Health

Robert De Niro Defends Screening of Anti-Vaccine Film at Tribeca Festival

By PAM BELLUCK and MELENA RYZIKMARCH for THE NEW YORK TIMES 25, 2016

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In a decision that has dredged up the widely debunked link between vaccines and autism, the Tribeca Film Festival plans to screen a film by a discredited former doctor whose research caused widespread alarm about the issue.

The film, “Vaxxed: From Cover-Up to Catastrophe,” is directed and co-written by Andrew Wakefield, an anti-vaccination activist and an author of a study — published in the British medical journal The Lancet, in 1998 — that was retracted in 2010. In addition to the retraction of the study, which involved 12 children, Britain’s General Medical Council, citing ethical violations and a failure to disclose financial conflicts of interest, revoked Mr. Wakefield’s medical license.

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On the festival’s website, the biographical material about Mr. Wakefield does not mention that he was stripped of his medical license or that his Lancet study was retracted. Instead, the festival website says that the Lancet study “would catapult Wakefield into becoming one of the most controversial figures in the history of medicine.”