Original subtitles

This programme contains some strong language and scenes that some viewers may find distressing

When the Covid vaccine was announced, it promised freedom from lockdowns,

economic catastrophe and relatives dying.

Who wouldn't jump at that? Many, it turns out.

It's not in the interest of the public to have mass vaccinations.

A powerful movement is exploiting our fears,

persuading some to believe the vaccine was designed

to control or even kill us.

Are you going to take the vaccine? Hell, no!

SHE LAUGHS Crazy!

It started with a lie, told at the right time...

..and it's found its moment again.

SIRENS BLARE

For most of us, the Covid pandemic

has been the biggest health crisis of our lives.

For the anti-vaxxers...

Coronavirus.

Christmas all over again.

Mass hysteria.

Let's catch this cold!

..it's the biggest opportunity yet.

BORIS JOHNSON: As I speak to you tonight,

our hospitals are under more pressure from Covid

than at any time since the start of the pandemic.

It's clear that we need to bring this new variant under control

while our vaccines are rolled out.

The Government is once again instructing you to stay at home.

You may only leave home...

Freedom, we're told, will be won

if we cast all doubts about the vaccine aside,

and put faith in what the Government are asking us to do.

The vaccine programme in England is moving to its next phase...

I don't particularly wish to take the vaccine.

With the blood clots from the AstraZeneca

and so on and so forth - none of which were predicted in advance...

So for anybody to stand and say that this is safe is blatantly lying.

This mRNA is going to attack you brain cells,

it's going to cause you Alzheimer's.

How would I know?

There are no DNA or fertility issues.

There is a real - if very low -

risk of blood clots from some Covid vaccines.

But genuine concerns and rumours mix

to create fertile ground for the anti-vaxxers.

I love what you've done with the place.

HE CHUCKLES

Well, it was quite an epic adventure to get in here.

I measured everything so it would just fit.

One of the UK movement's chief crusaders

is former Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn's older brother, Piers.

The reduction in fertility is something which comes

out of these vaccines,

and blood clots is a serious issue.

But they're talking about blood clots

because there's worse things going on

and they don't want to talk about them.

And they're now doing mass propaganda

to make people take things which are going to be damaging to themselves.

You know what happened in Nazi Germany.

You know that scientists were told what to believe, and propagate.

Scientists, like anybody else, have their price.

At the movement's heart is the core belief

that politicians and profit-hungry drug companies

exaggerate the dangers of coronavirus,

even that the pandemic is a lie.

It can be a seductive message.

In the height of the third lockdown, thousands of people gather -

closely - to denounce the vaccine and rage against the rules.

The global anti-vax movement is bigger, more organised

and better funded than ever before.

Don't take the vaccine!

Trans-humanism...

They will not cover you on your life insurance if you take the vaccine.

All your assets will go back to the Government - including your kids!

Research the mark of the beast!

It's your choice. You don't have to wear the mask.

Right, then, what does that make you?

What does it make you? What does it make you?

You have no brain.

The vaccine lowers your immune system -

Which means other diseases can spread like wildfire.

It's not in the interest of the public to have mass vaccinations.

The vaccine is their final act of repression.

It's repressing you individually.

It's part of brainwashing and regimentation.

In the UK, 90% of people are for vaccination -

far more than most countries.

But for the anti-vax movement,

scare stories are tools to chip away at public support.

Even small downturns in vaccination rates

encourage the virus to spread and mutate.

SHOUTING

CHANTING

No rights have been read to me!

It's a travesty to democracy!

The purpose of the Covid thing is to destroy democracy,

to destroy the right... Move out the way!

In America, one in three people say they don't want to be vaccinated.

At the front line of this contemporary battlefield

are protesters trying to change the minds of those that do.

And vaccination rates are stalling.

Excuse me, sir, do you want some info before you go in? Sorry?

Do you want some information before you go in? OK. Yeah.

I just wouldn't want anybody to get hurt.

I've seen people on my own Facebook feed that live around here -

this man who was from Apopka, which is just outside of Orlando.

He got the vaccine, posted about it,

and he died, like, the day or the following day.

Excuse me, folks.

Would y'all like some info before you go in?

Just about the risks, potential, you know.

Don't want anything bad to happen.

It's sad to see, you know? These people have no idea.

They've been scared to death by the media

and from this whole coronavirus thing.

Want some information before you go in? Sure. Have a good one.

They've been sold a ticket that this is the only way back to freedom,

this is the only way back to peace of mind, and it's just not the case.

You guys are dangerous people.

Telling people the risks of a shot is dangerous?

Now - you're spreading misinformation!

Everything and there is a provable fact. We have children out here.

It's a provable fact. All right. Feel free to counter them.

Fuck you guys. Have a good day, thank you for being so nice.

It's leading a great example for your children. Fuck you!

I think there's a goal to track, trace and vaccinate

every man, woman and child on the planet

and this is a great excuse to do that.

I think you should be sceptical of anything you

put into your body, including vaccines.

I would have said no.

I would have said, "No, not until I see the data."

But once the data are there,

and once your questions have been answered,

then your scepticism should melt away.

Frankly, vaccines are the only way out of this pandemic,

and if people are scared about vaccines

then we're not going to get out of this pandemic

and we're going to have to live with it.

Paul Offit is one of the leading scientists

advising the US government on its vaccine strategy.

When next winter comes,

if we don't have population immunity rates in the 80% range,

we're going to be in trouble.

People talk endlessly about variants,

how variants are a threat to us getting past this pandemic,

but I think that variants are just one of the two threats -

the other threat is the anti-vaccine movement.

# We don't want your vaccine, your vaccine... #

There is one name never far

from any anti-vax message board or conversation.

He's famous in America, where he now lives, but he's British.

A disgraced doctor who fled the UK, pursued by a scandal.

