It's been a tough couple of weeks for anti-vaxxers.
Under pressure from medical authorities to avoid promoting what is widely considered to be junk science, the prestigious Tribeca Film Festival announced over the weekend it had canceled the scheduled screening of a documentary that alleges a link between vaccines and autism.
Robert DeNiro, one of the festival founders, who had previously suggested that he was open to considering the debunked theory, walked back his tacit support, saying that, after discussions with experts, "We do not believe it contributes to or furthers the discussion I had hoped for."
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Two weeks ago, another study highlighted the dangerous impact that misinformation about vaccines has had on public health.
The research, lead by Dr. Varun K. Phadke of Emory University and published in the Journal of the American Medical Association, first showed that the majority of 1,416 measles cases identified in 18 different studies involved people who had not been vaccinated for the condition.
In addition, many of those who had not been vaccinated lacked the medically-recommended inoculation due to refusal, rather than lack of access to health care or a legitimate medical exemption.
Specifically, of the 970 measles cases for which the researchers had detailed medical data, 574 were unvaccinated despite lacking any medically recognized reason to forego a vaccine. And 405 of the cases had specifically chosen to forgo the vaccine because of objections not recognized as legitimate by the medical community.
The researchers found similarly depressing level of abstention from vaccines in their analysis of 10,609 cases of pertussis. In every report that provided detailed vaccination history of pertussis patients, the majority of the patients were intentionally unvaccinated.
The study authors had a couple ideas on how to improve the situation.
"Vaccine refusal-specific strategies to optimize vaccine uptake could include state or school-level enforcement of vaccine mandates, or increasing the difficulty with which vaccine exemptions can be obtained," they wrote.
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