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- [00:01]
Announcer
This message comes from FX's English teacher. Last year's critically acclaimed series returns to follow Evan, Gwen and Markie as they vie for their students divided attention. FX's English Teacher returns tonight at 9 on FX. All episodes streaming on Hulu.
- [00:19]
Dr. Paul Offit
Dr. Wakefield, would you like to start this panel? Yes. Thank you, Mr. Chairman, members of the committee, it's a great privilege to be here. The purpose of my testimony is to report the results of the clinical and scientific investigation of a series of children with autism.
- [00:37]
Rund Abdelfattah
April 6, 2000. Doctors, researchers and parents of children with autism have been called in front of Congress to testify about a potential link between autism and vaccines.
- [00:54]
Dr. Paul Offit
Now, nothing in this testimony should be construed as anti vaccine. Rather, I advocate the safest vaccination strategies for the protection of children and the control of communicable disease.
- [01:05]
Rund Abdelfattah
That's Andrew Wakefield. At this moment in the year 2000. He's a researcher from the Royal Free and University College Medical School in London.
- [01:14]
Dr. Paul Offit
A superb scientist who was at a superb institution.
- [01:17]
Ramtin Arablouei
Sitting just to the left of Wakefield is Paul Offit. Paul Offit.
- [01:22]
Dr. Paul Offit
I am the director of the Vaccine Education center at the Children's Hospital of Philadelphia and a professor of pediatrics at the University of Pennsylvania School of Medicine.
- [01:31]
Ramtin Arablouei
At the time, Paul was also part of a committee that advised the CDC about the use of vaccines.
- [01:37]
Dr. Paul Offit
I was subpoenaed to testify about whether I thought it made biological sense that vaccines could cause autism, and I didn't.
- [01:45]
Ramtin Arablouei
Paul listens. As Wakefield launches into his testimony, I.
- [01:49]
Dr. Paul Offit
Just as a little bit of background, this represent 1212 years of intensive clinical and scientific research, collaborative research.
- [01:56]
Ramtin Arablouei
Wakefield is summarizing the results of research he conducted at the Royal Free Hospital, research that first got the medical community's attention in 1998 when he published a paper in a renowned British medical journal called the Lancet. In that paper, Wakefield hypothesized that the measles, mumps and rubella vaccine could be connected to the development of autism in children.
- [02:22]
Rund Abdelfattah
When it's Paul's turn to speak, he doesn't waste any time beating around the bush.
- [02:27]
Dr. Paul Offit
My role in these proceedings is to explore the theories that have arisen due to concerns by the public that autism might be caused by the combination of measles, mumps and rubella vaccines known as mmr. No evidence exists that proves this association.
- [02:48]
Rund Abdelfattah
Paul is right. By the time Wakefield landed in front of Congress, his paper had been debunked. And one of the scientists who had debunked it was even sitting on the panel alongside him.
- [03:00]
Dr. Paul Offit
I think Andrew Wakefield believed this was true. And even after study after study showed that he was wrong, he believed he was right. But you could see that he was beloved at that meeting. He was godlike, whereas we were the bad guys.
- [03:16]
Rund Abdelfattah
This wouldn't be the last time Wakefield would be called in front of the US Government to repeat his debunked findings. Wakefield's paper gave the myth that vaccines cause autism real traction and staying power, the consequences of which we're still dealing with today.
- [03:33]
Dr. Paul Offit
Once you've rung a bell like that, it's very hard to unring.
- [03:39]
Ramtin Arablouei
Was a moment that health professionals and the medical field point to as evidence that people who are skeptical of the safety of vaccines are making it all up. But this moment also became a proxy for fears that have been around as long as vaccines have. Fears that in recent decades have intensified as the pharmaceutical industry has grown in size and influence, as the COVID 19 pandemic upended American life, as state mandated vaccination programs have faced backlash, and as a polarized political climate and a deluge of misinformation has made it harder for many people to know who to trust.
- [04:20]
Rund Abdelfattah
Today, those fears go beyond just the MMR vaccine and autism, with some powerful people casting doubt on vaccine safety in general. President Elect Trump has just announced on his truth social account that he is.
- [04:33]
Elena Kannis
Picking Robert F. Kennedy Jr. To be.
- [04:35]
Rund Abdelfattah
The next Secretary of Health and Human Services. The Senate confirmed RFK Jr. A well known vaccine skeptic, in February 2025. During his confirmation hearings, senators asked about his beliefs.
- [04:49]
Dr. Paul Offit
I support the measles vaccine. I support the polio vaccine. I will do nothing as HHS secretary that makes it difficult or discourages people from taking it.
- [05:02]
Rund Abdelfattah
Since his confirmation, he has made major and often controversial changes. In an unprecedented move, Secretary of Health and Human Services Robert F. Kennedy Jr. Is replacing all members of the Advisory.
- [05:15]
Elena Kannis
Committee on Immunization Practices, or acip.
- [05:19]
Dr. Paul Offit
The Trump administration is out today with.
- [05:21]
Rund Abdelfattah
A report on children's health. The report calls for investigating what it calls vaccine injuries. I'm Rund Abdelfattah.
- [05:30]
Ramtin Arablouei
And I'm Ramtin Arablouei. On this episode of Throughline from npr, the roots of the modern anti vaccine movement and of the fears that still fuel it. From a botched polio vaccine to the 1998 Lancet paper to today.
- [05:48]
Dr. Paul Offit
This is Dylan calling from Denver, Colorado. Your line's my favorite show and I listen every week.
