 These two doctors raised the false alarms that were largely responsible for creating all the public hysteria about vaccines. Andrew Wakefield scared us about MMR and Neil Halsey scared us about mercury. In 1998 Wakefield published a study in the Lancet, a small study only 12 children. Children had developmental disorders and GI symptoms. Ten of them were autistic and eight of the autistic children were thought to have developed autism after the MMR shot, which turned out not to be true. He found a pattern of abnormalities on colon biopsies. Now he didn't use any controls in order to show that these abnormalities were related to autism. He would have had to compare the rate in autistics to the rate in the general population. He didn't use any controls. He didn't verify that the autism developed after the MMR. The paper's conclusion was honest. It said in so many words we did not prove an association between MMR vaccine and the syndrome described. Nevertheless, Wakefield immediately called a press conference and told the world that MMR should be stopped because it probably caused autism. He suggested giving the vaccine singly, which didn't make any sense and he didn't have any evidence to support it. It was just his rationale. And interestingly he just filed a patent for a single measles vaccine. Now, since single vaccines weren't available in the UK, stopping the MMR meant no measles vaccine at all. Vaccination rates plummeted. You can see the numbers on the screen. Measles rates soared, children died and in 2008 measles was declared endemic again in the UK. Wakefield's study is now entirely discredited. All attempts to replicate it failed. The Lancet and 10 of his 12 co-authors retracted the study. Wakefield himself has been exposed as unethical and unprofessional. He was asked to resign from his job. He was investigated with devastating results and the licensing body in the UK has charged him with several counts of misconduct. It turns out Wakefield was hired by a lawyer to find evidence to justify suing vaccine manufacturers. The children he studied were his lawyer's clients. He covered up the fact that he was paid over half a million pounds by the lawyer. The study was never approved by the Hospital Ethics Committee and in endangered children. He didn't disclose any of his conflicts of interest, which were several and he lied repeatedly. Wakefield thought measles RNA in the bowel caused autism. He covered up the fact that his lab had already looked for measles in the bowel and had failed to find it. Then he claimed the unigenetics lab did find it. But the unigenetics lab has since been discredited. Among other things, they supposedly found measles RNA with a test that can only detect DNA. They had contamination in the lab. They were also paid by the same lawyer and an independent investigator went in and looked at all their procedures and he said, I do not believe that there is any measles virus in any of the cases unigenetics looked at and the lab is no longer in business. The latest allegations, the investigator Brian Deere was able to get a hold of the original medical records of the patients that Wakefield studied. It turns out most of them had signs of autism documented in their medical records before they ever got the MMR shot. What's more, the original biopsy reports were reported as normal and then they were reviewed and declared abnormal for the published study. So it was all a big mistake. It was junk science. It didn't show any connection between MMR and autism, but it was used to deny children MMR. The second false alarm was about thimerosal. It's a vaccine preservative that contains mercury and the FDA was concerned about the total amount of mercury children might be getting. We knew methylmercury could cause mercury poisoning, such as the Minamata disaster they had in Japan. But thimerosal doesn't contain methylmercury. It contains ethylmercury, which is excreted faster and it's much safer. There was a study in 1929 where adults were given the equivalent of 20,000 times the amount of thimerosal children could possibly get from all their vaccines and none of them developed any symptoms of mercury poisoning. Thimerosal is still recommended as a preservative by the World Health Organization and it's still used in other countries. But pediatrician Neil Halsey was almost single-handedly responsible for getting thimerosal banned in the US. He wasn't even thinking about autism. He was worried about subtle neurologic effects in children which had been seen in children exposed to methylmercury, but no damage had ever been shown from ethylmercury. There was no evidence against ethylmercury at the time. Halsey thought we should bend over backwards to avoid any possibility of harm and he railroaded the committee by tactics like threatening to hold his own press conference if they didn't vote the way he wanted. The committee's announcement was guaranteed to confuse the public. Current levels of thimerosal will not hurt children, but reducing those levels will make vaccines even safer. Thimerosal was not removed from vaccines for any concern about autism. That concern was raised by two mothers of autistic children who looked up the symptoms of mercury poisoning and somehow got the idea that the symptoms of mercury poisoning and autism matched. They don't. They absolutely don't. And as Steve said, there's been no change in the rate of autism, no decrease in autism since the thimerosal was removed. So the damage had been done. A third of the population still believes vaccines cause autism.