Look, the guy who triggered all of this,

the granddaddy of the anti-vax movement,

the first person to realise that you can target the vulnerable

using misinformation about vaccines...

..and build a business, build a living, build a franchise off it...

Andrew Wakefield.

And he's back.

This time, all over the internet,

telling us that you don't need to wear masks, Covid isn't real,

and vaccines are dangerous.

OVERLAPPING VOICES

So you've been pretty critical of Wakefield over the years.

I guess you were never destined to be friends, right?

He doesn't like me very much,

I know he's said some pretty mean things about me in public.

But I think Andrew Wakefield

has perpetuated one of the biggest frauds in the world.

Andrew Wakefield in 1988 published a paper in the journal Lancet,

claiming that the combination measles, mumps, rubella -

MMR - vaccine, caused autism.

What he had was, he had a series of 12 children,

eight of whom had autism,

and those eight had presumably developed autism

within a month of receiving the vaccine.

He also had a theory.

His theory was that the reason that happened was because

the measles, mumps, rubella vaccine was given in combination

and wasn't given separately.

That overwhelmed the immune system.

For which he had no evidence.

Measles, mumps and rubella given together may be too much

for the immune system of some children to handle.

He just made it up!

The most amazing part of his paper was that it ever was a paper,

that it ever was published.

He might as well have published a series of children who,

within a month of having eaten a peanut-butter-and-jelly sandwich,

eight developed leukaemia.

He was well spoken, he was charismatic,

he was dramatic and he cared.

I mean, he was made for TV.

And the British media loved him.

They, in fact, created a little biopic about him,

starring Hugh Bonneville - the star of Downton Abbey.

Stop there.

We need a biopsy of that.

You know, how many scientists can claim that?

How many scientists can claim that a famous film star or TV star

has portrayed them on television?

None of us because, you know,

we're not really either that good looking or that interesting.

You believe me?

Why wouldn't I believe you?

When that paper was published...

Questions were raised today about the safety of the combined

mumps, measles and rubella vaccine...

..showing a possible link with a bowel disease

which could lead to autism.

..it created panic.

Tens of thousands of parents chose not to vaccinate their children.

Thousands of children were hospitalised and four children died.

You can reasonably make the claim that that paper killed children.

There were a lot of heroes in this story

but one of them is certainly Fiona Godlee.

She stood up as the Editor in Chief of the British Medical Journal

and challenged the Lancet to do the right thing.

Fiona Godlee public published an analysis of Wakefield's paper,

based on a re-examination of the medical details

of the children he used in his study.

What transpired when the cases of these children,

their medical records, was properly looked

against what was reported in the Lancet paper

is that Andrew Wakefield had manipulated the information

to fit his case.

In fact, some of those children had developed autism

before they actually got that vaccine.

Channel 4 and Sunday Times investigations

had discovered something else.

Andrew Wakefield was being paid to do this by a lawyer

who was aiming to sue the manufacturer of the vaccine.

He was being paid £150 an hour and ended up earning more than £400,000

for the work he was doing,

and none of this was declared in the publication in the Lancet.

Now, what that meant was that the condition that Andrew Wakefield

said he was discovering was something he was actually

going out and looking for.

Even more shocking is that,

while he was busy discrediting the triple vaccine,

he had taken out a patent on a single measles vaccine.

So while at the press conference

he was warning people against the triple vaccine,

he stood to make millions from a single measles vaccine.

I do think that there is a case for dissociating these vaccines

into their component parts - separate measles, mumps

and rubella vaccines, given perhaps by separation of one year.

He had an enormous academic and financial

vested interest in that statement.

How did Wakefield react to you calling him an elaborate fraud?

Well, he sued us.

And this is a pattern of behaviour with Andrew Wakefield.

People are obviously scared by this,

but to my knowledge he has never successfully sued anyone.

Dr Wakefield, any regrets, Dr Wakefield? No regrets, thank you.

What we now know is the study published in the Lancet

was not only bad science and unethical science - it was fraud.

Your wonderful man, you're a wonderful person.

Andrew Wakefield deliberately rigged the result

in order to support his claim.

In January 2010 the General Medical Council concluded

what was its longest ever fitness-to-practise hearing -

the result of which was, a few months later,

that Andrew Wakefield was struck off.

He had been dishonest,

unethical and had shown callous disregard for his patients.

The allegations against me

and against my colleagues are both unfounded and unjust.

I repeat, unfounded and unjust.

Why he was unable to say he was wrong here is beyond me.

I mean, it couldn't be clearer that he's wrong.

We in the UK thought he was finished.

We thought we'd got it sorted - he was struck off, it was over.

How wrong we were!

On the day that the General Medical Council

finally ruled against Andrew Wakefield,

stripping him of his medical licence,

Wakefield wasn't in London to hear it.

He was in a TV studio in America.

And Dr Andrew Wakefield is here for an exclusive interview.

Doctor, good morning. Good morning.

Do I still refer to you as "doctor"?

Yes, they can't take away the fact that I have a medical degree, yes.

Is this the final blow to your credibility, doctor?

Is that it? This is a little bump on the road

and that's how it should be perceived.

It's a bump on a very bumpy road, but it's a bump.

The big surprise, for most people,

was that Andrew Wakefield didn't crawl under a rock and disappear.

What's your next step, real quickly?

My next step is to continue this work to its natural conclusion.

These parents aren't going away, the children aren't going away

and I'm most certainly not going away.

There was a simple way that Andrew Wakefield could have

silenced his critics - repeat the study.

But he didn't.

Even before the full truth of his fraud emerged,

Wakefield fled to the States where he's lived ever since.

America seems to suit him very well, the whole culture there,

the openness to...

..erm, you know, claims and counter claims and money

and everything that he's found that supports him there.

I don't know. Why... Why has he done so well in America?

Because America has a system...

