By oracknows on January 4, 2016. One of the stories dominating my blogging in 2015 was a manufactroversy that started in August 2014 when, after several months of rumbling in the antivaccine crankosphere that there was a CDC scientist ready to blow the whistle on an alleged coverup of evidence that vaccines cause autism, Andrew Wakefield, ever the publicity hog, released a video entitled CDC Whistleblower Revealed, in which he claimed that he had evidence of a "high level deception" of the American people about vaccine safety and revealed the "CDC Whistleblower" to be one William W. Thompson, PhD, a psychologist by training who worked for the CDC studying vaccine safety in epidemiological studies and who had had many telephone conversations with a biochemical engineer turned incompetent epidemiologist named Brian Hooker. Unbeknownst to Thompson, Hooker had been recording their conversations, and carefully cherry picked excerpts were included in the video, interspersed with Andrew Wakefield making hyperbolically offensive claims that this "coverup" was as bad as the Tuskegee syphilis experiment, with the CDC being worse than Hitler, Stalin, and Pol Pot. (I kid you not.) We now know that Thompson had been assisting Hooker in a "reanalysis" of a pivotal study of vaccine safety by DeStefano et al for which he had been co-author looking at whether the MMR vaccine was associated with autism in children in the Atlanta area. (Spoilers: It wasn't.) The reanalysis claimed to have found an increased risk of autism for a small subset: African American males who had been vaccinated before age 3. Of course, the study, even with Hooker's incompetent reanalysis, had failed to find a correlation in any other subgroup, leading me to refer to it as having proven Andrew Wakefield wrong.