An NYC theater is debuting the anti-vaccine documentary from a discredited former doctor that Tribeca yanked from its line-up
It included a film produced by the man who's been linked to jump-starting mass, unfounded hysteria over vaccinations.
The movie has since been removed from Tribeca's schedule after Festival co-founder Robert De Niro said it did not "further the discussion" on the issue.
But now, another theater is set to show it.
Angelika Film Center, an independent theater in New York's Greenwich Village neighborhood, is premiering the film starting Friday, April 1, according to its website.
The man who made the film is Andrew Wakefield, and in 1998 he infamously - and wrongfully - presented a paper claiming that a combination vaccine for measles, mumps, and rubella (MMR), could be linked to the onset of autism.
In the fallout from his error-riddled presentation, his so-called findings were discredited in close to every way possible: The paper was retracted. Wakefield was stripped of his medical license, found guilty of "abusing a position of trust as a medical practitioner," and found guilty of "dishonesty" in his studies.
You wouldn't have known it from looking at Tribeca's website, however. Here's how they described the film, called "Vaxxed: From Cover-Up to Catastrophe":
As for its producer, Andrew Wakefield, all Tribeca said about him is this:
Not surprisingly, the festival got a lot of heat for its choice to include the movie in its line-up, and on March 27 decided to remove it from its schedule.
Documentarian Penny Lane, who received the Tribeca Film Institute's Documentary Fund (not the same entity as the film festival) in 2012 and recently produced a film about a doctor who "built an empire with his goat-testicle impotence cure," wrote a scathing public letter to Tribeca on Facebook about its choice.
"Dear Tribeca Film Festival, I love you but you made a very serious mistake," Lane wrote.
She adds: "Your online film festival guide helpfully suggests if I'm interested in Vaxxed, I might also be interested in the category of 'documentaries.' Well, as a documentary filmmaker who spent eight years making a film about a quack: yes ... I am interested in your choice to screen Vaxxed and what it means for documentaries."
Who is Andrew Wakefield and how did his infamous vaccine study go so viral?
The paper was about vaccinations.
In it, Wakefield claimed that one vaccination in particular, a popular inoculation for measles-mumps-rubella (MMR), could be linked to the onset of autism, a serious neurodevelopmental disorder characterized by impaired social interaction.
In the weeks and months to come, scientists, doctors, and public-health experts jumped to point out the multiple flagrant weaknesses in his paper.
But the damage was done. And its aftereffects continue to be felt today, from vaccination rates that declined in the wake of Wakefield's publicity to new outbreaks of measles and other illnesses for which perfectly safe inoculations exist.
The new film, whose official synopsis, according to Indiewire, doesn't even allude to any of the above, was set to premier Sunday, April 24, at the Tribeca Film Festival.
