VAXXED pulled in over $1.3M in donations, and most of it went to Wakefield and Tommey’s company

A few years ago Andrew Wakefield (one of Time Magazine’s Great Science Frauds) headed a team promoting a faux documentary called “Vaxxed”. I wrote about this film a great deal at the time, but suffice it to say it exemplified much of what is wrong with the way the anti-vaccine community uses and abuses the autism community.

If memory serves, VAXXED concluded with a long list of sponsors. So they apparently had a fair amount of money to work with to produce the film. The film was a product of the Autism Media Channel, which is a limited liability corporation (LLC) owned by Polly Tommey and Andrew Wakefield, based on tax records. At the same time, Vaxxed was associated with a charity: AMC Foundation. Said foundation is run by Andrew Wakefield with Polly Tommey and Brian Burrowes also listed as directors (at least on past tax forms).

Vaxxed came out in 2016, and nonprofit tax forms for 2016 are now public. Here are the tax forms for 2015 and 2016:

Here is the 2015 tax form.

And here is the 2016 (more interesting) tax form.

There are some very interesting details, but let’s focus on a few. Starting with in 2016 AMC Foundation took in $1,325,098 in contributions and grants. $1.3M. (click to enlarge)

$1.3M. Where did it go? Well, about $207K went to “other expenses”. Of that $50K was travel (they had a bus touring around promoting the movie, but they also had a gofundme campaign to pay for the bus if I recall correctly). Another ~$80k into “other” which doesn’t seem to be itemized. Click to enlarge.

And, then there’s the $1M that was given to the business arm of the Autism Media Channel. Click to enlarge.

As noted above, the Autism Media Channel LLC is owned by Andrew Wakefield and Polly Tommey. So that $1M is roughly $500,000.00 each. Of course, the business has to pay other expenses. For example, one assumes that Del Bigtree was not riding along the tour for free. Also, we don’t know how much of the original expenses for producing VAXXED may have needed to be paid off. Of course, had Ms. Tommey and Mr. Wakefield chosen to pay themselves through the charity arm of VAXXED, we would know the amount. That’s called transparency. Given how large this sum is, transparency would seem to this observer to be a necessity. Also, given how much the VAXXED team complains about lack of transparency, this action strikes me as completely hypocritical. click to enlarge.

Perhaps keener eyes than mine can find where any of the money went to, say, help any of the families who Wakefield and Tommey were so eager to include in videos. Or to perform research on autism and/or vaccines. Or anything that, well, would seem charitable. I guess some would think supporting the next film–by the profit generating business–is a charitable act. By shifting the money to their LLC business, we can’t see how much was paid directly to Mr. Wakefield and Ms. Tommey. Which, in itself, is a practice that bothers me. A prime reason to donate to a charity (rather than, say, offer support for a film directly) is to gain transparency. Note that in 2015, the charity did list salary for Ms. Tommey as well as expense for “FILM PRODUCER. PROGRAM EXPENSES”, which one might reasonably consider as a payment to Del Bigrtree (the producer of Vaxxed). So they apparently chose to stop listing salary/payments in 2016.

Recall that in the past Mr. Wakefield was paid $270K/year at Thoughtful House and, after that job ended, tax records for his charities set his salary at the same annual rate.

I profess to be no expert on taxes or the structure of charitable institutions. In my opinion this transfer of funds is at the very least a questionable practice. Money was collected through a charity–giving donors a tax advantages–and mostly diverted to a business run by the same people as heading the charity. Aside from the fact that I would never willingly let Andrew Wakefield or Polly Tommey get a dime of my money, I personally would not be pleased if money I was donating was handled in this way. But Mr. Wakefield’s supporters have been looking the other way and accepting his excuses for over 20 years. I doubt this will bother many of them at all. If any.

—
By Matt Carey