There's been a lot of attention on loneliness lately.

16% of Americans report feeling lonely all or most of the time.

The former Surgeon General even declared a loneliness epidemic.

On It's Been a Minute, we're launching a new series called All the Lonely People,

diving deep into how loneliness shows up in our lives and how our culture shapes it.

That's on the It's Been a Minute podcast on NPR.

Dr. Wakefield, would you like to start this panel?

Yes, thank you, Mr. Chairman, members of the committee, it's a great privilege to be here.

The purpose of my testimony is to report the results of the clinical and scientific investigation

of a series of children with autism.

April 6, 2000, doctors, researchers, and parents of children with autism have been called

in front of Congress to testify about a potential link between autism

and vaccines.

Now, nothing in this testimony should be construed as anti-vaccine. Rather, I advocate the safest

vaccination strategies for the protection of children and the control of communicable disease.

That's Andrew Wakefield. At this moment, in the year 2000, he's a researcher from the Royal Free

and University College Medical School in London. A superb scientist who is at a superb institution.

Sitting just to the left of Wakefield is Paul Offitt. Paul Offett. I am the 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. At the time, Paul was also part of a committee

that advised the CDC about the use of vaccines.

I was subpoenaed to testify about whether I thought it made biological sense that vaccines could cause autism, and I didn't.

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