- [05:55]
Announcer
This message comes from Sony Pictures Classics. In Eleanor, the Great June Squibb brings to vivid Life the spirited 94 year old Eleanor Morgenstein who, after a devastating loss, tells a tale that spirals beyond her control. From director Scarlett Johansson comes a comically poignant exploration of how the stories we hear become the stories we tell. Deadline puts it there won't be a dry eye in the house. Eleanor the Great only in theaters September 26th.
- [06:22]
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This message comes from NPR sponsor FX presenting the Lowdown, starring Ethan Hawke, introducing you to Lee Raybon, a quirky journalist slash rare bookstore owner slash unofficial truth seeker who is always on the tail of his latest conspiracy. This time, his most recent expose puts him head to head with a powerful family that rules Tulsa, meaning only one he must be on to something big. FX's the lowdown all new Tuesdays on FX stream on Hulu. This message comes from Schwab. Everyone has moments when they could have done better, like cutting their own hair or forgetting sunscreen, so now you look like a tomato. Same goes for where you invest. Level up and invest smarter with Schwab. Get market insights, education and human help when you need it. Learn more@schwab.com this message comes from Harvard Extension School. Reimagine what a Harvard education can be at Harvard Extension School. You can take a course, earn a graduate degree or pursue a certificate online part time on your own terms. Taught by Harvard faculty and industry leaders, our courses are designed to challenge you while preparing you for the next step in your career. Learn more at Info Extension Harvard Edureimagine.
- [07:50]
Rund Abdelfattah
Part 1 Vaccine Roulette Dr. Paul Offit.
- [07:56]
Ramtin Arablouei
Has been working in the field of infectious disease for over 40 years. His focus on vaccines, like many people's, began in the shadow of polio.
- [08:06]
Dr. Paul Offit
This year, the enemy, poliomyelitis, struck with such impact and fury that it shook the entire nation. I certainly remember polio.
- [08:16]
Ramtin Arablouei
When Paul was five years old, he got surgery on his foot.
- [08:19]
Dr. Paul Offit
When you're in an orthopedic hospital in the mid-1950s, you're in a polio ward.
- [08:23]
Ramtin Arablouei
Newsreels about polio show kids in war wards filled with rows of beds, the kind with the iron headboards that you always see in old hospitals.
- [08:32]
Dr. Paul Offit
I remember children screaming. I remember the children in our lungs. It was really like something out of a Charles Dickens novel. It spread its crippling tentacles from ocean to ocean and border to border. That is not a disease you want to relive.
- [08:49]
Rund Abdelfattah
Starting in the late 1940s, polio outbreaks.
- [08:52]
Elena Kannis
Were just getting worse and worse.
- [08:54]
Rund Abdelfattah
This is Elena Kannis, and I'm a.
- [08:56]
Elena Kannis
Historian of medicine and public health and a professor and journalism and history at the University of California, Berkeley.
- [09:04]
Rund Abdelfattah
She wrote the book Vaccine America's Changing Relationship with Immunization.
- [09:10]
Ramtin Arablouei
Polio was a serious threat. A single case could send a community into a panic because polio is really contagious. It can spread through saliva, mucus, feces, contaminated water or food.
- [09:23]
Dr. Paul Offit
It has closed the gates on normal childhood. It has swept our beaches, stilled our boats, and emptied our parks.
- [09:30]
Elena Kannis
Because a single case meant that an outbreak was sure to come. And an outbreak meant that dozens, if not hundreds or thousands of people would be infected. People who were infected with it could end up paralyzed from the waist down, and many, many scores of them would die. So when the polio vaccine is approved for use by the Federal Government in 1955, it is literally this moment where, like, everybody pauses, people run into the streets, church bells ring, sirens go off, and then this massive effort gets underway to distribute this vaccine. And parents bring their kids and they line up in droves and they get this vaccine.
- [10:21]
Ramtin Arablouei
The science behind the polio vaccine work the same way some types of vaccines do today.
- [10:26]
Dr. Paul Offit
So the goal of a vaccine is to induce the immunity that is typically acquired from natural infection without paying the price of natural infection.
- [10:36]
Ramtin Arablouei
Vaccines do that by introducing your body to a version of the virus so your body can learn and recognize it and fight it off. Today, vaccines contain a weakened or dead bacteria or virus or bits of a virus's genetic material. Any of those things can help your body develop immunity.
- [10:54]
Elena Kannis
The effective polio vaccine contained a version of the polio virus that had been inactivated or quote, unquote, killed with chemicals. The problem is, like, that's definitely a way to make an effective vaccine, but you've really got to kill the virus.
- [11:18]
Rund Abdelfattah
So By April of 1955, the polio vaccine was being produced at a mass scale.
- [11:24]
Elena Kannis
And in this one lab here in Berkeley, there was a batch that went out. Nobody realized that the virus hadn't been fully inactivated. Oh, my God. Yeah. So people who believed that they were turning out for a perfectly safe and effective vaccine ended up contracting polio because.
- [11:46]
Rund Abdelfattah
In that case, they just. They literally injected people with polio accidentally.
- [11:50]
Elena Kannis
Yes, they did. They did. So this came to be known as the Qatar incident. And while it caused many, many cases of polio that likely went undetected, it caused 200 plus cases of paralytic polio and led to just under a dozen deaths. The federal government stepped in to say, okay, there's more we can do in the space of regulation and safety. And we had this relatively new government agency, the cdc, that stepped in and said, we are going to keep track of all of these vaccines. We're going to work with the FDA and other agencies to make sure that all vaccines are safe.
- [12:34]
Rund Abdelfattah
In May 1955, the government paused all polio vaccinations for over a week while they rechecked the vaccines for safety. The Qatar incident led to a comprehensive investigation and increased federal safety protocols aimed at ensuring that something like this never happened again. The government wanted to send a message.
