Opposition to vaccination is much older than the internet. What this page records is the movement’s modern form, which is bound up with one paper and its retraction.

The 1998 paper and its retraction

In 1998 The Lancet published a paper by Wakefield and colleagues that was taken as raising a link between the MMR vaccine and developmental disorder. In 2010 The Lancet retracted it. The retraction notice is a separate published document with its own DOI, and both are cited above so that the paper cannot be found through this page without its retraction attached.

The retraction did not end the claim’s circulation, which is the point of interest here rather than the paper itself.

Amplification that was not organic

Broniatowski and colleagues, studying vaccine-related posting on Twitter, found that automated accounts and accounts linked to a state influence operation posted on both sides of the vaccine debate. Their finding is about amplification, not belief: some of the visible volume of argument on this subject was manufactured, in both directions.

That is a narrow finding and this page does not extend it. It does not establish that the movement is astroturfed, and the authors do not claim that.

What was removed

The previous version of this page carried a four-phase chronology and six claims of political impact, including that the movement affected “vaccination rates and public health outcomes in various communities” and “influenced platform content moderation policies around health misinformation”. Coverage and exemption rates are published by public health agencies and could support a properly sourced statement; the unsourced assertion has been removed rather than kept.

The founded field read “1990s”, which is not a date and in any case understates the movement’s age by more than a century. It has been removed.

The connection to a named living individual is retained as a recorded association, with its description corrected to say that no source cited here establishes it.

Sources

  1. 01.

    Wakefield, A. J., Murch, S. H., Anthony, A., Linnell, J., Casson, D. M., Malik, M., Berelowitz, M., Dhillon, A. P., Thomson, M. A., Harvey, P., Valentine, A., Davies, S. E., & Walker-Smith, J. A. (1998). RETRACTED: Ileal-lymphoid-nodular hyperplasia, non-specific colitis, and pervasive developmental disorder in children. The Lancet, 351(9103), 637-641. The paper that raised the MMR-autism claim. Cited here only as the document itself, and only alongside its retraction; the Crossref record carries the RETRACTED prefix, which is reproduced in the title above so the citation cannot be read as an endorsement.

  2. 02.

    Lancet, T. E. o. T. (2010). Retraction—Ileal-lymphoid-nodular hyperplasia, non-specific colitis, and pervasive developmental disorder in children. The Lancet, 375(9713), 445. The Lancet's retraction of the 1998 paper, published in 2010. Metadata confirmed against the Crossref record for the DOI.

  3. 03.

    Broniatowski, D. A., Jamison, A. M., Qi, S., AlKulaib, L., Chen, T., Benton, A., Quinn, S. C., & Dredze, M. (2018). Weaponized Health Communication: Twitter Bots and Russian Trolls Amplify the Vaccine Debate. American Journal of Public Health, 108(10), 1378-1384. Peer-reviewed study of automated and state-linked accounts posting on both sides of the vaccine debate. Cited for the finding that some amplification of this material was not organic; the study's own framing is about the debate being weaponized rather than about the movement's beliefs. Metadata confirmed against the Crossref record for the DOI.