..the philanthropic structure of this country,

the tax incentives, the wealth creation possibilities...

I like to say - self-centredly, I'll say it -

every story is a business story

because almost every story in the end is about money.

So what's so interesting about the anti-vax movement -

where is the money?

The money comes from a small

but very well-heeled network of donors and philanthropists

and they will consistently and repeatedly fund...

..anybody who can essentially, reinforce their opinions.

I've just been fascinated at how Andrew Wakefield has been able

to reinvent himself after being run out of Britain.

When he comes to America,

he actually winds up opening up a non-profit -

it's based in Austin, Texas - called Thoughtful House.

So the early 2000s was a period when Andrew Wakefield,

having been expelled from the medical establishment in the UK,

fell into the arms of financially lucrative quackery

in an environment that Wakefield had helped to create

which was the idea that if vaccines caused autism,

autism could also be cured.

I found the annual report that any American non-profit

or charitable organisation is required to file.

You can see they gathered a lot of philanthropic capital.

Jane Johnson, she's preposterously wealthy,

heiress to the Johnson & Johnson fortune.

After her comes Lisa Selz whose husband, Bernard Selz,

is a famous Wall Street banker and then hedge fund manager.

Millions of philanthropic dollars just sitting there.

He is able to begin sort of empire building

and that's a function of the patrons

that he is able to develop along the way.

To me, America was an oasis to a man in the desert.

One of the things that Thoughtful House allowed him to do

is to explore other sorts of autism treatments.

These included chelation therapy, you know, leaching out minerals,

hyperbaric chambers for the bends,

many thousands of dollars for these,

you know, non-scientifically vetted treatments.

Wakefield then set up the Strategic Autism Initiative,

funnelling money to doctors

practising sometimes dangerous treatments.

Dr Mark Geier - a doctor who was treating children with autism

with a drug used in chemical castration

and he was struck off for that conduct

and that doesn't really slow Wakefield down whatsoever.

He actually increases his giving.

There's a lot of, erm...

Kind of a cottage imagery of false hope in this country

where we're perfectly willing to embrace people

who offer us snake oil and he was exactly that, a snake oil salesman.

One of the things that really has been a guiding light

in my medical career has been listening

to mothers telling the story of what happened to their children.

The man in the white coat, the doctor, the paediatrician,

"I know your child better than you" - no, you don't.

I don't think we should underestimate Andrew Wakefield

or those who support him.

I think it would be a very grave error to do that.

My son's name is Justin and I just want to say thank you

for doing everything that you do. That's OK. Can I get a hug, please?

Thank you so much for doing everything that you do.

It's a pleasure. Got to be done. Thank you. Hang in there.

He has a terrific belief in his own rightness,

so there's a kind of narcissism combined with a cause,

combined with a group of vulnerable people

who feel neglected and let down.

I met Dr Wakefield in my friend's apartment.

He was the only physician that I saw who listened,

who actually listened, didn't try to talk on top of me,

didn't immediately start shaking his head.

He was warm, he was engaged, he was very knowledgeable.

He validated a lot of things that we had been so concerned about

that other doctors had dismissed.

One thing that allows the belief to take hold for parents -

Wakefield's theory that vaccines cause autism - is the fact

that signs of autism tend to become more evident at around 18 months

to two years old, the same time that children receive the MMR.

Christian and his brother Matt, who is two years younger, like, here...

That was Christian at two when his brother came home from the hospital.

Look at this one.

He liked to get in his car,

put stuffed animals in there and drive around.

And after he developed autism at, like, two and a half,

I kind of stopped taking pictures because they were just awful.

Like, he would not look at the camera, he would be upset.

Which is weird. It's like time stops here.

Do you ever doubt that it was the vaccine that...? No.

I never doubted it was the vaccines because it was so clear-cut to me

and he's a case of a catastrophic regression.

The dramatic difference was so obvious.

Dr Wakefield, he said,

"Yeah, this is a very tough thing for these kids to live with.

"It's very, very tough,

"but we think that we can do things medically to help."

Wakefield's unfounded theory was that the MMR caused autism

by damaging the gut, allowing toxins to leak into the brain.

The procedure... It's no small deal.

It's like a colonoscopy, I guess.

Like, the day before, you drink an enormous amount of laxatives

and kind of clean out your gut and then you go in

and then they take a bunch of pictures

and they can see what's gone wrong and it is very expensive

and, of course, insurance wouldn't pay for it.

I remember it was, like, $5,000.

It does suggest that Andrew Wakefield's motives

are not for the benefit of his patients.

It's very hard to understand what his motives might be

except for his own aggrandisement and enrichment.

I have heard so many times mothers are saying,

"I knew there was something wrong.

"The doctor was about to give that injection

"and something inside me said, 'Do not do this.'"

Women, mothers, must reassert themselves.

My son would line objects up in a certain way.

He would do things like run into the road

if he got overwhelmed with noise.

So that's when I started to look up autism.

You know, you go and Google, you think, "What can help my child?"

You're worried.

Parents were just beginning to go on the internet in the early 2000s

and Google different causes of autism.

It opened up a whole new world for them

and then anything can be put on the internet.

Here was a British doctor who seemed extremely credible, you know,

and he'd been run out of Britain for exposing the truth

that vaccines cause autism.

So...

It was... It was a gold mine for him.

Any parents that had vaccinated his children had turned out to be later

diagnosed as autistic were straight away looking into what could...

What could get rid of their children's autism?

Camel's milk, for instance, is meant to accelerate speech.

It doesn't.

Turpentine, slapping therapy where you hold a child down

and slap the autism out of them.

Erm... Really? Yep.

Yep. Packing therapy which is available in France

where they wrap children in freezing cold sheets to, you know,

reactivate their immune system to drive the autism out of you.

There's MMS, miracle mineral solution,

which is chlorine dioxide bleach

which is touted to cure autism in enemas and oral solutions.