- [12:54]
Elena Kannis
You can count on the federal government to ensure your personal safety and this won't happen again. And in the late 1950s, this was a really effective message.
- [13:05]
Rund Abdelfattah
Despite the Qatar incident, polio vaccination continued. By 1961, more than 85% of all school age children had received a polio vaccine.
- [13:15]
Elena Kannis
It's so hard for us to put ourselves in the shoes of somebody living through 1955. They were so terrified of polio, they just might have taken their chances with the vaccine with a lot of fear in their hearts. But different from how we might react today, today something like that, we would never get past.
- [13:42]
Rund Abdelfattah
Cases of polio began to plummet. The polio vaccine became an example of a national triumph.
- [13:49]
Elena Kannis
And at this point, immunization and health professionals were saying, we are definitely on our way into an era of just biomedical supremacy and freedom from infectious diseases like measles, smallpox, chickenpox, mumps, polio. We're just going to become the dustbins of history.
- [14:09]
Ramtin Arablouei
But that's not what happened.
- [14:12]
Elena Kannis
So we get to the end of the 1960s and what becomes apparent is that nobody's turning out for these vaccines the way they did for the polio vaccine. People feared polio, but they had a very different relationship with mumps, with measles, with rubella.
- [14:28]
Ramtin Arablouei
They weren't as afraid. So more people skip the shots.
- [14:32]
Elena Kannis
And what scientists and epidemiologists start noticing also is that where you have communities that are highly vaccinated, you aren't really seeing outbreaks of things like measles anymore. But where communities aren't highly vaccinated, you're getting outbreaks of polio and measles. So at the end of the 1960s, there starts to be more and more of a push to strengthen the enforcement.
- [14:58]
Ramtin Arablouei
Of mandates, vaccine mandates. Over the next decade, this became a priority. And in 1977, President Jimmy Carter launched a national initiative to increase childhood vaccination rates. States began to enforce mandates that required children to get a set of vaccinations before they enrolled in school.
- [15:19]
Rund Abdelfattah
When we think of the word mandate, right, it's very much sort of top down Right, Yes. And I think, especially when it comes to children, that seems like it could strike a nerve for parents in particular. Right. That some authority is telling them, I know what's best for your child.
- [15:40]
Elena Kannis
Absolutely.
- [15:41]
Rund Abdelfattah
More so than you do.
- [15:42]
Elena Kannis
Absolutely. We were a country founded on libertarian values. Those values shaped the medical landscape of the 19th century. And really like the medical landscape up to today, there's a tension between the authority of the parent and the authority of the state. And you know, this has implications for all different kinds of sectors and questions in society, from, you know, mandatory schooling down to, you know, bike helmet laws and other public health measures and yes, vaccination.
- [16:20]
Ramtin Arablouei
And in 1982, that tension would come to a head around a vaccine against diphtheria, tetanus and pertussis. Known as the DPT vaccine.
- [16:32]
Dr. Paul Offit
The diphtheria tetanus pertussis vaccine had a difficult safety profile when it was first invented.
- [16:41]
Rund Abdelfattah
The vaccine could cause rare but severe side effects like prolonged crying and seizures in infants. These symptoms were temporary, but claims began to circulate that the vaccine was doing permanent damage to children.
- [16:55]
Elena Kannis
So in the early 1980s, there is a reporter, Lee Thompson, a reporter at.
- [17:03]
Rund Abdelfattah
NBC affiliate WRCTV in Washington D.C. who catches wind of these claims and she.
- [17:10]
Elena Kannis
Embarks on this reporting project and it ends up becoming the basis for a 1982 to hour long news broadcast titled Vaccine Roulette.
- [17:21]
Dr. Paul Offit
DPT Vaccine Roulette.
- [17:24]
Rund Abdelfattah
Just a note here. The people call this vaccine both DTP and dpt. So you'll hear both in the episode, but they're referring to the same thing.
- [17:35]
Elena Kannis
And what Thompson reports is that scientists have known for some time that there are adverse events associated with this vaccine, but that they aren't disclosing them to parents. And that parents are therefore, as she put it, kind of playing a game of roulette with their children. If we kind of keep the Cutter incident in mind, we just marveled at the fact that parents at that moment in time knew that there was this horrible chance that something could go wrong. And yet people still got their kids vaccinated against polio anyway. But a couple decades later, the early 1980s, that's not what the parent population of the US is ready to sign on for.
- [18:25]
Ramtin Arablouei
At that point, between the Qatar incident and DPT vaccine roulette, a lot had changed in the us There was a string of government coverups, Watergate, the Pentagon papers. These things had put the American people on edge. And there was a series of protest movements, from civil rights to the anti Vietnam War movement that changed the Attitude, attitudes of the country towards their government.
- [18:49]
Elena Kannis
Their attitude in the wake of the anti authoritarian movements is hold on. There were risks and we weren't informed. Why weren't we informed?
- [18:59]
Ramtin Arablouei
After seeing the documentary, some parents began to allege publicly that their children had suffered permanent harm after getting the vaccine.
- [19:07]
Elena Kannis
They organized themselves into a group that they called Dissatisfied Parents together.
- [19:13]
Ramtin Arablouei
Dpt. They picked that acronym on purpose and.
- [19:17]
Elena Kannis
They were a pretty formidable group.
- [19:19]
Ramtin Arablouei
Parents also began to sue pharmaceutical companies.
- [19:23]
Dr. Paul Offit
The whole issue was like, it was very complicated to determine with certainty whether it was the reaction that a kid had was coincidental with the vaccine or was it some underlying condition that was triggered by the fever that they got as a result of this vaccine.
