News From The Anti Vax Front

Robert De Niro says that the Tribeca Film Festival, which he co-founded 15 years ago, is screening a documentary made by a widely discredited doctor only to provide “the opportunity for a conversation around the issue” of autism. But for those who have protested the festival’s inclusion of Vaxxed: From Cover-Up to Catastrophe, the festival and De Niro’s decision is tantamount to taking a side in a hotly contested debate—one that many scientists believe shouldn’t be a debate at all.

Vaxxed is directed by Andrew Wakefield, a British medical researcher who authored a 1998 paper that purported to find a link between the common MMR vaccine and autism; Wakefield’s paper was widely cited by anti-vaccination crusaders, but his results were never replicated in another study. Wakefield’s paper has since been rescinded by the journal in which it was originally published, and Wakefield’s medical license has been revoked.

The documentary was announced as part of the Tribeca Film Festival lineup on Monday in the “Tribeca Talks” series, which invites filmmakers to discuss the film at length with audience members after the screening. On Wednesday, director Penny Lane wrote an open letter on her Facebook page asking Tribeca to fix their “very serious (if human) mistake” and cancel the screening; Lane’s most recent film, Nuts!, about a doctor who falsely claimed to have cured male impotence, premiered at Sundance earlier this year.

The festival’s official response is thus far limited to this tweet, and a slightly longer official statement saying essentially the same thing:

But it’s rare to find film festivals that embrace films, especially documentaries, as instantly polarizing as Vaxxed. The 9/11 truther documentary Loose Change, for example, found a long online life without ever screening at a festival. Dinesh D’Souza’s doc 2016: Obama’s America had no festival presence at all, but grossed $33 million at the domestic box office, making it the second-biggest documentary in history after Fahrenheit 9/11; that film premiered at Cannes.

Variety even reported on the general political leanings of film-festival programming in 2014, with Toronto programmer Thom Powers saying he saw “a lot more of what I describe as left-wing propaganda films.” The conversation around autism and vaccines is not nearly as partisan as most hot topics in this country, though; anti-vaxxers are as likely to be libertarians in the heartland as they are to be crunchy San Francisco parents.

People who believe in Wakefield’s claims—or in the story that Vaxxed tells, about “whistle-blower” C.D.C. scientist William Thompson—do remain in the vast minority, which is how Vaxxed has come up for such sharp criticism. De Niro’s statement, while theoretically just asking that “all of the issues surrounding the causes of autism be openly discussed and examined,” is for vaccine supporters a call for debate where none exists. The C.D.C. and all reputable science says that vaccines don’t cause autism. The Tribeca Film Festival has chosen to program a film that says they do, and is lending a microphone to the loudest proponent of that discredited idea.

De Niro’s full statement is below.