It does nothing but cause very serious side-effects.

Parents were using this on their children.

And I thought, "They can't be, it's bleach!"

I looked at my own children and thought, I can't not do anything.

I have to do something about this.

Have you had any updates on whereabouts he is?

Yeah, he posted a video.

A lot can be done in small places.

One of the people we're after is a man called Grennan.

So, Grennan holds seminars where you go along and you sit down

and you learn how to mix sodium chloride

and citric acid together which makes chlorine dioxide bleach.

He's been doing some sort of classes, hasn't he, as well?

Yeah, they're travelling around.

I think there was one that we looked at that they made

about $16,000 just in one seminar.

Then you add three drops of the activator.

Remember, we've standardised the hydrochloric acid to be at 4%.

Grennan is on the run,

operating from a secret lab somewhere in America.

His bestselling product is miracle mineral solution -

swimming pool bleach repurposed as a medicine for kids to drink

to wash their systems clean of autism

and, more recently, Covid.

I started using fake profiles, finding out where they are,

their locations.

Amanda and Melissa are brilliant at finding out identities

or locations, so it can be really hard to pinpoint them,

but once we do...

..we report them straight to the police.

It was pretty obvious that this product was being made

in the backyard.

The biggest thing that stuck out was the grass growing in there,

like, that, you know,

that looks like Florida.

Yeah, maybe we could look at some of the cars around in the video

and see, maybe we could get a licence plate.

We're the bleach hunters.

That's what we are.

We track down abusive parents and quacks, charlatans, people...

Snake oil salesman.

You see, the thing about putting a bleach, you know,

a toxin into your child in an enema or an oral solution

is you are going to get severe adverse reactions.

You know, this is the breakout on their skin from ingesting bleach.

This is from having bleach in the mouth.

These are actually strips of bowel lining

with a penny to show the thickness

and a tape measure to show, you know, how long it is.

This is someone's child.

These are the pinned posts advising parents not to tell people,

you know, that they're using it.

I do believe, in many cases,

they genuinely do believe that they're helping their children.

More bowel lining.

You know, they've kept it in jars

to show off how much they've managed to get out.

It's just horrendous. It's horrendous abuse.

I blame Wakefield for that.

I blame Wakefield for all of this.

In a twist of good fortune,

Wakefield's ideas have taken hold in a very useful place - Hollywood.

I believe that autism,

in my heart, is preventable. And treatable. And treatable.

Vaccines are the largest-growing division

of the pharmaceutical industry.

His new, powerful friends include a figure from America's political

aristocracy - Robert F Kennedy Jr, an outspoken vaccine critic.

It's a useful club to be in for someone looking for a new career.

I thought, I am gonna become a film-maker.

And more importantly, turn the tables on one's old adversaries.

And I am going to become your worst enemy.

WHOOPING

Wakefield claims he's found an insider that will prove

that the CDC, America's health protection agency,

has been covering up the truth.

Deliberate, high-level deception of the American people

with disastrous consequences for its children's health.

First, he persuades his billionaire donors, the Selzes,

to give him a million dollars.

Next, he recruits a daytime TV producer.

What's up?

Del Bigtree.

Together they make a movie, Vaxxed,

and so begins Andrew Wakefield's next assault on vaccines.

It's a great pleasure to be back causing trouble in Canada again.

I've been wanting to make movies my whole life and with that film,

when it was finished I remember having tears in my eyes

as I watched it, just thinking,

who made that movie?

They say the sculptor looks at a rock and ends up saying,

"I didn't make the sculpture,

"I just removed the rock that was in the way."

Did you enjoy Vaxxed the movie?

HE LAUGHS

Um...no.

My oldest son Ian was walking and running.

After the vaccine, he was no longer able to do that.

He just tells anecdote after anecdote after anecdote.

"My child was fine, they got this MMR vaccine and now look at them."

And then the parent weeps, clutches their child.

I mean, who is not moved by that?

The insider is a disgruntled CDC scientist who Wakefield's associates

have cultivated, and one of them

had secretly recorded.

Their insider hands over the data

gathered for a ten-year-old study on vaccination and autism,

and Wakefield's team reanalyse the numbers...

..till they get the answer they want.

Wow. The CDC had known all along

there was this MMR-autism risk.

And they sliced and diced the data

in an effort to get rid of that effect.

It's not exactly the Nixon tapes.

I mean, it really just reads like a disagreement among authors

about how data should be presented. That's all that was.

The CDC said the film manipulated the data and added to it

to fit Wakefield's theories.

Wakefield's insider put out a statement saying

he would never suggest any parent avoid vaccinating their children.

But by then the film was already gathering momentum.

As a parent of a child who has autism,

I'm concerned, and I wanna know the truth. And I'm not anti-vaccine,

I want safe vaccines.

Actor Robert De Niro has reversed course

in a highly controversial documentary film.

This prestigious Tribeca Film Festival will no longer

feature a film called Vaxxed.

They'd never confronted anything like this before.

They'd never had to deal with a film

like this and they censored it.

There was a backlash which I haven't fully explored,

and I will, but I didn't want it to start affecting the festival

in ways that I couldn't see.

I think the controversy was a favour to Wakefield and Bigtree and the

movie because the movie became a much-talked-about issue.

But pharma and all these shills

and everybody that wanted to stop the story made the biggest mistake,

not only just getting us kicked out of Tribeca,

but slowing our release down till we were in the public eye

for a straight year.

We bought a bus that said "Vaxxed". We're just driving city to city.

And we would show up, there would be a line down the block.

So, I saw that the Vaxxed bus was on tour round the country

and was making a stop in my town.

And I decided, well, that's not gonna do,

I'm not gonna let them defile my home park like that,

so I just went and printed up a sign

and just walked over

and went over to the bus and stood there in front of it.

