Anecdotes

When the film was announced for the 2016 Tribeca Film Festival, documentarian Penny Lane wrote a virally-circulated letter condemning its inclusion in the lineup. Although festival head Robert De Niro defended the film's inclusion in a statement on March 25, 2016 (as he and Grace Hightower have an autistic son), the film was pulled from the line-up the next day on Tribeca's Facebook page. However, the distributor, Cinema Libre Studio, managed to book the film into the Angelika Film Center, NYC, where VAXXED was not only shown for two weeks, from April 1 to April 15, instead of the previously planned single showing on the closing night of the Tribeca Film Festival, April 23, but where the eight o'clock showing was followed by a panel discussion with Andrew Wakefield, Brian Hooker, Del Bigtree, and Polly Tommey, an autism parent and founder of the magazine 'The Autism File'.