In The Politics of Autism, I analyze the myth that vaccines cause autism. This bogus idea can hurt people by allowing diseases to spread. Examples include measles, COVID, flu, and polio.
Antivaxxers have found lots of ways to make money from their movement.
Michelle R. Smith and Laura Ungar at AP:
Many of the people involved in groups pushing anti-science bills have built lucrative careers on their stance and benefited from the millions of dollars that flow through the movement.
One of Bigtree’s companies was paid $350,000 working on Kennedy’s presidential campaign in 2023 and 2024. A second was paid $184,000 from another Kennedy-affiliated group, the MAHA Alliance, from October to December of last year. In 2023, another anti-vaccine group he leads, the Informed Consent Action Network, or ICAN, paid him $234,000.
After Kennedy was picked as health secretary, Kennedy gave the MAHA trademark to a company managed by Bigtree. Kennedy’s ethics disclosure said he transferred ownership for “no compensation” after making $100,000 in licensing fees from it in the few months he had the trademark.
In an ICAN video on Facebook in August, Bigtree celebrated the group’s successful lawsuit to compel Mississippi to allow religious exemptions from vaccines. Then he said they would “double down” on efforts to change the law in other states where religious exemptions aren’t allowed. Bigtree asked supporters to help by buying a brick for as much as $300 to pave a terrace at ICAN’s offices, where he works.
At The Times, Megan Agnew reports on Andrew Wakefield, whose fraudulent article started it all. After losing his British medical license, he moved to Texas and made a bundle of money.
Wakefield thrived in America, speaking at conferences and heralded as a martyr by mothers of autistic children who believed the disorder was caused by a vaccination. He was the father of the modern conspiracy theory. Crowds cheered, fans sobbed, people called him their “Jesus Christ”. It is from these Texan-born groups that Robert F Kennedy Jr, President Trump’s health secretary, was introduced to the same doctrine. Kennedy said in 2019 that Wakefield was “among the most unjustly vilified figures of modern history”.
Today, Wakefield is back on the conference circuit, speaking at events in the UK this month and Austin in November for which he is titled “Dr Andy Wakefield”, despite the fact he is barred from practising.
...
He has restyled himself as a filmmaker, releasing anti-vaccine propaganda movies, has a multi-million dollar home and a polished reputation. This is the reinvention of Britain’s most infamous fraudulent doctor.
On Saturday night, Wakefield hailed “a revolution in America” over vaccine policy while making a rare public appearance in the UK. He was speaking at an all-day conference at a hotel in York, and told the audience — who had paid up to £150 to see him — of his excitement over Kennedy’s appointment as US health secretary.
Peter Hotez, a researcher of infectious diseases at Baylor College of Medicine in Houston, said: “Wakefield’s paper was version 1.0 of the antivax movement; before him there wasn’t a link between autism and vaccines. Texas has since become an epicentre of this political movement.”