And then one thing led to another, just to drop everything

and go out and chase the Vaxxed bus around the country for a while.

Hey, everybody, Craig Egan here. I am in Billings, Montana.

Craig Egan here in Minnesota.

I am back at the Vaxxed bus.

I mean, we were on a road trip.

We were on the road the whole time, you know?

We drove from Tacoma to Colorado and then to Kansas City

and then we, like,

zig-zagged across the Midwest all the way to Philadelphia.

One of their trips, I think they came in to find you in the diner

having your breakfast and say hello. How did that go?

Not so well, it turns out.

They wanted to see if they could get an interview with you, Paul.

Are you up for that? An interview over the Vaxxed bus?

Who are you? I'm just a camera guy.

No. You're not interested? Are you kidding me?

We can talk about, you know, differences of opinion and...

Get outta here.

Get the fuck outta here. I don't wanna talk to you. All right.

All right? I mean, I just think if you have the truth on your side

you'd be up for just having a conversation. Out. All right.

Get the fuck out of here.

I regret saying that. Um, certainly my hospital regrets my saying that

because that video appeared everywhere. I think my hospital

had to hire somebody for the next 24 hours to try

and deal with the fallout from my saying that.

Although I can tell you I never got more positive mail.

There were a lot of people that really loved that line.

One of the locations where they went, they were interviewing this

guy who was kind of a conspiracy theory radio show kind of guy.

I mean, I will be violent if somebody tries to vaccinate me

or one of my family. That's why I've got this gun on my hip.

They were interviewing him and he was, like, going on about

the one world government and all this crazy nonsense.

It's a little one. Is it loaded? Yeah, of course it is.

And then the subject of me came up.

Our little protester didn't follow us today.

He's a little punk bitch.

And he's just like, "That little bitch."

He started, like, like, like, like, like insulting me

and basically went on this rant saying that

when the system collapses and the government collapses

and there's no accountability any more,

I'm gonna be the first person he hangs from a noose.

But I guarantee you what - he wouldn't...

I'd treat him like the little bitch he is if he ever flipped me off.

I was like, wow, dude!

Nice to meet you, too, guy! You know?

HE LAUGHS

I just wanted to be a monkey wrench in their gears.

I can't take on the entire anti-vax community and I certainly

can't take on well-funded people

like Andrew Wakefield and Del Bigtree.

But I can be a pain in the ass when I really try hard.

There was one more person who could really further Wakefield's

aspirations to widen his audience,

and get back at the medical establishment.

Two years old, two and a half years old, a child, a beautiful child,

went to have the vaccine

and came back and a week later

got a tremendous fever,

got very, very sick. Now is autistic.

SIREN WAILS

I've been very much involved with it over the years,

I have some great friends, Bob and Suzanne Wright,

and they've had a serious event take place in their family,

they're fantastic people, and I've helped them over the years.

My parents were friends with him and my dad did business with him,

they lived in a Trump apartment, yeah, sure.

He knew about Christian.

It's also very controversial to even say, but I couldn't care less,

I mean, I've seen people where they have a, you know, perfectly

healthy child and they go for the vaccinations

and a month later the child is no longer healthy.

He could have been talking about Christian.

Donald Trump could have been talking about Christian because

Trump is very nice, he asked my parents what precipitated

the onset and my parents said,

"Well, you know, Katie thinks it's the vaccines."

And he said, "I've heard that from so many families. So many."

You know, I have a theory,

and it's a theory that some people believe in,

and that's the vaccination.

Before Donal Trump was elected, he, um, he was an anti-vaxxer.

And then when he won and he had his inauguration balls,

the people that he invited were people like Andrew Wakefield.

That's really unfortunate that Andrew Wakefield had this

opportunity with Donald Trump

because in a normal world the President of the United States

should not be meeting with someone like that.

But, unfortunately, that's not what the White House was at the time

that we were dealing with. I would like to say, you know,

no, thank you to the UK for sending this individual our way.

Cos now we're stuck with him.

In 2019, before Covid,

there was another epidemic that confirmed the strength

of Andrew Wakefield's anti-vax message.

..New York City health department took the unprecedented step

of issuing an emergency... ..major outbreak of measles...

..the city's measles count is now 390...

But it was also the start of a fightback,

led by high-school kid who had reason to question

how the anti-vax message was spreading so successfully.

I'm looking at the news and seeing that there's measles outbreaks

across the world, and across the US.

There are preventable diseases spreading in ways

that they really shouldn't.

My mum is anti-vaccine.

Seeing the measles outbreaks, I knew I was...

..almost part of the problem.

So I went online and I said, "Hey, my parents are kind of stupid

"and don't believe in vaccines.

"Now I'm 18, where do I go to get vaccinated?"

MESSAGE SENT SWISHES

Measles is highly contagious. It came back into the United States.

Thank you, Andrew Wakefield.

So, I remember about a year or so ago, I was talking to my mum,

and she said, "Yeah, I paid for this class to learn more about vaccines."

And I was like, "Who's running it?" She said, "Oh, this doctor,

"she's a doctor from Cleveland Clinic..."

"Oh, she's anti-vax, right?" She said, "Yeah."

"How much is a class?"

It was, like, $300.

I was like, "You paid $300 to learn about vaccines when I can just,

"like, research it on the CDC's website for free?

"And why do you have to pay to go figure this out?"

And she was like, "Well, no-one will tell me the truth."

And I had a moment of realisation where I was like,

"Wait a second, this is about money.

"I think this is really about money, so are these people manipulating

and convincing the mum of these lies to profit off of her?"

Possibly the most cynical currency of

the anti-vaccination movement has become the dead baby.

Six-month-old Evee Clobes' mother was not anti-vaccination.

She had just taken her baby to get her routine shots.

When I woke up, I went to the bathroom...

..and I came back...

