Antivax as a movement was astroturfed by law firms looking to get rich(er) on legal action suing pharma companies for "vaccine damage" of children.
Like, you have Andrew Wakefield's initial autistic gastric distress study being funded by a cabal of big legal firms and a couple of legal actions that started pretty much immediately after it was published as if they already had their case ready and we're just waiting for the evidence to be created.
The court cases went nowhere because there wasn't sufficient popular consent around the belief that vaccines cause autism, despite the media blast at the time to convince parents of this lie.
The antivax movement has been growing since and now the cranks are everywhere so expect the people who tried to profit from manufactured illness before come crawling right back out of the woodwork.
Wakefield did have ties to a company that packaged the MMR vaccines independently (which he claimed would not cause autism), but that company was created after his paper was released.
Meanwhile, in 2004 it was revealed that Wakefield was recieving a pay of £150 an hour (plus expenses) from a legal representative of JABS (an activist group that was pushing for vaccines as a cause of autism) to write the infamous antivax study.
In 2006 it was revealed he'd been paid a further fee of £435,643 as a lump sum by a different group of British lawyers shortly before he began work on the study.
The un-conspiracy thing with anti-vax is that Jenny McCarthy almost single handedly boosted it to national attention by talking publicly about abusing her autistic son. Her minor celebrity, dehumanization of her son, and some talk shows created one of the great public health disasters of the 21st century.
Antivax as a movement was astroturfed by law firms looking to get rich(er) on legal action suing pharma companies for "vaccine damage" of children.
Like, you have Andrew Wakefield's initial autistic gastric distress study being funded by a cabal of big legal firms and a couple of legal actions that started pretty much immediately after it was published as if they already had their case ready and we're just waiting for the evidence to be created.
The court cases went nowhere because there wasn't sufficient popular consent around the belief that vaccines cause autism, despite the media blast at the time to convince parents of this lie.
The antivax movement has been growing since and now the cranks are everywhere so expect the people who tried to profit from manufactured illness before come crawling right back out of the woodwork.
i thought that the most suspect financial link with Wakefield was to a medical company marketing a different vaccine/vaccination schedule?
Wakefield did have ties to a company that packaged the MMR vaccines independently (which he claimed would not cause autism), but that company was created after his paper was released.
Meanwhile, in 2004 it was revealed that Wakefield was recieving a pay of £150 an hour (plus expenses) from a legal representative of JABS (an activist group that was pushing for vaccines as a cause of autism) to write the infamous antivax study.
In 2006 it was revealed he'd been paid a further fee of £435,643 as a lump sum by a different group of British lawyers shortly before he began work on the study.
:very-smart: i must've forgotten that part
The un-conspiracy thing with anti-vax is that Jenny McCarthy almost single handedly boosted it to national attention by talking publicly about abusing her autistic son. Her minor celebrity, dehumanization of her son, and some talk shows created one of the great public health disasters of the 21st century.