OK, we've all become expert chemists and biologists.
What I remember - totally off the cuff - is a series of NPR reports from years ago (possibly before 2000) that may have been the genesis of the anti-vaccination crowd. Something to do not with the vaccines themselves but a bundled delivery method. Separately they weren't a problem but combined they were and no doubt pharmaceutical $$ was at the root of it. It was causing problems with the children that received it. Combined vaccines have been around quite a while, there was something specific about the new process they were using. Since I don't have kids I wasn't too worried about it but for whatever reason remember a little about it. Not hard to see how THAT could morph into something else and I think it might have done just that.
I followed this at the time. The British doctor and medical researcher Andrew Wakefield published a study in 1998 claiming a link between autism and the measles, mumps, and rubella (MMR) combination vaccine. The study was published in the prestigious
Lancet medical journal. This triggered a wave of other publications examining the link and legitimized anti-vaccine sentiment among the medical community for several years afterwards, before journal editors apparently had enough and put an abrupt stop to it all.
Upon investigation, by the Sunday Times newspaper and others, fraudulent manipulation of data on the part of Wakefield was discovered, along with an undeclared conflict of interest by which he stood to make significant financial gains from the publication of his research. He was referred to the General Medical Council, which held an inquiry and then, at a disciplinary hearing, he was struck off the medical register, no longer being allowed to practice medicine. The initial paper in the
Lancet was retracts and
The editor of the
Lancet was then, and is now, Richard Horton, who apparently feels remorseful for effectively giving birth to the modern 'anti-vaxx' movement on both sides of the Atlantic. Although, he has form for rashly short-cutting the peer-review process to publish controversial papers. For example, a study into civilian deaths in Iraq a few years after the Coalition invasion, an open letter dismissing "conspiracy theories" suggesting that SARS-CoV-2 may have escaped a lab, and a fraudulent study claiming that hydroxychloroquine use in Covid treatment was responsible for elevated mortality.
As for Andrew Wakefield, by reports he is now shacked up with the Australian supermodel Elle MacPherson.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lancet_MMR_autism_fraud