..and she hadn't moved yet and I got closer and I said, "Evee!"

And...we got to the hospital and...

..I knew she was gone.

It just didn't make any sense.

So I made this post on Facebook,

"Please help, my daughter just died...

"..unexpectedly," and my Facebook blew up.

Within hours, Catie was inundated with messages blaming

the vaccines for her baby's death.

This is a classic example of how anti-vaxxers operates.

They come along, and they say,

"Well, did your kid have any vaccines last year?"

And you say, "Yeah, they had three, four, maybe," and they say,

"Oh, that's a high vaccine load, maybe it was the vaccines.

"Have you looked at this paper? That might tell you some information

"about it, you should do your own research."

The medical examiner ruled that evidence collected

at the scene showed Evee suffocated while co-sleeping with her mother.

But this hasn't stopped anti-vaxxers using her story

to drive traffic to their sites.

Catie, welcome, thank you for coming on

and offering to share your story with us.

The allegations that here, you have a healthy child,

she has this positional...asphyxia and she dies. Mm-hm.

That's not what happened at all.

No. Taking a clinical history, it was quite evident that...

..it was a continuum...

..of illness, which started with the vaccines

and ended in Evee's death. That's undeniable.

I am absolutely appalled by this story and sadly,

I've heard it so many times.

SHE EXHALES

Well... SHE SOBS

I want to say thank you for fighting.

The anti-vaxxers swoop in and convince this person that

vaccines are the reason.

That person then goes out as an advocate and says,

"Vaccines killed my child."

And now, that person has become a human shield for the movement.

Here, we've got her store,

where she has got her "Justice For Evee" merchandise,

she's got pins, you can get a little sleeper pin for $10...

..tote bags, T-shirts for everyone...

.."Healthy babies don't just die."

It's just... HE CHUCKLES

You've got your hoodies...

She's got a full-on boutique going on here.

The image of Catie Clobes' baby is now pasted on billboards

across America - a mother's grief used by the anti-vax movement's

big guns, to turn her into an activist, promoting their message.

So, here is all of the different bits and pieces

you need to know if you have a vaccine-injured child...

Larry Cook...

He describes himself as a healthy lifestyle author,

film-maker and coach.

He had a Facebook group - 195,000 members.

What he did was he hooked people in using different myths.

You know, whether it's about fertility or microchips or

whatever else, but once they're in there, the Facebook group was used

to radicalise people and to bring them into his marketing pathway.

This is why vaccines fail - it's not because of anti-vaxxers,

it's because the process itself is a fake process.

It's fake immunity, it's false.

We looked at the techniques they use which are very similar to...

It's a mixture of sort of grooming...

..and multilevel marketing.

So, the way they bring people in is they target people

who are vulnerable, giving them a small answer, they say,

"I've got bigger answers, but you're going to pay for it."

And they start dragging them down and that's why it's

a bit like multilevel marketing, it's a bit like a cult.

With every additional donation,

you get a higher level of understanding.

Good morning, everyone.

My name's Ethan Lindenberger and I'm a senior at Norwalk High School.

And my mother is an anti-vax advocate that believes vaccines

cause autism...

So I gave a Senate testimony in March 2019 in front

of a Senate committee about vaccinations

and about preventable disease outbreaks...

And they wanted to hear my perspective as someone who

grew up with an anti-vaccine mother.

I had to buy my first suit to go there.

My pastor... Finally went to get my suit, and he was like,

"Hey, even if you sound dumb, you'll look smart."

And I was like, "Cool."

People don't resonate well with information in data, numbers and...

They resonate better with stories.

You see that with a lot of the anti-vaccine committee,

that a large proportion of the foundation that they build

to communicate with parents is on a very anecdotal level,

sharing stories and experiences and that speaks volume to people

because, at least for even my family, my mum would reaffirm

that her position was correct

because she knows people and she's seen stories.

INDISTINCT CHATTER

So, aside from just a long laundry list of, like,

things that have happened,

security had to walk me in and out of the Senate building,

they had people that tried to approach me

after the Senate testimony that were arrested.

It's, like, very organised and...weaponised people.

There's a guy named Larry Cook on Facebook, a big anti-vaxxer,

and he was, all caps, literally all caps, like,

"Ethan's dumb... I can't believe this is a thing."

And I was having 100 people comment on my posts and stuff, like,

"You're stupid," "You're dumb..." and blah, blah, blah.

It's like, "Where is this coming from?! This is a sudden influx of this hate.

And I saw that and I was like, "Oh..."

Like someone told them to. Exactly.

I had bomb threats, I had a person comment on Instagram

that someone should beat my brains out with the bat.

People can take action on the things that they say, so, just...

You're very, very strong and it's amazing how well

you're taking it in stride, but just remember to be cautious also. Mm-hm.

Real-life... Yeah.

Something that I noticed, though, as a similarity...

Ethan Lindenberger basically rebelled against his mother

by getting vaccinated by choice as a teenager.

You know, this is very alarming for a mother.

I think that they're pushing forward Lindenberger

for several reasons, but not least of which is that... Mm-hm.

..is to have him portrayed as a role model for children to defy their

parents in respect of vaccination or of medical decisions... Yes.

..and so, I find him utterly irrelevant...

..in the scientific setting.

Utterly irrelevant in many, many ways,

but a useful idiot in terms of exploiting him to...

..to persuade other teenagers that it's cool to defy your parents

and it's very, very sad that he defies his mother, which...

It goes against this notion which I am deeply invested in, of...

ETHAN: Hm. ..maternal instinct.

What do you make of that?

HE MOUTHS

I think that...

..between Wakefield and I...

..the one who's more scientifically irrelevant

is the one who lost his medical licence.

When did you first find out your son was the new superhero

of the pharmaceutical industry?

Wow, well...

He had told me that he was going to get vaccinated

and I was very upset, we ended up getting into a pretty big argument

about it and it was more...