- [19:37]
Rund Abdelfattah
This is Arthur Allen. He's a senior correspondent for nonprofit KFF Health News and author of the book Vaccine the Controversial Story of Medicine's Greatest Lifesaver.
- [19:48]
Dr. Paul Offit
You wouldn't really blame the vaccine for that because maybe if they'd had a fever the next week from a regular viral illness, they would have. The same thing would have happened to them. So there's the scientific like answer to that and then there's the legal answer to that.
- [20:05]
Rund Abdelfattah
The scientific answer became clear pretty quickly.
- [20:08]
Dr. Paul Offit
Studies actually fairly quickly showed that that wasn't the vaccine that was doing it. If you looked at children who got the vaccine or didn't, there was no increased incidence of any permanent defects associated with that vaccine.
- [20:20]
Rund Abdelfattah
The legal answer was a little murkier.
- [20:23]
Dr. Paul Offit
I mean, vaccines are supposed to be really safe and they should be, you know, much safer than almost any medication you can think of. But that doesn't mean that they're completely safe. It doesn't mean that they're there's no harms.
- [20:34]
Rund Abdelfattah
Parents were winning personal injury lawsuits against the vaccine makers, with the average claim rising to tens of millions of dollars by 1984.
- [20:44]
Dr. Paul Offit
It really drove vaccine makers from the market.
- [20:46]
Rund Abdelfattah
But the activists powering dissatisfied parents together also wanted alternatives to lawsuits. They wanted a law on the books that would protect children from harm.
- [20:56]
Elena Kannis
They, over the course of the next four years, worked tirelessly in the Capitol to introduce new laws that said that the federal government would do even more to ensure that the vaccine supply was safe.
- [21:16]
Ramtin Arablouei
In 1986, they had a breakthrough. A new law called the National Childhood Vaccine Injury act, which creates the Vaccine Injury Compensation Program, commonly known as the Vaccine Court.
- [21:31]
Rund Abdelfattah
It was designed to compensate individuals or their families who were injured by certain vaccines. It was a no fault court and the compensation money came from a government trust fund funded by attacks on vaccine manufacturers. But the Vaccine Court Also protected those vaccine manufacturers from lawsuits that threatened to hold up their production or even drive them out of business.
- [21:55]
Elena Kannis
So it's really important to pause here and look at this moment. The parents who came together were from across the political spectrum and they did something that we'd seen happen before. They turned to Washington, they turned to the federal government and said, do more to ensure that vaccines are safe. This is really distinct in the history of anti vaccination and I hesitate to call it that because it does not seem accurate at all. This, this is a movement that's saying some of our members actually have real reservations about vaccines. But we are the parents who got our kids vaccinated and we want future parents to get vaccines for their children and feel absolutely confident in those vaccines.
- [22:42]
Rund Abdelfattah
Huh? Oh, see, that's a really important nuance that it wasn't a I don't wanna vaccinate my child and you shouldn't vaccinate your child. It's we need to demand that we are continuing to improve these vaccines and make sure that they are as foolproof as possible.
- [23:00]
Elena Kannis
Exactly, exactly. It's a lot easier to tell a story of simple anti vaccinationism. It, you know, boils everything down to black and white.
- [23:13]
Ramtin Arablouei
This parent group, dissatisfied parents together fractured.
- [23:17]
Elena Kannis
After a while there were those who found themselves just absolutely devoted to the cause and stuck with it and kept pushing and pushing and pushing. And then there were parents who said, okay, we got what we wanted and now I'm moving on.
- [23:32]
Ramtin Arablouei
Dissatisfied parents together would later morph into the National Vaccine Information Center, a group that today has been criticized for spreading misleading information about vaccine safety. The movement spawned by the documentary DPT Vaccine Rollette lived on really in many.
- [23:51]
Dr. Paul Offit
Ways, that vaccine caused the birth of the modern American anti vaccine movement.
- [23:56]
Ramtin Arablouei
Some parents began to draw connections between vaccines and any unexpected diagnoses.
- [24:02]
Elena Kannis
When Vaccine roulette aired in 1982, it resonated with parents who feared that we were seeing as a nation who more and more learning differences and developmental delays and disabilities in children. And they were really struggling to understand like why their kids had disabilities like this when they didn't and nobody in their family did. And vaccines started to suddenly seem like a possible explanation. Concerns about the connection between vaccines and autism were, were circulating for close to two decades before they were published in the Lancet.
- [24:47]
Ramtin Arablouei
Coming up, Andrew Wakefield publishes his paper Giving the movement New life.
- [25:00]
Elena Kannis
Hello, I'm calling from Milwaukee, Wisconsin and.
- [25:04]
Dr. Paul Offit
The only reason I'm calling is to.
- [25:06]
Elena Kannis
Say that I heard the program called through line last Friday night and it.
- [25:11]
Dr. Paul Offit
Was the most wonderful program I've ever heard.
- [25:15]
Elena Kannis
Thank you. Thank you so much support for this.
- [25:19]
Announcer
Podcast and the following message come from Strawberry Me. Be honest, are you happy with your job? Are you stuck in a job you've outgrown or never wanted in the first place? Are your reasons for staying really just excuses for not leaving? Let a career coach from Strawberry Me help you get unstuck. Discover the benefits of having a dedicated career coach in your corner and claim a special offer at Strawberry Me. NPR this message comes from BetterHelp President Fernando Madeira describes how BetterHelp online therapy.
- [25:53]
Dr. Paul Offit
Has helped him for me, sometimes I just need to go and talk to somebody that is not gonna judge me, right? It's gonna be there and they're gonna listen to me and I can't start just saying, look, I'm not feeling right today and it feels natural. I love it.
