For over two decades, Dr. Andrew Wakefield has been vilified for reporting what countless parents saw with their own eyes — that their healthy children regressed into autism following vaccination.
Now, in our landmark McCullough Foundation report, Determinants of Autism Spectrum Disorder, we bring together over 300 studies confirming that vaccines are the dominant risk factor among all environmental and iatrogenic influences.
In this exclusive interview, Dr. Wakefield reflects on how he first identified gastrointestinal disease in autistic children, the decades of censorship that followed, and why the truth can no longer be suppressed.
“The parents were right — the doctors were wrong,” Wakefield said. “We scoped the children, we saw the inflammation, and it was something brand new. Had we been allowed to continue, we would have known the full mechanism years ago.”
Academia’s Campaign of Indoctrination Against Wakefield
During the interview, I shared something that shocked even Dr. Wakefield.
When I was completing my Master of Public Health at the University of Michigan School of Public Health, there were entire modules in the curriculum dedicated to ‘debunking’ Dr. Wakefield — not by examining data, but by rehearsing talking points fed by pharmaceutical interests.
Students were instructed to dismiss his work as “discredited” without ever reading the Lancet paper or the clinical evidence it described.
This was not education — it was indoctrination, a form of scientific brainwashing designed to preserve the narrative that “vaccines cannot cause autism,” regardless of mounting evidence to the contrary.
It exposed how deeply the Bio-Pharmaceutical Complex has infiltrated academia — shaping generations of public-health professionals who are rewarded not for independent thought, but for obedience.
The Lancet Debacle & the Vaccine Cartel’s Retaliation
As detailed in our report, the controversy began in 1998, when Dr. Wakefield and twelve colleagues published their Lancet case series describing intestinal inflammation and regression following the MMR vaccine. They did not claim proof of causation — only that the evidence warranted further investigation. Yet, after the National Childhood Vaccine Injury Act shielded manufacturers from liability and the Omnibus Autism Proceeding began exposing vaccine-injury claims, powerful interests moved to silence dissent.
In 2004, journalist Brian Deer — working for a Rupert Murdoch–owned paper — launched a coordinated smear campaign accusing Wakefield of fraud, just as thousands of families were petitioning the U.S. vaccine court. Under immense pressure from the pharmaceutical establishment, The Lancet capitulated in 2011, retracting the paper despite no errors in data or methodology.
This moment marked the triumph of censorship over scientific inquiry.
Decades of Progress, Lost to Censorship
Had Wakefield and others been allowed to continue their research, we might have understood and successfully treated autism decades ago.
Promising leads on gut–brain dysfunction, immune dysregulation, and mitochondrial injury were buried under propaganda and professional reprisals. Entire generations of children have since been lost to diagnostic labeling rather than biomedical intervention — while universities, journals, and health agencies doubled down on denial.
The human cost of that censorship is incalculable: millions of families left without answers, and an entire field of autism research set back a quarter-century.
Today, the McCullough Foundation’s comprehensive analysis revives that lost line of inquiry — uniting the epidemiologic, mechanistic, and clinical evidence that vindicates what Wakefield first observed in the 1990s.
Epidemiologist and Foundation Administrator, McCullough Foundation
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