Thread by @ChrisMasterjohn

The foundational origin myth of the "vaccines don't cause autism" cult is the retraction of the "fraudulent" Wakefield paper.

Just like Stalin erased Trotsky from photos of him and Lenin, they erase from history the larger 1996 Fudenberg paper that was never retracted.

Published two years before Wakefield's paper, Fudenberg found that in 15 out of 22 autistics enrolled between 1984 and 1987, onset was within one week of the MMR vaccine.

Fudenberg was drawing attention to the link in the 1980s, had his license revoked in 1995, and can be found dismissed as a quack on various sites like Wikipedia and Quackwatch.

But his paper was never retracted.

Further, the retraction of the Wakefield paper never questioned whether the eight children developed onset of autism 24 hours to two weeks after the MMR vaccine.

So we are left with two case series showing this as a common temporal association, no refutations of the temporal association, and then a dark shadow falls on the ability to even ask the question.

I believe the reason the story always starts with Wakefield is because his paper was retracted.

If you start the story with Fudenberg, you have to explain what on earth his narcotics charges had to do with the unretracted vaccine paper.

It's just too dirty of a beginning to the story.

Starting with Wakefield allows you to pretend the temporal association was found fraudulent, rather than technicalities of the referral and ethics process, and that allows you to claim the whole idea was fraud from the beginning.