dollsahoy:

bogleech:

Many people know that vaccines were linked to autism by a fraud and con artist who just wanted to sell his own alternative vaccines.

What a lot of people DON’T know is that he had no reason to choose autism for this scam except that it had JUST started entering mainstream consciousness and was still barely understood by most people. He took advantage of ignorance and confusion already surrounding a hype train and it could have been anything but it happened to be Autism at that particular time.

That’s how fucking meaningless the connection is.

Wakefield didn’t just claim it caused autism–he also claimed it caused an inflammatory bowel disease.  That didn’t quite capture the public imagination the same way, though…