Please wait while the transcript is being prepared...
0:00
This is the beginning of part 2 of our study
of anti-vaccine movements over the years.
0:09
This concern about infectious
diseases slowly but progressively
waned throughout the
1950s, 60s and 70s.
Pretty soon vaccines themselves,
at the beginning of the 1970s,
started to be regarded as
a bigger threat of danger
than infectious
diseases themselves.
We saw this in the 1970s
and 80s with the fears
and an anti-vaccine
movement that
emerged surrounding
the DPT vaccine.
DPT stands for diphtheria,
pertussis and tetanus
which are three childhood diseases
that are vaccine-preventable.
A small study linked the DPT vaccine
with neurological complications.
These neurological
complications today
we would call autism,
but at the time they were just known
as neurological complications.
A small study in the
United Kingdom linked
a high fever from the
pertussis component,
the whooping cough component,
of the vaccine with
the initiation of neurological
complications or autism.
What's known as reactogenicity,
is the high fever that's
caused by a vaccine,
which is simply an indication
that a vaccine is working.
It's triggering the
immune system as desired.
But in some people,
the perception that high
fever was causing autism,
was taken as a
reality and as truth.
This triggered waves of news
stories around the world,
and people started to link these
neurological complications
with the DPT vaccine.
The problem with this is that
the DPT vaccine is
given multiple times
through childhood and autism is
identified through childhood,
and people started to link
those two things together.
This was particularly
exploited by Gordon Stewart,
who was a vaccine sceptic,
and he started to
espouse the idea that
the DPT vaccine caused what
we would today call autism.
The rates of DPT
vaccination plummeted.
One of the consequences
of this was
that the pertussis
component that was causing
this reactogenicity or these
fevers was required to
be diluted so that it didn't
cause as severe of a fever.
That wasn't enough to
assuage the public
to allow the DPT
rates to increase.
Instead, there was legal action
taken throughout the world.
In particular,
there was a major trial that
occurred in the United Kingdom
in which both the
anti-vaccine sceptics
who were claiming the cause
of neurological
complications or again,
what we would call autism,
and those who were on the
scientific and medical front
that were advocating
for the DPT vaccine,
both had their day in court.
In this case, quite literally.
In a 500 page verdict,
the judge concluded that
there was no link between
the DPT vaccine and
neurological complications.
Essentially, the DPT
vaccine had been completely
cleared of any concerns
that it might cause autism.