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Lmao, yes they did. The anti-vaxx movement has been around in some form for a very long time, but it really got supercharged after Andrew Wakefield published his (now retracted) study in The Lancet in 1998 claiming the MMR vaccine was linked to Crohn’s Disease and that it may cause autism in children. Needless to say, that’s all bunk. I’ve read the study, and his claims boil down to “I asked the parents if they thought their kid’s autism symptoms started after they got the MMR vaccine and they said yes!” It was later revealed that Wakefield had a stake in a company planning to sell separate shot vaccines and he was trying to discredit the combined MMR vaccine to boost sales of his vaccine. Unsurprisingly, Wakefield lost his medical license as a result of all of this. This was all unearthed by journalism legend Brain Deer, who did a documentary on the subject called “MMR: What they didn’t tell you”. He also wrote a book about it called “The Doctor who Fooled the World”. I told a very abridged version of this story and I highly recommend checking out Deer’s work. He’s an excellent journalist and blew the lid off of all of this.