The Anti-Vaccine Movement

Throughline

NPR

Documentary, History, Society & Culture

4.7 • 15K Ratings

🗓️ 25 September 2025

⏱️ 50 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

The alleged link between vaccines and autism is back in the news this week, being regularly speculated on by both President Trump and Health and Human Services secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. The claim has been repeatedly disproven: there is no evidence that vaccines and autism are related. But the myth is powerful. In this episode: the roots of the modern anti-vaccine movement, and of the fears that still fuel it – from a botched polio vaccine, to the discredited autism study, to today. This episode originally published in February 2025.

Guests:

Paul Offit, director of the Vaccine Education Center at the Children's Hospital of Philadelphia, and a professor of pediatrics at the University of Pennsylvania School of Medicine

Elena Conis, historian of medicine and public health and a professor in journalism and history at the University of California, Berkeley

Arthur Allen, senior correspondent for nonprofit KFF Health News and author of Vaccine: The Controversial Story of Medicine's Greatest Lifesaver

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Transcript

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0:19.1	Dr. Wakefield, would you like to start this panel?
0:24.2	Yes, thank you, Mr. Chairman, members of the committee.
0:26.7	It's a great privilege to be here.
0:29.1	The purpose of my testimony is to report the results of the clinical and scientific investigation of a series of children with autism.
0:37.1	April 6, 2000.
0:40.1	Doctors, researchers, and parents of children with autism
0:43.3	have been called in front of Congress
0:45.1	to testify about a potential link
0:47.3	between autism and vaccines.
0:53.3	Now, nothing in this testimony should be construed as anti-vaccine.
0:58.3	Rather, I advocate the safest vaccination strategies for the protection of children and the control of communicable disease.
1:05.1	That's Andrew Wakefield.
1:07.1	At this moment, in the year 2000, he's a researcher from the Royal Free and University College Medical School in London.
1:14.4	A superb scientist who was at a superb institution.
1:17.4	Sitting just to the left of Wakefield is Paul Offett.
1:21.2	Paul Offutt.
1:22.4	I am the director of the Vaccine Education Center at the Children's Hospital of Philadelphia
	...

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