Pediatrician Dr Philip LaRussa says Andrew Wakefield’s film acts as if his research had not been revealed as fraudulent and he had not lost his medical license

Dr Philip LaRussa is a professor of pediatric medicine at Columbia University Medical Center. He specializes in infectious diseases and immunization, and recently served on the National Vaccine Advisory Committee for the federal government.

Controversial Vaxxed film premieres in New York despite scientists' outcry Read more

What did you think of Vaxxed: From Cover-Up to Catastrophe?

There were really three parts to this film. There’s the story of Andrew Wakefield’s research, there’s the really compelling story of parents with children with autism, and then the third story is the whole issue of what’s going on with Bill Thompson [an alleged Centers for Disease Control whistleblower whom the film relies on heavily] and the CDC.

The first story is that Wakefield really conducted fraudulent research, and he did nothing in the film to address any of the concerns about all the discrepancies in his research. It’s as if that didn’t exist.

He didn’t mention the fact that he lost his license in Great Britain, he didn’t mention the fact that [11] of his co-authors withdrew their names from his paper. He didn’t mention the fact that there was a series of investigative articles by [Sunday Times journalist] Brian Deer. None of that existed in this film.

Could you talk about how the film addressed the supposed link between vaccines and autism?

In Wakefield’s original [now retracted] study, he proposed a biologic mechanism, and each part of that has been disproven – so where is the link? They give no biologically plausible explanation for a cause and effect.

The other issue is that there is [probably] a genetic cause to autism. What has been disappointing is the slow progress in trying to actually get to the point where you could say to a parent: “Here are the genes that cause this problem, here’s what they do, here’s how we test for them.”

And imagine if you’re a parent and you have a child with autism – you don’t want to hear what doesn’t cause autism, you want to hear what causes it. Until we can say to parents, “Here’s the evidence, this causes autism,” we’re always going to have this issue to address.

Could you talk about some of the documented side effects of vaccines?

One of the things the film really didn’t portray in an accurate way was the purpose of the Vaccine Injury Compensation Board. That was put in place to give parents readily accessible means to be compensated for damage to their child, for injuries known to be caused by vaccines.

There is no medical intervention, whether it’s an aspirin or anything else, that is 100% safe, and we all assume that risk every time you take an aspirin or any kind of pill.

What the Vaccine Injury Compensation Fund attempted to do was to say, here’s what we know are the known side effects. They may occur one out of 10,000, one out of a million. It doesn’t matter – we have plausible evidence that this effect is associated with this vaccine, and since we’re asking everybody in the population to take the vaccine, for the good of themselves and the good of the public, it’s the public’s responsibility to assume the burden.

What [the film is] asking for is to go back to a system that existed before.

So let’s say, for example, seizures after [diphtheria, pertussis, tetanus] vaccines, we know that those occur at a defined rate. So with that vaccine, if your child had seizures after DPT vaccine, the one that we no longer use, you would have to sue the manufacturer. That could go on for years in court. Meanwhile if you had a damaged child, you would have to find the money to take care of that child.

What the Vaccine Injury Compensation Board says, if you have what’s called a “table injury”, where in fact your child has had a known vaccine-caused adverse event, all you need to do is prove that your child got the vaccine, prove the injury occurred, prove it occurred during the time window that’s associated with that injury and you’re awarded compensation, so you have what you need to take care of your child.

Vaxxed review – one-sided film leaves the elephant in the room Read more

What sort of impact do you see this film making?

Well, I think what’s going to happen is it’s going to raise a lot of questions that the CDC is going to have to address, about excerpts of what Bill Thompson is reported to have said to the film-maker’s investigator. The other thing that I think was not addressed in the film is that they conveniently focused on Thompson’s concerns about a study he was involved in. They neglected to mention all the studies that have been done throughout the world that have not shown a link between vaccines and autism.

They were saying: there’s this silver bullet here, and the CDC is hiding it, and no one else has looked at this issue – which is not the case.

This interview has been edited for length and clarity.