Robert De Niro, a co-founder of the Tribeca Film Festival, is defending the festival's decision to screen a controversial anti-vaccination documentary that, according to the film festival's website, digs into "the long-debated link between autism and vaccines."
In a post to the Tribeca Film Festival's Facebook page, De Niro says he wants to provide "the opportunity for a conversation around the issue."
"Grace and I have a child with autism and we believe it is critical that all of the issues surrounding the causes of autism be openly discussed and examined," De Niro's statement reads, in part.
According to the documentary's Facebook page, "Vaxxed" aims to be an "investigation into fraud on the MMR autism study at the Centers for Disease Control as revealed by Senior Scientist & Whistleblower Dr. William Thompson."
The documentary's website says Thompson "led the agency’s 2004 study on the Measles-Mumps-Rubella (MMR) vaccine and its link to autism" and that he "confessed that the CDC had omitted crucial data in their final report that revealed a causal relationship between the MMR vaccine and autism."
The documentary is directed by Andrew Wakefield, who, according to the documentary's website, is "falsely accused of starting the anti-vax movement when he first reported in 1998 that the MMR vaccine may cause autism."
Wakefield's 1998 study, published in the medical journal The Lancet, was later discredited, with The Lancet issuing a retraction in 2010. Wakefield was erased from the medical register in the United Kingdom that same year.
The Centers for Disease Control says on its website that "there is no link between vaccines and autism."
Filmmaker Penny Lane issued strong criticism for the film festival's decision in an open letter posted to Facebook on Wednesday.
"There is a big difference between advocacy and fraud, between point of view and deception. For you to claim there is no difference, and for you to screen this film, perpetuates Wakefield’s fraud," Lane's letter reads, in part.