A week or so ago Robert De Niro was still supporting the showing of Vaxxed at the Tribeca Film Festival. Then last weekend he pulled the plug.
De Niro and his wife Grace have a son with autism. So do I. By unhappy coincidence, our son John’s cogitive capacities collapsed after a round of vaccinations when he was two.
“Vaccines are safe and effective.” That’s the mantra we continuously hear from Big Pharma as well as the same skeptics who over the years have been implacable foes of ID.
I’m not sure the precise role that vaccines played in my son John’s problems. He has a twin who received the same vaccines, but was unaffected. So if vaccines played a causal role in John’s autism, there must have been other predisposing factors.
My own sense is that vaccines pulled the trigger in our son John’s case. At the very least, I would thus have liked to see Tribeca allow Vaxxed to be shown and its content to be freely discussed.
But the pro-vaccine forces see it as a moral mission to suppress discussion of this topic. Andrew Wakefield, the director of Vaxxed, we are repeatedly told has been thoroughly discredited (discredited by interests incentivized to see him discredited).
I feel for Robert De Niro. He wanted to see Vaxxed get a hearing. But the pressure he faced for withdrawing the film must have been enormous. I saw a similar move a decade ago when the ID film The Privileged Planet was to be shown at the Smithsonian. The uproar against it was enormous.
I have not seen Vaxxed, but I look forward to seeing it. Click here for the film’s website.
Del Bigtree, the film’s producer, had an interesting interview, which was made before the film was nixed by Tribeca:
On October 26th, 2015, I received an email from a colleague of my former dissertation supervisor, Leo Kadanoff, informing me that Leo had died that morning. It’s now several weeks since his passing, but I still would like to pay my respects to him here at this blog.