- [26:12]
Announcer
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- [26:19]
Rund Abdelfattah
Part 2 the Lancet paper In 1996, a man named Richard Barr approached a doctor named Andrew Wakefield with an offer. Barr was a personal injury lawyer with ties to an anti vaccine group. He offered to pay Wakefield to research a link between the MMR vaccine and autism so that he could use Wakefield's research as evidence in his lawsuits.
- [26:46]
Ramtin Arablouei
Wakefield's paper was published in 1998 in the Lancet, one of the world's leading medical journals, sending shockwaves through the medical community.
- [26:55]
Dr. Paul Offit
Now, his paper wasn't a study, it.
- [26:58]
Rund Abdelfattah
Was a case series, which is different from a full blown scientific study. A case series is when doctors notice a trend in their field, maybe like a group of patients exhibiting mysterious symptoms and they think there could be something more to look into. So they write up a paper on a very limited group of people detailing their findings.
- [27:18]
Dr. Paul Offit
It was 12 children, eight of whom had developed signs and symptoms of autism.
- [27:24]
Rund Abdelfattah
Wakefield's paper suggested a link to the MMR vaccine, for which he had no evidence.
- [27:30]
Ramtin Arablouei
Again, this is Paul Offit, director of the Vaccine Education center at the Children's Hospital of Philadelphia.
- [27:38]
Dr. Paul Offit
You could have published a paper saying, here's eight children who recently ate a peanut butter and jelly sandwich that now have signs and symptoms of autism because it was really no better than that.
- [27:48]
Ramtin Arablouei
But when it was published, people in the medical field took it seriously because that's how a case series is supposed to work. Someone notices a strange pattern, publishes a paper about it, and it prompts other scientists to look into it because it's fair enough, right?
- [28:03]
Dr. Paul Offit
My child was fine they got this vaccine, now they're not fine. Could the vaccine have done it? That is a answerable question. It's a scientific question that can be answered in a scientific venue and was. And so study after study after study, more than a dozen studies done in seven countries on three continents involving thousands and thousands of children, none of them.
- [28:26]
Ramtin Arablouei
Found any evidence that linked the MMR vaccine to the development of autism.
- [28:32]
Dr. Paul Offit
So asked and answered.
- [28:37]
Ramtin Arablouei
But the doubts Andrew Wakefield had sowed were powerful. And that's what landed Paul in front of Congress, testifying opposite Andrew Wakefield in April 2000.
- [28:50]
Dr. Paul Offit
My concern, Mr. Chairman, is that parents listening to or reading about this hearing might incorrectly conclude that vaccines cause autism. This is not the case. Vaccines are extremely safe and highly effective.
- [29:04]
Rund Abdelfattah
I'd love to get a sense of even more of what it was like to be in that room listening to him.
- [29:09]
Dr. Paul Offit
It was like the world had turned upside down. In my world, it's always the data that mattered. And it's fair to ask a question, it's fair to have a hypothesis. But if it's a testable hypothesis, which this was, does M. Marko's autism? You're not asking how many angels can dance on the head of a pin? This was a question that could be answered in a scientific venue and was being answered in a scientific venue. And it just. And so I saw this man standing up, ignoring those data and just declaring his own truths, including scientific truths, and I just couldn't believe it. I wasn't used to that. I'm getting much more used to it now, but I wasn't used to that then.
- [29:44]
Rund Abdelfattah
Did you have any interaction directly with him?
- [29:48]
Dr. Paul Offit
Yes, as he was walking out, I shook his hand and he looked at me and sort of kept his eyes parallel, as if he was looking at something behind me, which was unnerving in that moment.
- [30:02]
Rund Abdelfattah
Did you have a sense of just how big this idea that he had launched into the world that vaccines cause autism was going to become?
- [30:11]
Dr. Paul Offit
No, not at all. I still believed at that time, in a world dominated by logic and reason, that it's okay to ask the question, it's okay to have the hypothesis, but that when that question has been thoroughly answered, that that would end it. And I was just naive. I was wrong. It didn't end it at all. If anything, it's gotten worse over time as we have less and less trust in public health agencies. I will never forget that when that meeting was over and there was an overflow room for parents, because parents really wanted to hear this. Parents of children with autism. And afterwards There were a number of parents that came up to tell me what a jerk I was for sort of standing up for what I thought was the science of vaccines. The thing that struck me then and still strikes me, is that we were like the scientists or we were the doctors, but here he was representing the parents. And, you know, we were parents too, so we care deeply about vaccine safety.
- [31:12]
Rund Abdelfattah
Wakefield seems like he knew how to command a room. He knew how to shape the narrative. And that seems to have been really important in terms of getting this idea traction.
- [31:25]
Dr. Paul Offit
He comes off as someone who's speaking truth to power, and that power is pharmaceutical companies who are never going to be seen as sympathetic. So if you're on the other side, I mean, you're just saying, look, this isn't true. I mean, this isn't causing autism, but you don't have anything to offer. You don't have a clear cause or causes of autism. He does. He's offering parents something, and we're not.
- [31:48]
Ramtin Arablouei
The prevalence of autism diagnoses was rising dramatically during this time. From the 1970s to the 1990s, the US had seen a tenfold increase. Some people attributed the rise, at least in part, to greater awareness and changes in diagnostic criteria. But there wasn't a conclusive explanation.
- [32:09]
Rund Abdelfattah
Wakefield's theory was just one theory. Others started to emerge. Some parents latched onto an ingredient in some vaccines called thimerosal. It's a preservative used to keep germs from growing in some vaccines. It was never used in the MMR vaccine, but it was used in others. And it contains levels of mercury. Some parents believed exposing children to thimerosal could cause autism. This has been studied extensively since then, and there has been no scientific evidence linking the two. Still, the concerns about mercury led to change. There are now thimerosal free versions of most vaccines available to people.
