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The belief is real (but the claim is not).
A doctor claimed a certain ingredient in vaccines was causing autism, while also trying to sell his own version without that ingredient. A massive conflict of interest and he lost his medical licence over it.
But damage was done and people freaked out over it. In fact, the ingredient was removed in order to alleviate peoples concerns but by that point the idea vaccines=autism had taken off and it was hard to stop that spread of misinformation. Especially since the dude doubled down on the stance.
See https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Andrew_Wakefield
Andrew Wakefield knowingly and intentionally misrepresented his scientific findings to further his own career ahead of the interests of humanity as a whole. Thomas Midgley Jr is the only person I'd put ahead of him in terms of the damage he's done to the world.
Andrew Wakefield, Jenny McCarthy, and RFK Jr. have so caused so much needless death and suffering. Fucking monsters.
And Oprah for platforming these grifters (among many others).
Just to add onto this, because Wakefield's conflict of interest is one facet of the stupidity of the entire thing. Check out H.Bomberguy's video about the whole thing, the poorly done experiment, the inconclusive research, the bone marrow autism cure guy, and how we went from "there is maybe possibly some interaction between some chemical in the vsccine and some as of yet unknown and undescribed connection between the brain and gut this chemical that may or may not have some impact on autism more research is needed," to "vaccines are 100% the cause of autism"