Background of a paper titled "Quantifying the effect of Wakefield et al. (1998) on skepticism about MMR vaccine safety in the U.S.":
"Efforts to trace the rise of childhood vaccine safety concerns in the US often suggest Andrew Wakefield and colleagues’ retracted 1998 Lancet study (AW98)–which alleged that the MMR vaccine can cause children to develop autism–as a primary cause of US vaccine skepticism. However, a lack of public opinion data on MMR safety collected before/after AW98’s publication obscures whether anecdotal accounts are indicative of a potentially causal effect."