- [32:52]
Ramtin Arablouei
Even if Wakefield's theory and thimerosal theory were pretty different, the people who believed in them had a common enemy.
- [33:00]
Elena Kannis
In the early 2000s, what we have is this moment in which a handful of things have been happening.
- [33:08]
Ramtin Arablouei
Alaina Konis professor of Journalism and History at the University of California, Berkeley there's.
- [33:14]
Elena Kannis
Been growing attention to mercury exposure, growing crackdown on it. There's been growing attention to the abuses of the pharmaceutical industry. And what I mean by that is like, very broadly, the practices of the pharmaceutical industry in courting doctors and selling diseases in order to sell drugs, in, like, concealing data, in turning out the opioid crisis, right? Yes. But like long before the opioid crisis. Like, you know, we even have like the editor of the esteemed New England Journal of Medicine writing a whole book about things that Big Pharma had done wrong. It has become like a national punching bag. There are these myriad concerns that parents and others have been raising about vaccines. The fact that autism rates were just skyrocketing in a mind blowing way like it just in the early 2000s. Everywhere you looked, every classroom, there were kids with autism diagnoses. They were all across the spectrum. The statistics coming out of the CDC were absolutely terrifying. And they just went higher and higher. Like the rate of.
- [34:31]
Rund Abdelfattah
With no good explanation.
- [34:32]
Elena Kannis
No explanation at first. And gradually like partial explanations coming together. But you can kind of start to see the issues here overlapping, like hold on mercury exposure, hold on more and more vaccines and these mandates and autism. And this very active group of parents kind of join forces with some of the extant vaccine critical groups and start bringing attention to again, as they called it at the time, vaccine safety issues in a way that hadn't happened in a full 20 plus years. Like things had gone really quiet after the passage of the 1986 law. All of this is kind of like coming to a boil at the same time. Like imagine the stove with all of these pots and they're all hitting like the boiling point.
- [35:35]
Ramtin Arablouei
Soon the pots on the stove would boil over and concerns about vaccines and autism would spread much further.
- [35:43]
Dr. Paul Offit
Around 2004 or FK Jr called me.
- [35:48]
Rund Abdelfattah
That's coming up.
- [35:54]
Dr. Paul Offit
Hello, this is Steve from Tampa, Florida, and you're listening to Throughline from NPR.
- [36:02]
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- [37:09]
Rund Abdelfattah
Part 3 Deadly Immunity June 2005.
- [37:16]
Ramtin Arablouei
Dr. Paul Offit wakes up to an article from Rolling Stone titled Deadly Immunity. The author is a well known environmental lawyer named Robert F. Kennedy Jr. Who'd called him up while researching the article a year earlier.
- [37:32]
Rund Abdelfattah
For years, RFK Jr had been concerned about mercury and the environment. He'd pushed back on the coal industry to clean up rivers where the mercury in fish had been found to have a harmful impact on on humans who ate them. So when he learned there was mercury in vaccines, he decided to investigate. And he called up Paul.
- [37:51]
Dr. Paul Offit
It was a good conversation. We talked for about an hour.
- [37:55]
Rund Abdelfattah
At least that's what he thought before he read the article. Although the vaccination industry insists that ethylmercury poses little danger because it breaks down rapidly and is removed by the body.
- [38:07]
Dr. Paul Offit
Several studies suggest that ethylmercury is actually more toxic. He just said that mercury is in vaccines at a level that's toxic. He had misstatement after misstatement after misstatement.
- [38:18]
Ramtin Arablouei
In that article, Paul had developed a vaccine for an illness called rotavirus. And as he says he told RFK on that call, study after study had shown that a child would ingest more mercury from breast milk than from any vaccine. There was no evidence that such small, small quantities cause damage.
- [38:39]
Rund Abdelfattah
So back to the article. In it, RFK Jr also repeated a claim from a scientific paper published in the late 90s by a doctor in England named Andrew Wakefield. The claim that vaccines are linked to autism.
- [38:55]
Elena Kannis
He was arguing another thing, namely that the pharmaceutical industry was aware of something and was concealing it.
- [39:02]
Ramtin Arablouei
This is Elena Kannis, and that corporations.
- [39:05]
Elena Kannis
Like that actually needed more regulation and oversight than they were getting. The scientists and researchers, many of them.
- [39:14]
Rund Abdelfattah
Sincere, even idealistic, who are participating in efforts to hide the science on the Marisol claim that they are trying to.
- [39:22]
Ramtin Arablouei
Advance the lofty goal of protecting children.
- [39:24]
Rund Abdelfattah
In developing nations from disease pandemics. They're badly misguided.
- [39:29]
Dr. Paul Offit
Their failure to come clean on thimerosal.
- [39:31]
Rund Abdelfattah
Will come back horribly to haunt our country and the world's poorest populations. Deadly immunity, Rolling Stone, June 2005.
- [39:42]
Elena Kannis
And coming from an environmental lawyer, that argument had a lot of traction.
- [39:47]
Rund Abdelfattah
We reached out to both Andrew Wakefield and RFK Jr. Wakefield did not respond. A statement from the Department of Health and Human Services in response to our questions read in part, quote, secretary Kennedy is not anti vaccine. He is pro safety, pro transparency, and pro accountability. Okay, so back to 2005.
- [40:09]
Ramtin Arablouei
RFK Jr's article reignited debates over vaccines and Andrew Wakefield started to get noticed in the U.S.
