Vaxxed: From Cover-Up to Catastrophe

In California, the worst measles outbreak

in 15 years is spreading.

The virus is roaring back into the headlines tonight.

An outbreak, somehow traced to...

Someone who had probably caught measles abroad visited

Disneyland and may have sneezed.

Measles on the march in America.

This outbreak is showing no signs of letting

up there are already more cases this year than there were...

The number tripled

to 644 measles cases reported in 27 states.

I mean, is this all

basically because of the anti-vaccination movement?

Because parents aren't vaccinating their kids?

Yeah, you know, I think so.

A bill that would ban exemptions

from childhood vaccines is advancing

through the California legislature.

We are offering legislation

that will abolish the personal belief exemption.

I think you're starting to see why it is

that mandates are so important.

There has been some inaccurate information

circulating about vaccines, mostly stemming

from a British study linking vaccines to autism.

Still continued here, the vaccine caused autism,

even though that has been debunked.

Repeatedly and thoroughly debunked.

You may have heard vaccination causes autism

in one out of 110 children.

Fuck that.

Total bullshit.

It doesn't.

The bill requiring children to be vaccinated has passed

with bipartisan support.

Every child must meet immunization standards

before joining public schools, private schools and daycares.

I would strongly encourage everybody, look at the science,

look at the facts, CDC, the Center for Disease Control,

can give you good information.

Get your children vaccinated.

Hello?

I was sitting at my desk where I teach

at Simpson University.

My phone rings.

It's Dr. William Thompson.

Brian, you and I don't know each other very well.

I don't know how this is all going to play out.

You have a son with autism, and I have great shame now,

when I meet families with kids with autism.

Because I have been part of the problem.

My son Steven was born in February of 1998.

Steve, what does the cow say?

Moo.

Tweet, tweet.

Tweet!

Doggie.

Yeah.

Two weeks after his 15 month vaccines, he lost all language.

He lost all eye contact.

We pick him up and he would just hang limp.

This is a time where CDC was just starting

to do these studies on vaccines and autism.

As a scientist, I have over 60 technical

and scientific publications

in major international scientific journals,

and I was contacting the CDC

and was deeply critical of their studies.

And so the CDC decided that the scientist who was going

to interface with me at that time was Dr. William Thompson.

Because I was on his back, because he didn't

like what I was saying about the statistics, I received a letter

from a CDC attorney in 2004 saying

that I was no longer permitted to contact the CDC.

Fast forwarding to 2014, Thompson said to me,

"Brian if you listen to me, and if you do what I tell you to do,

I can guarantee you will be able to access a treasure trove

of data, and I would like to guide you through these steps.

So I wanted to be a resource, I wanted to be valuable to you.

I want you to have someone in the system...

For years, I had been trying

to crack this edifice of the CDC.

And just getting little glimpses of what was not right.

The CDC has put the research 10 years behind.

Because the CDC has not been transparent,

we've missed 10 years of research because the CDC

is so paralyzed right now by anything related to autism.

I am a licensed clinical psychologist

and a board certified behavior analyst.

In 1978, I want to say the prevalence of autism was

about 1 in 15,000 children.

It was a very rare disorder.

I was working at a clinic at UCLA,

which was pretty much the only known center

for treating children with autism, and we had maybe 6

to 10 children we were working with.

Somewhere around the early 90s, shortly after I opened card,

the growth of autism has been so high and so rapid

that I've never felt like I could ever catch up anymore.

From an official diagnostic perspective,

the way that we define autism, we were looking

at deficits in two areas.

The first is social communication

and social interaction.

And in that area we require three specific symptoms

to be present.

Symptoms such as no social emotional reciprocity.

No nonverbal communication.

That means eye contact, for instance.

Or no development of relationships.

The second required area of deficit is the presence

of stereotypic repetitive restricted behaviors.

And these are things like hand flapping, body rocking,

insistence on routines being the same.

One of the new additions is the presence

of a sensory dysregulation.

If a child has an inability to sense things correctly,

not necessarily hearing things the way we do,

that could be classified as a symptom of autism.

So you have five symptoms, two in the area

of repetitive behaviors, and three in the area

of social communication deficit,

then you will get a classification

of what is called autism spectrum disorder, ASD.

We begin though, as always, keeping them honest.

Breaking news tonight, just hours ago,

the British Medical Journal, the BMJ,

did something extremely rare for a scientific journal.

It accused a researcher, Andrew Wakefield, of outright fraud.

I got a call on the 19th of May 1995

from a mother telling me the story of her child,

his regression into autism following a vaccine,

and I said "How can I help you?

I know nothing about autism.

You've come through the wrong number."

And she said, "No, doctor,

my child has terrible gastrointestinal issues,

and no one will take them seriously."

I was an academic gastroenterologist doing

research with a particular interest in Crohn's disease,

ulcerative colitis, inflammatory bowel disease.

I knew nothing whatsoever about autism.

When I was at medical school it was

so rare we weren't taught about it.

We heard a succession of stories which were very, very similar.

Medicine is about pattern recognition,

and there was a clear pattern emerging.

So we decided, a group of us,

including the world's leading pediatric gastroenterologist

at the time, led by professor John Walker Smith,

decided that these children merited thorough investigation.

Well Dr. Wakefield has been shown

to use absolutely fraudulent data, created a fake paper,

the journal allowed it to run.

All the other studies were done,

showed no connection whatsoever again and again and again,

so it's an absolute lie that has killed thousands of kids.

What we discovered and reported

for the first time was this link between what appeared

to be a novel type of intestinal inflammation,

and autistic regression

in previously developmentally normal children.

And among those, the majority had regressed

into autism according to their parents following the measles,

mumps, rubella vaccine.

It wasn't our place to censor that story,

because it may be uncomfortable for public health.

Our job was to report that story accurately,

in order that it might lead to further investigation

and the paper explicitly said,

this paper does not prove an association between MMR vaccine

and the syndrome described.

More work is needed to resolve this issue.

That was the conclusion of the paper.

As an investigative medical journalist,

I've spent the last 7 years working on one

of the best medical talk shows in the world.

We know in medicine that there have been many,

many studies proving that vaccines do not cause autism.

But the problem I have always had with that is that thousands

and thousands of parents all telling the same story.

My child got a vaccine.

Usually the MMR vaccine.

And then that night or the next day broke

out in a fever and then when they came

out of the fever, lost speech , lost the ability

to walk, basically regressed into what we know

as autism, and never came back.

Doctors used to be told to listen to their patient.

That was the cornerstone of medicine as we know it.

But something has changed recently

where the patient doesn't know what they're talking about,

and these parents, with their story of their children,

have just been written off

as if they have no idea what is really going

on with their child.

I have two kids.

And anyone that has children knows

that when we first have babies, we are overly sensitive

to every little hiccup, every cough, every sniffle.