And on top of it,

Speaker 41 he knew my mother had cancer.

Speaker 41 He knew my mother had cancer.

Speaker 33 And he knew perfectly

Speaker 41 that

Speaker 41 my father, my father was completely paralyzed, almost from the neck down.

Speaker 41 I did all the things and more that I've told you. And you know, I have this situation.
What do you do? You sue me for $450,000?

Speaker 41 Who does that?

Speaker 41 You want to know who Wakefield is? Answer that question.

Speaker 33 We invited Wakefield to respond, to give his side of the story, but he didn't get back to us.

Speaker 33 Francesca left us with a question. Who is Andrew Wakefield? To me, he's someone who's stubborn and relentless, someone who does not give up.

Speaker 33 He lost his medical career, he lost the respect of the scientific community, but his ambition has only grown.

Speaker 33 After vaxed, his attacks on vaccines expand and evolve, his donations swell, his army of supporters grows, and now powerful politicians are starting to sense an opportunity.

Speaker 33 A chance to use anti-vax feeling as a vote winner, as a wedge issue to drive between the American people. A chance to go even further than Wakefield has ever dared.

Speaker 33 The aim of these new anti-vaxxers seems to switch from challenging the science to gaining power.

Speaker 33 In the third and final episode of Dr. Anti-Vax, COVID radicalizes the movement.

Speaker 37 But it is the silver lining of the dark cloud of COVID is that it has woken so many people up.

Speaker 33 And a new leader emerges.

Speaker 37 And if I have to die for this, I'm going to die with my bullets on.

Speaker 33 Thanks for listening. You can get early access to this and to all our Tortoise Investigative Series, plus ad-free listening by subscribing to Tortoise Plus on Apple Podcasts.

Speaker 33 Or for the best Tortoise listening experience curated by our own journalists, download the Tortoise app.

Speaker 33 And please leave ratings and reviews. They really help.

Speaker 33 Dr. Antivax is written and reported by me, Alexei Mostras, and Ilan Goodman.
The producer is Ilan Goodman. Sound design is by Tom Birchall.
The editor is David Taylor.

Speaker 36 Tortoise.

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