this post was submitted on 07 Sep 2025
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Yeah but it was 90s scientist who said vaccines caused autism though. Which just invalidates the point this tweet was trying to make.
It was one "scientist" who by all accounts was a massive fraud and anyone with any semblance of smarts recognised that almost immediately. That the world is full of idiots is the problem.
Wakefield did manage to fool peer reviewers and got his paper published in Lancet, a top-tier medical journal (and it took them 12 years to fully retract that paper). So I wouldn't say people recognized that immediately.
(And I just kinda hate "things were better in the past" type of arguments, in general. Things were shit back then, and things are shit now.)
One single comment by one shitty doctor in a magazine. He didn't even say that. He basically said 'some parent thought that maybe their child started to exhibit autism-like symptoms shortly after receiving a vaccine'.
I am not fucking kidding you. That was it! No study, no control groups, no sample size. Nothing. Just one stray comment that is shorter than this one I am writing now and it is the foundation of their entire theory.
Andrew Wakefield definitely published discredited studies though... Or at least one.
Uh. No. It was a published paper in The Lancet, which they did not retract for 12 years. MDs have a lot of blame here.
Look up Hbomberguy's video on the matter. It was the lancet, but it was an erroneous publication. Rare, but it happens. The study was grade A bullshit.
What is the blame we should place on them? The whole point of science is that shitty theories and great theories live in the same space. They're then evaluated by the collective body of scientists based upon the results of their tests. Eventually the shitty hypotheses dies off. No one is ever supposed to rely upon one study or even a few studies. It should take years and many studies before the results or conclusions should be relied upon by non-scientists.
So the blame is likely borne by a combination of the education system (explaining the importance of repeated scientific evaluation), the pervasiveness of lay "scientists" and *philosophers relying upon social media and other unreliable sources for their data, and the greater access that a random non-scientists have to studies that would normally be buried by time. Then you have people reaching their own conclusion and just finding a random study that supports that conclusion. That's the exact opposite of what the scientific method requires. The push by conservatives over the last few decades to erode scientific education (i.e creationism) is probably more likely to blame than any one scientist, doctor or certainly the medical/scientific community.