Robert De Niro Still Backs Vaccine Doc Axed From Tribeca Film Festival

Though the controversial documentary ‘Vaxxed’ was pulled from Robert De Niro’s Tribeca Film Festival, the actor has said that he still backs the film and that people should see it.

De Niro also said that his wife Grace Hightower noticed a change in their son Elliot, who has autism, after being vaccinated.

Speaking on US show Today, he said: “There are many people who will come out and say ‘I saw my kid change overnight.'”

Asked if that was his experience with his son, he replied: “My wife says that. I don’t remember. But my child is autistic. And every kid is different.”

The Tribeca festival, which De Niro co-founded, pulled screenings of 'Vaxxed: From Cover Up to Catastrophe’, made by the discredited former gastroenterologist Andrew Wakefield, following a backlash and threats of boycotts.

He’s now said that he ‘regrets’ the decision.

“The movie is something that people should see,” he said. “There was a backlash that I haven’t fully explored, and I will, but I didn’t want it to start affecting the festival in ways I couldn’t see.

“But definitely there’s something to that movie… There are a lot things that are not said.

“I as a parent of a child who has autism, I’m concerned. And I want to know the truth. I’m not anti-vaccine. I want safe vaccines.”

Wakefield’s paper linking the MMR vaccine to autism, published in The Lancet in 1998, was rescinded by the journal in 2010, after it emerged he’d based his research on just 12 subjects, and that the parents of some of those subjects were filing lawsuits against MMR vaccine manufacturers.

He was later struck off the UK medical register.

Image credits: Getty/AP