Pediatrician Dr. Paul Thomas Agrees with Robert De Niro: “Let’s Find Out The Truth” About Vaccines

“As a parent with a child who has autism, I’m concerned,” Robert De Niro said on the Today Show on April 13. “I want to know the truth. I’m not anti-vaccine. I want safe vaccines.” De Niro got visibly upset as he spoke. Upset about the way the mainstream has shut down the conversation about vaccines and autism. Upset that he had to make the quick decision—which he seemed to say he now regrets—to pull the documentary Vaxxed from this year’s Tribeca Film Festival. And upset about his now 18-year-old son who has autism. “The vaccines are dangerous to certain people who are more susceptible, and nobody seems to want to address that. Or they say they’ve addressed it and it’s a closed issue,” De Niro said. “There’s more to this than meets the eye, believe me. There is something there that people aren’t addressing.” As a Dartmouth-trained pediatrician with over 11,000 children in my practice in Portland, Oregon, and a Cornell-educated science writer and Fulbright scholar who has been researching children’s health for over ten years, we agree with Robert De Niro: the question of whether vaccines are a contributing factor to the autism epidemic is anything but closed.