By Anne Dachel
February 4, 2011, CNN’s Dr. Sanjay Gupta interviewed Bill Gates about his plan to eradicate polio by 2012. (HERE) Gates went into great detail about the benefits of vaccines and how he plans to distribute them around the world.
In the midst of the interview, Gupta posed a question about the possibility of a link between vaccines and autism. Seemingly perplexed about the whole thing, Gupta asked, “There has been a lot of news about is there a connection with autism, for example. What do you make of all that? Dr. [Andrew] Wakefield wrote a paper about this [in The Lancet in 1998] saying he thought there was a connection. And there were lower vaccination rates over a period of time as a result in Britain, then the United States. What are your thoughts?”
This opening gave Gates a chance to attack Wakefield for, as he described it, faking his data. He called the idea of a link as “an absolute lie.” That said, Gates went on to talk more about the “miracle of vaccines.”
While autism was only a one small part of the total interview, the title of CNN story was, Bill Gates: Vaccine-autism link ‘an absolute lie.’ It seems that Gates’ plan to promote vaccinations around the world was another opportunity to blame the controversy on Andrew Wakefield. It’s not going to work however.
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