- [40:20]
Elena Kannis
Wakefield becomes this high profile individual. He had been one in England and.
- [40:25]
Rund Abdelfattah
He inspires other high profile supporters. We do not need that many vaccines.
- [40:32]
Elena Kannis
A number of celebrities start talking about their own concerns about vaccines going on nationally televised talk shows. Among the most vocal were Jenny McCarthy and Jim Carrey.
- [40:44]
Rund Abdelfattah
Without a doubt, in my mind, I believe vaccinations triggered Evan's autism. Actress Jenny McCarthy and comedian Jim Carrey were dating at the time and Jenny's son had been diagnosed with autism. So I think they need to wake up and stop hurting our kids. Together they organized a rally in the nation's capital called Green Our Vaccines.
- [41:07]
Dr. Paul Offit
I just want to start by asking.
- [41:08]
Ramtin Arablouei
The CDC one question.
- [41:11]
Dr. Paul Offit
How stupid do you think we are?
- [41:13]
Rund Abdelfattah
RFK Jr spoke at that rally.
- [41:16]
Ramtin Arablouei
They've removed the thimerosal from the vaccines and autism rates have not gone down.
- [41:21]
Dr. Paul Offit
How many times have you read that repeated by these people from the press? That is an industry talking point that.
- [41:29]
Ramtin Arablouei
The industry knows is a lie.
- [41:32]
Rund Abdelfattah
National news outlets turned out story after story about vaccines.
- [41:36]
Elena Kannis
Local newsrooms were closing down and there was increased competition for news consumers. And the vaccine story was one of these stories that resonated broadly. And meanwhile, social media is taking off. The public can actually weigh in. And so this thing really snowballs and it's really creating a mass movement.
- [42:09]
Ramtin Arablouei
So as this mass movement continued to make headlines in the 2000s, it also began to face more scrutiny.
- [42:16]
Elena Kannis
A lot of really critical media attention then starts to focus on the kind of characterization of vaccine skeptics as ignorant, selfish, uninformed and worse. And it's become kind of a moral position that many in media and politics have become comfortable taking. Vaccines save lives. If you don't get vaccines, you don't care about people and you don't believe in science without including any of the vast context around the question. Yesterday, a respected British medical journal retracted a study that said the MMR vaccine may trigger autism. CBS News correspondent Richard Roth.
- [43:07]
Ramtin Arablouei
With more eyes on the movement, the Wakefield paper came under more scrutiny. The Lancet retracted it in 2010. And a British journalist named Brian Deer published an investigation revealing that it wasn't just flawed, but omitted key facts. Dear had already confirmed that Wakefield was paid to conduct his research by people with an interest in its outcome. His new work revealed that some children in the study had already exhibited signs of autism before getting vaccinated. RFK Jr. S article in Rolling Stone was also removed.
- [43:44]
Rund Abdelfattah
You went through the sort of fallacies of the Wakefield paper. Do you remember when it was retracted and what your reaction to the retraction was and what happens to Wakefield?
- [43:57]
Dr. Paul Offit
My reaction was it's too late. It should have never been published. You can't say anything about causality because there's no control group.
- [44:05]
Rund Abdelfattah
But were you surprised that even after the retraction the narrative continued?
- [44:10]
Dr. Paul Offit
I'm not even sure if they'd retracted it a month later. It would have mattered. I think the cage door got open and the devil came out.
- [44:19]
Ramtin Arablouei
After the retraction, Wakefield lost his medical license in the uk, but he had already moved to the US and gotten involved in the anti vaccine movement. Eventually, he made a documentary which controversially reiterated the claims in both his paper and RFK Jr's article. As for RFK Jr he launched an organization called the World Mercury Project that was committed to, quote, exposing the government and corporate corruption that has led to increasing exposures to neurotoxic mercury in foods and medicines.
- [44:55]
Elena Kannis
And in the meantime, vaccine preventable diseases are starting to break out in in really troubling numbers.
- [45:05]
Dr. Paul Offit
Health officials fear thousands may have been exposed to the measles at Disneyland and Disney California Adventure last month.
- [45:12]
Elena Kannis
Then in 2014, there's this measles outbreak that starts at Disneyland.
- [45:17]
Dr. Paul Offit
I think the original case may have come in from outside of this country because measles is still prevalent in the world.
- [45:23]
Rund Abdelfattah
Measles had been eliminated in the US by the year 2000, which meant enough people were vaccinated that even if someone came into the country with measles, it wouldn't be able to spread. Think of it as like a bunch of people holding up umbrellas in a group. So even if a few people don't have an umbrella, they're still shielded from the rain.
- [45:42]
Dr. Paul Offit
There was essentially a boat around them.
- [45:44]
Rund Abdelfattah
But that protection wouldn't last forever. For decades, California had allowed some people to opt out of vaccines for non medical reasons. The state actually created that exemption when it started mandating that kids get the polio vaccine before enrolling in school. Back in the 1960s, California had a philosophical exemption to vaccination, and vaccination rates had begun to fall.
- [46:09]
Dr. Paul Offit
Once vaccination rates fray, that moat disappears. Eye fever, aching eyes, hacking cough. And after a week, every square inch.
- [46:18]
Ramtin Arablouei
Of you covered by red dots.
- [46:20]
Dr. Paul Offit
Measles. Tonight, the CDC warns it's back and it's spreading.
- [46:24]
Rund Abdelfattah
So Oregon is now the latest state.
- [46:26]
Elena Kannis
To have a case of measles traced back to that outbreak that started at Disneyland.
- [46:31]
Dr. Paul Offit
As health officials try and contain the.