I think she looks at this as if she's lost me to the powers that be,

controlling and contorting the truth.

I'm like, "What are you saying? Because you know I'm against this." Right... And I said,

"Well, if you're going to talk, I'll talk, I want to talk too, tell them I want them to interview me."

So, you said, "I want to be interviewed..." Oh, yeah. "..with my side of the story."

Yeah, I said, "I want them to hear my side of the story."

And to me, I also see it a similar way,

where I've lost a caring mother, I've lost that...

..to an organisation and a movement, elaborately and directly

trying to manipulate that and profit and gain out of that...

..at the expense of my family.

Does your mother get most of her information online?

Yes, either through Facebook or through sites that use

the social media platforms, like Facebook.

Where do you get most of your information?

From...not Facebook!

I'd love to be a guest at Thanksgiving dinner at your house!

That would be a... LAUGHTER DROWNS SPEECH

Welcome back to the Andy Wakefield Podcast.

My name is Lori Gregory and, as always,

it's my great pleasure to be here with you, Andy Wakefield.

How are you today? Morning, Lori, I am wonderful.

We're going to talk today about the gift that just keeps on giving.

Covid-19.

So much to talk about.

Every day, there is just so much more...

Where is Wakefield now?

Over the years, he's courted an awful lot of trouble,

do you think he sleeps well at night?

Andrew Wakefield has absolutely no trouble sleeping at night

and I'm fairly confident

that he's actually never sleeping better.

Andrew Wakefield is living in South Florida,

in an estate,

with Elle MacPherson.

I mean, holy Toledo, can you even imagine that?

I mean, it's...

I don't get it.

You're supposed to be a hidden figure,

you're not supposed to be living on a tropical beach...

..with Elle MacPherson. It's not supposed to happen that way.

I mean, what do you even...

..imagine she sees in him?

The wages of medical sin and public health

panic inducing seem to be pretty attractive,

you know, on balance.

He's making a really good case

that getting struck off and becoming a pariah in your home country...

..is not the worst thing that can happen in a career.

Even as Wakefield is pursuing new interests,

the fortunes of the anti-vax movement are about to transform.

2020 arrives and it's Christmas all over again.

Coronavirus.

Covid-19 is a giant overblown hoax.

Causing mass hysteria.

Let's catch this.

Coronavirus is the biggest opportunity they'd had in decades

to convert millions of people.

An opportunity they seized with both hands.

I watched Mikki Willis' wonderful documentary yesterday, Plandemic.

Extremely powerful piece of work.

Most impressive.

So, if you haven't watched that, you must watch it.

That documentary, posted on the Internet,

claimed that Covid had been started deliberately

so drug companies could profit from dangerous vaccines.

Somebody didn't go to a market,

get a bat, the virus didn't jump directly to humans -

that's not how it works.

Plandemic,

a pseudo-documentary filled with a hodgepodge of conspiracy theories.

In just one week, it was viewed over eight million times,

which is a shockingly high number.

This is the one they've been waiting for, they're well financed,

they're well organised,

and now really sophisticated at using social media

to spread their message.

Covid is a massive gift to them.

It was a growth opportunity,

a chance for them to sell their narratives.

All the memes that they've been doing about other diseases,

about measles, autism,

about everything else - they got repurposed immediately for Covid.

# I'm a Pfizer girl, in a Covid world... #

This is a farm for creating high-engagement content.

Ten million more followers over that first year,

60 million followers in total across their social media platforms.

This was a chance for them to grow and also to build alliances

because they were the talking point for millions of people.

So the team's been looking today into Joe Mercola quite specifically

and this one here shows that

he's been listening 22 vitamin supplements and products

that claim to treat or cure Covid.

He's been promoting remedies for Covid

including H202 nebulisation.

That's inhaling bleach.

There really is no magic medicine.

And so therefore that's when the charlatans step in,

that's when the clowns enter centre stage and they say,

"Yeah, the modern medicine doesn't know it because they don't care,

"because doctors don't care but I care

"and I'm going to give you this magic medicine

"at a price from which I will make a fortune."

Grenon, the man who was selling them MMS bleach as a cure for autism

is now targeting people with Covid.

So we started reporting him for this.

For fake cure peddlers,

the pandemic has become an "I saw you coming" moment.

Grenon's income quadrupled when he repackaged his bleach product

as a Covid cure.

Grenon has come out and said he has contacted Trump.

And then I see the disinfectant

where it knocks it out in a minute, one minute,

and is there a way we can do something like that?

By injection inside

or almost a cleaning so that you're going to have

to use medical vouchers for it

but it sounds interesting to me.

The American authorities didn't share the President's enthusiasm

for industrial bleach.

Live photos from John Grenon,

aged 62, and his three sons,

they were caught selling a "Miracle Mineral Solution".

Grenon's been caught, how brilliant is that?

Finally!

I can't believe it's taken this long. I'm so happy.

There's a lot of stuff coming out of the house now

that he's been arrested. Huge vats of the MMS...

It was like a factory in there.

The world's leading scientists have expressed their delight,

along with a strong note of caution,

following the news that a vaccine against coronavirus

has proven 90% effective.

We are going to see a vaccine

with a limited the lifespan that is going to hurt a lot of people.

This vaccine has a truckload of shit in it.

It causes for infertility, death.

Poison. It's going to destroy your health.

Alzheimer's, you name it.

Infertility in women - potentially, permanently.

Why have we taken the entire global economy to its knees

over what's going to be a big fat nothing burger?

Why would they want to sabotage the best hope that we have

for an end to Covid?

Money.

Imran and his team have been looking at the money

behind the anti-vax movement for us

and are soon to publish findings in a report

that lays out, unequivocally,

that anti-vax is a money-churning business.

