The film was directed by discredited anti-vaccine activist Andrew Wakefield, who was struck off the medical register in the United Kingdom in 2010 due to ethical violations related to his fraudulent research into the role of vaccines in autism.

In 1998 Wakefield and 12 other authors published a fraudulent study in The Lancet in which he falsely claimed that the MMR vaccine caused autism.

In 2010 the study was retracted, and Wakefield was struck off the medical register in the United Kingdom due to "ethical violations and a failure to disclose financial conflicts of interest" and for his invention of evidence linking the MMR vaccine to autism.

[27] According to Variety, the film "purports to investigate the claims of a senior scientist at the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention who revealed that the CDC had allegedly manipulated and destroyed data on an important study about autism and the MMR vaccine.

[24][30] Hooker's 2014 paper on the narrative was subsequently retracted due to "serious concerns about the validity of its conclusions"[31][32] and in 2015 the CDC had confirmed that any such initial correlation had ceased to exist once they performed a more in-depth analysis of the children in the study.

"[1] A review by Ed Cara from the health and science news-site Medical Daily states that "[Vaxxed] doesn't care about convincing its audience with evidence.

Instead, Wakefield, Hooker, and producer Del Bigtree run the viewer through a well-trod gauntlet of emotional pleas, context-free statistics ... and shadowy conspiracies.

"[33] Eric Kohn from an independent film news-site Indiewire says: "Wakefield's by-the-numbers approach to didactic storytelling relies on tons of random factoids positioned out of context to drive home his agenda.

describes the film as a "slickly produced but scientifically dubious hodgepodge of free-floating paranoia" and warns of its "anti-Big Pharma conspiracy mongering.

"[34] Sarah Gill of The Age called the film "another desperate attempt to hoodwink the public for no greater purpose than making money.

and that the "trailer features distressing footage of parents making anecdotal and unfounded claims that vaccines caused their children to have developmental problems, including autism.