- [46:33]
Elena Kannis
Virus late 2014 into 2015, health professionals and lawmakers come together in California and elsewhere and say, like, enough is enough. We have had enough vaccines skepticism. We have had enough use of vaccine exemptions. And so they start cracking down on exemption clauses.
- [46:55]
Rund Abdelfattah
But there was a backlash. Jim Carrey is really upset with California Governor Jerry Brown for signing a new.
- [47:03]
Dr. Paul Offit
Vaccination law this week.
- [47:05]
Rund Abdelfattah
The rule makes vaccines mandatory for all.
- [47:08]
Dr. Paul Offit
School children regardless of their religious and personal belief. Kerry went off on Twitter and called.
- [47:14]
Rund Abdelfattah
Governor Brown a corporate fascist who must be stopped.
- [47:22]
Dr. Paul Offit
In 2017, you started to have these Republican led legislatures that were very skeptical of vaccination.
- [47:31]
Ramtin Arablouei
Arthur Allen is a senior correspondent for KFF Health News.
- [47:35]
Dr. Paul Offit
Republicans had always been as pro vaccine as anybody else. It was a reaction to this effort to sort of crack down on vaccine exemptions that were causing this measles outbreak. And it created incredible power in the anti vaccine movement.
- [47:51]
Ramtin Arablouei
The Disneyland outbreak led to 147 people being infected with measles across seven states, Mexico and Canada. No one died. But Paul Offit says if vaccination rates continue to decline, outbreaks like that could be much worse in the future.
- [48:09]
Dr. Paul Offit
So I just fear this. I think we're just so blase about this. We don't remember these diseases. And I guess having lived in a polio ward for six weeks, that's still with me.
- [48:24]
Rund Abdelfattah
Let's play out the scenario. What are we looking at? If vaccination rates for these different diseases.
- [48:31]
Dr. Paul Offit
Fall, then you'll see children start to die from measles again because that's always the first one to come back. It's already starting to come back. Measles is the single most contagious vaccine preventable disease. The contagiousness index for viruses like influenza or SARS CoV2, the cause of COVID is like 2 to 4, meaning you'll infect 2 to 4 people. The contagiousness index for measles is 18. It's much, much higher. You just have to be in the person's airspace within two hours of them being there. And sadly, that may be what it takes that we have to see children suffer this, but I'm not even sure that will do it.
- [49:08]
Rund Abdelfattah
Dr. Paul Offit was appointed to an FDA vaccine advisory committee in 2017. In September 2025, he was removed from the committee. Dr. Offit has said that he believes he was dismissed because of his critiques of the Trump administration. The administration has said this is not the case.
- [49:29]
Dr. Paul Offit
I think we have lost trust. I think a lot of that happened during the COVID pandemic in part because we weren't always right. Because we were learning as you go because you're building the airplane while it's still in the air and we're sort of dictating things. And that really rubbed people the wrong way.
- [49:57]
Rund Abdelfattah
Yeah. I have to say, I feel that I had my first kid and, you know, you're getting vaccines basically from the time they're what, like two months old. And I have a new kind of empathy for that kind of fear that many parents have because you have this desire to sort of control everything you know about their well being and health and care and all of that.
- [50:20]
Dr. Paul Offit
I think it's perfectly reasonable for a parent to be skeptical of anything that they put into their child's bodies. Vaccine certainly among them. I mean, we ask parents to give as many as 25 shots in the first few years of life to prevent diseases most people don't see using biological fluids most people don't understand. I think it would be surprising if parents weren't skeptical of vaccines. But I think that there's a difference between skepticism and cynicism. And when you cross the line to cynicism now, you just don't believe what people believe are telling you. You don't believe the data, you don't believe the science. And that's different. All you have that separates truth from superstition are excellent scientific studies. And if you're throwing those out, then you feel like there's no hope.
- [51:03]
Elena Kannis
I will say that when you sit down to get a vaccine, your plan, placing an enormous amount of trust in a long chain of people and institutions that you may not know, you may never see, you may never understand, that trust is fundamental to that story of success. But that trust has been eroded across the board. Getting a vaccine is not just this simple cut and dried medical or political act, like it's a human act and it can be painful. And when we do it to children and our little babies, it's emotional too. All of that is part of the reality of getting vaccinated. So yes, vaccines save lives. And I wish that could be the end of the story. But the entire reason why I study the history of vaccination is because it's not.
- [52:25]
Rund Abdelfattah
That's it for this week's show. I'm Rund Abdelfattah.
- [52:28]
Ramtin Arablouei
I'm Ramtin Arabic Louis. And you've been listening to throughline from npr.
- [52:33]
Rund Abdelfattah
This episode was produced by me and.
- [52:35]
Ramtin Arablouei
Me and Lawrence Wu, Julie Kane, Anya.
- [52:39]
Rund Abdelfattah
Steinberg, Casey Miner, Christina Kim, Devin Kadayama, Irene Noguchi voiceover. Work in this episode was done by Devin Katayama.
- [52:50]
Ramtin Arablouei
Thank you to Greta Pittenger at rad, Brett Neely, Scott Hensley, Johannes Durgi, Johnette Oakes, Keandre Starling, Tony Cavan, Nadia Lancy, Edith Chapin and Colin Campbell.
- [53:04]
Rund Abdelfattah
Fact checking for this episode was done by Kevin Voelkel. This episode was mixed by Jimmy Keighley. Music for this episode was composed by Ramtin and his band Drop Electric, which.
- [53:14]
Ramtin Arablouei
Includes Naveed Marvi, Sho Fujiwara, Anya Mizani and finally in the if you have an idea or like something you heard on the show, please write us@dolinepr.org thanks for listening.
- [53:40]
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