It's February 1998. Andrew Wakefield, a doctor at the Royal Free Hospital in London,

sits down to do a press conference. His research is about to be published in one of England's

most prestigious medical journals, The Lancet. The Royal Free, aware that Wakefield's findings

might cause a stir, to say the least, had gathered a panel of medical experts, including

Wakefield to address the media directly. For this paper, Wakefield had studied 12 children

who had developed symptoms of autism spectrum disorder. There was another thing these children

all had in common as well. They'd received the measles, monks, and rubella vaccine,

or the MMR vaccine, a three-in-one shot that was licensed for use in the United States in 1971

and had revolutionized the field of childhood disease prevention.

And there was one sentence in this report that had brought all of these journalists from some

of the country's biggest newspapers to the room that day, a sentence that went like this.

In eight children, the onset of behavioral problems had been linked, either by the parents

or by the child's physician, with measles, monks, and rubella vaccination.

So basically, Wakefield's paper proposed that one of the world's most important and effective

new vaccines could be causing autism. If this was true, it would send shockwaves not only through

the medical establishment, but through the world, a vaccine used by hundreds of millions that was

actually dangerous to children. So, as you can imagine, the messaging around this report was

important, very important, because Wakefield's research was actually focused on this one particular

thing. They were attempting to describe a new, what they thought was a new syndrome called

autistic interocolitis, so this link between bowel disease, autism, and the MMR vaccine.

This is Dr. Adam Rutherford, a geneticist and journalist. But the paper itself doesn't actually

make a causal connection between the vaccine and autism or the bowel disorder. It's at this press

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