"Bought" is a movie by Jeff Hays which wants you to believe the dangerous idea that vaccines are ineffective and can cause autism, a notion that has been repeatedly debunked. They also combine this strain of paranoia with one claiming how dangerous "GMOs" are, even though they cite not a single study to support this discredited idea either.
The movie can be purchased for $16.99 or rented for 48 hours for $4.95. After the producers twice ignored my request for a review copy, I regret to say that I spent the $4.95. It is such tedious nonsense that by the time that I finally finished watching it my wife, listening from the next room was ready to climb the walls.
Much of the movie is narrated by Toni Bark, MD, who claims to practice Classic Homeopathy. You may recall that homeopathy uses medicines diluted many hundreds of times, so not a single molecule of the medicine remains behind. This nonsense was recently debunked by the Science Babe who swallowed an entire bottle of "homeopathic sleeping pills," without any ill effect (James Randi does a similar stunt.). Despite the MD in her title, Bark is no longer practicing science based medicine. But wait, there's more!
Toni Bark also runs something called the Center for Disease Prevention and Reversal, and through her web site, peddles something called Essential Living Foods and some others through another site called Skin and Chocolate. One of Bark's partners in the interviews that make up this film is Kelly Brogan, MD who practices something called "holistic women's health psychiatry." Brogan is a board certified psychiatrist, but the specialty she practices has no such certification (or even any meaning.) She also writes for the quack site GreenMedinfo and peddles food supplements from her web site. Neither of these women have any qualifications to discuss vaccines. The central conceit of the first part of this film is that pharmaceutical companies have paid their drug reps (and some physicians) to encourage off-label prescribing. Eventually a whistle-blower reported Glaxo and they paid a $3 billion fine for over-prescribing of Paxil to children and Johnson and Johnson paid a $2.2 billion fined for pushing Risperdal.
A suit is pending against Merck for misrepresenting the effectiveness of the mumps component of their MMR vaccine. These are the only significant facts in the entire movie, and while they represent corporate misbehavior at its worse, they in no way indicate that vaccines are harmful to children or anyone else. Bark launches the first sally, suggesting that pertussis vaccine can cause brain injury, but shows no research evidence. In fact, there is a 1989 paper in Vaccine by Griffin and a 1990 paper in JAMA by Cherry which both conclude there is no evidence of brain damage from pertussis vaccine. Such irresponsible claims as Bark makes do not deserve to be presented in a movie. In much of the rest of the film, the "experts" they interview seem to be mostly chiropractors. Now chiropractors may help you with your muscle pains and the like, but they are not trained in science-based medicine or medical research, and have no particular qualifications to pontificate about vaccines. Then we hear from Gayle DeLong, PhD. At least, someone with a real research degree! Oops, no, not a scientist, but she has a PhD in economics, but nonetheless claims to have found an association between vaccines and autism, thoroughly debunked here.
Moving right along, we next hear from Stephanie Seneff, who is an electrical engineer who uses a computer program for text mining to draw bizarre inferences, but never presents any experimental data to support them. Here she asserts without evidence that aluminum is very toxic and when used as a vaccine adjuvant "goes right to your brain." Did she actually look anything up?
Aluminum salts have been used in vaccines for over 70 years, and Paul Offit's 2003 paper in Pediatrics completely demolishes that nonsense. At this point the film takes a turn from crazy to stupid and uses some of the usual suspects to attack GMOs, failing to note that every major scientific organization worldwide has found that they pose no more harm than conventional crops, and that a review commissioned by an organic food group in Italy by Allesandro Nicolia found 1783 papers in the past 10 years, which showed no harm caused by GMOs.
