Over the weekend, science collided hard with celebrity culture when public health advocates successfully intervened in a film festival selection.
At the center of the imbroglio was actor Robert De Niro, who last week revealed that he had greenlit the screening of an anti-vaccine film at the Tribeca Film Festival, which he co-founded.
The film, Vaxxed, is directed by the discredited physician-researcher Andrew Wakefield. Wakefield helped sow the seeds of the current anti-vaccine movement in 1998 with a bogus study that claimed to have demonstrated that the measles, mumps, and rubella vaccine can be linked to autism. (I explained precisely why his research is fraudulent here.)
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