Three of Andrew Wakefield's closest associate -

Del Bigtree, Robert F Kennedy Jr and Joseph Mercola -

are responsive for nearly half of the content

that we find circulating in anti-vaccine groups.

We knew that they were going to take advantage of Covid,

we just didn't realise how effective they'd be

and how substantially they'd grow

so this is a bigger industry than we'd ever thought was possible.

Not only are the followers with millions to the anti-vax sellers,

their clicks have, in the past,

generated vast incomes for the social networks

who have hosted them.

Could be worth up to a billion dollars in annual revenue

to these social networks.

Nine months into the pandemic, in December 2020,

Facebook changed course and started removing false claims

about Covid-19 vaccines - and vaccines in general.

Those in control of these things did not like me speaking out

as much as I did

and Facebook shut me down,

and then Twitter followed suit.

Larry Cook responded with a move that would open a window

on the anti-vax business model, he sued them.

This is his affidavit. He said his revenue has been demolished.

Boo-hoo.

"Through Facebook, I shared online summits, donation requests,

"supplement recommendations

"and other revenue-generating opportunities."

It's a five-dollar special.

"Without my Facebook account because of censorship,

"my ability to secure ongoing revenue has been demolished."

That's what he saw it as.

These are economically-motivated bad guys.

These people need to be out of business, they need to be pariahs.

When one door closes, when Facebook closes,

there are ten people waiting in the wings saying, thank you.

The silver lining of Covid is it's brought people together

who historically, even five months ago,

would never be talking to each other.

Despite the clamp-down by some major social media platforms,

the anti-vaxxers claim they're winning.

They're moving to other platforms and onto the streets.

Here, the movement's work is done by committed foot soldiers,

like the rap artist Remeece,

whose music has become the anthem for anti-vaccination.

# Brutha, brutha, don't take the vaccine

# Sista, sista, don't take the vaccine

# Don't take the vaccine Don't take the vaccine... #

Really catchy video with Remeece, Footsoldiers. Yes.

How does it go?

# We don't want your vaccine, your vaccine

# Stick your mask up your ass cheeks... #

What we haven't seen coming with this movement is the scale

and success of recruitment.

It's won over people in unexpected places, forming unlikely alliances,

perhaps because its rallying call is, don't be taken for a fool.

And they've broaden their reach,

now they're targeting anyone who is feeling marginalised or let down.

And the largest group among them, black and minority ethnic people.

I know a lot of families

that are not going to be taking up the vaccine.

Are you surprised by the stat that one in three black adults

are considering not taking the vaccine?

No.

I'm not, I'm sadly not surprised, because of the amount

of distrust that black people have of the government.

The conspiracy theorists and anti-vaxxers will just...

I think if there's the slightest doubt or mistrust

or the slightest fear or worry, that's when they get in.

In America, Wakefield's ally Robert Kennedy Jr is going a step further.

As the nephew of a president and son of Bobby, hero to the

civil rights movement, Kennedy is using his handed-down hero status

to appeal directly to black people with a new film.

Medical Racism: The New Apartheid implies that Covid vaccines

are a cover to conduct experiments on black people.

This is a classic example of them going after segments within

the population because it's a market opportunity for them.

There is actually a higher level of vaccine hesitancy in the black

community, that's driven by a number of factors but one of which is that

there is specific misinformation being targeted at them.

The anti-vax movement is riding a wave of populism,

where people can choose their own facts.

Now it's political, they're preaching a new world order,

an outright rejection of science, experts and established authority.

WAKEFIELD: I got a call from my mother the other day and she said,

the national news said last night on television that

you're coming to England to address in anti-vaccine rally.

You know, this is all over the world, people are rising up.

Because of the vaccines,

half of the population are going to be injured or die.

If people stand up, we can stop them, but if we don't stand up,

this is going to be the end of the human race as we know it.

People are coming round now to seeing the truth, and once that

happens, it happens en masse and it gains momentum and it's unstoppable.

# Don't take the vaccine Don't take the vaccine

# Mama, Mama, don't take the vaccine

# Papa, don't take the vaccine Don't take the vaccine... #

In Trafalgar Square, tens of thousands of people gather

for the star guest, whose voice is beamed in from the States.

He is an absolute God, ladies and gentlemen,

I give you Dr Andrew Wakefield! CHEERING

It feel so good to be with you again.

My family motto is nil desperandum, never despair.

Despair is a state of inertia, of panic.

That is not the people of England.

This particular coronavirus had its origins at the hands

of scientists, it was made by man.

They must stop taking our freedoms from us.

I stand with you.

Go well, my friends.

Dr Andrew Wakefield!

I think Andrew Wakefield sees himself as an international hero.

CHUCKLING: Thank you, I love you too.

An historic figure, almost a religious figure.

It's Messiah-like.

I think the real danger is that we have underestimated the anti-vax

movement, its scale, the compelling nature of its narrative,

the vested interests that are driving it,

the money that's driving it.

We have to raise our game.

Today, in 79 out of 117 countries surveyed,

over a third of people say they may not take the vaccine.

And if that plays out, the global vaccine roll-out will fail.

We're up against a really organised, ruthless,

evil anti-vax industry.

And the one who lit the touch paper of this modern movement,

who's led this march through telling people

not to be fooled by this conspiracy against them?

Science should have prevailed, it was a lie all along.

But whether it's down to timing or personality,

he got away with it and, in the end, makes fools of all us.

He's already onto his next grandiose claim,

that vaccines, which have all but seen off diseases like polio

and smallpox, now jeopardise the very survival of the human race.

This is what extinction looks like, and it's entirely man-made.

There are a lot of fraudsters in science and in medicine.

What sets this fraud apart is the scale of the consequences

and the impact on the public's health globally.

Science did bring us out of the age of darkness

into the age of enlightenment.

We shouldn't be so quick to throw it away.

Subtitles by Red Bee Media