The Selzes’ sons — both young adults — declined to comment. Friends and family members reached by The Washington Post said they were unable to shed light on the Selzes’ philanthropic choices.
“This is a topic we don’t discuss,” said Marilyn Skony Stamm, a business executive and close friend of Lisa Selz. “We have differing opinions.” Stamm declined to elaborate, except to say that she values her friendship with the Selzes, whom she called “an incredibly philanthropic family.”
Support for a key figure
Tax filings for the couple’s charitable foundation show they began supporting the movement in 2012, when they gave $200,000 to a legal fund for Andrew Wakefield, one of the most important figures in the anti-vaccine movement.
Wakefield, a former gastroenterologist, rose to fame in 1998 after publishing a paper in the Lancet, a respected British medical journal, that linked the MMR vaccine to autism in eight children. An investigation by Britain’s General Medical Council, which regulates doctors, found Wakefield guilty of professional misconduct in 2010 and revoked his license. The panel concluded that Wakefield had financial and ethical conflicts of interest, and had acted “dishonestly and irresponsibly.” Twelve years after the study’s publication, the Lancet retracted it.
Wakefield declined to comment for this report. He has repeatedly denied wrongdoing and said he was motivated by children’s suffering.
“You have probably heard in the newspapers and elsewhere that I am guilty of scientific fraud,” Wakefield said via Skype to a forum this spring in Rockland, N.Y. “And I want to reassure you that I have never been involved in scientific fraud. What happened to me is what happens to doctors who threaten the bottom line of the pharmaceutical companies.”
By 2012, Wakefield had moved to Austin, where supporters began raising money for the Dr. Wakefield Justice Fund, an effort to sue the journalists who had questioned Wakefield’s findings. The fund was “established by friends and supporters . . . to respond to false claims made against Dr. Wakefield; expose the corrupting influence of special interest groups behind these allegations and protect Dr. Wakefield’s work from both profit- and politically-motivated censorship and retribution,” an archived version of the fund’s website says.
Wakefield’s lawsuit was unsuccessful, but the Selz Foundation found other ways to support his work. After he launched two nonprofits in 2014, the Selz Foundation donated $1.6 million to the groups over the next several years, according to tax records. One, the AMC Foundation, was registered as a public charity to fund documentaries about public health issues. The other was a Texas nonprofit corporation.
Wakefield used the money to help fund a documentary film called “Vaxxed,” which details his allegations about a government coverup of vaccine dangers. After filming, he and other producers traveled the country in a black “Vaxxed” bus that stopped at churches, libraries and chiropractors’ offices to record interviews with parents who believe their children had been injured by vaccines.
“Virtually every dollar in this film to date has been donated by a handful of brave parents and philanthropists,” the “Vaxxed” website says. In the credits, the film lists the Selz Foundation first among 16 donors who financed the production.
The film also introduced a new face to the anti-vax movement: Bigtree. Once a television producer of “The Doctors,” a daytime talk show filmed in Hollywood, Bigtree signed on to co-produce the film, which was released in 2016.
Tara Smith, an infectious disease expert at Kent State University who has researched the anti-vaccine movement, called the film “an effective piece of propaganda” that uses “heart-wrenching stories of children supposedly harmed by vaccination.”
For example, one mother featured in the film said her son developed autism after he was inadvertently given a double dose of the MMR vaccine. Filmmakers provided no medical documentation to support the claim, and the mother has said publicly that her son’s medical records were stolen from her apartment.
The stories in the film “frequently fall apart when scrutinized,” Smith said.
Bigtree said the film’s critics are “spreading misinformation” unless they “have proof that the exact stories of vaccine injury by the parents that appear in ‘Vaxxed’ are false.”
Since the publication of Wakefield’s Lancet paper, 21 studies have investigated vaccines and autism. None has found evidence of a link. The latest and largest study published this spring involved 657,461 Danish children born between 1999 and 2010. Experts note the first symptoms of autism often appear when children are about 12 months old — the same age they receive their first MMR shot — leading many parents to blame vaccines.
Last year, Wakefield dissolved the two nonprofits, according to Texas business filings and Wakefield’s co-founder, Polly Tommey. During its brief life, the AMC Foundation doled out grants exclusively to Autism Media Channel LLC, a private company that was also run by Wakefield, Tommey and a third partner, according to tax filings.
According to the filings, the grants supported an educational film project.
Attorney Marc Owens, a former head of the IRS division responsible for monitoring tax-exempt organizations, said the arrangement is “a very suspicious transaction.”
“They transferred all of their income, it appears — with the exception of a small amount — to, basically, themselves,” Owens said. “It is extremely unusual to see this sort of expenditure from a public charity.”
In an interview, Tommey defended the transactions.
“Everything was cleared legally, and we stuck to our mission,” she said.
Tommey said she is now focused on the upcoming release of a sequel to “Vaxxed” that will include information about Gardasil, a vaccine that protects against several strains of the human papillomavirus. Wakefield, meanwhile, has launched another public charity to fund educational film projects, according to tax filings.
The same year “Vaxxed” was released, Bigtree established the Informed Consent Action Network. The Selz Foundation donated $100,000 that first year — 83 percent of the charity’s funding, according to tax records.
A woman attends the anti-vaccine forum in Brooklyn, where several hundred measles cases have been confirmed this year. (Yana Paskova/For The Washington Post)
Attendees at the Brooklyn forum attempted to block the windows with paper and plastic to prevent passersby and the media from peering inside. (Yana Paskova/For The Washington Post)
As Bigtree became a leader within the movement, donations from the Selzes grew: In 2017, the foundation boosted its contribution to more than $1 million — 74 percent of ICAN’s total revenue.
Tax filings show the charity spent more than $600,000 that year on legal fees. In 2018, the organization filed Freedom of Information Act lawsuits against federal agencies, including the Food and Drug Administration, the National Institutes of Health and the Department of Health and Human Services. The suits sought to compel the release of data and documents related to vaccine safety.
Another quarter of a million dollars went toward salaries for two ICAN officers: Catharine Layton, the group’s chief administrative officer, was paid $98,000. And Bigtree, who was previously unpaid by the charity, drew a salary of $146,000.
In a written response to questions from The Post, Bigtree said the compensation from ICAN is currently his only salary. He declined to answer questions about his relationship with the Selzes.
“Like many charities, we receive funding from multiple sources and we do not discuss our donors or their donations as a matter of policy,” he wrote. “None of our donors make decisions on the science we research, or the lawsuits that we file.”
ICAN also reported travel expenses exceeding $148,000 in 2017. Bigtree frequently travels the country, speaking at wellness conferences and testifying before lawmakers considering vaccine-related legislation.
At the height of a measles outbreak in Washington state in February, for example, Bigtree testified in Olympia against a measure intended to make it harder for parents to opt out of measles vaccinations for school-age children. The bill passed and was signed into law in April.
In late April, Bigtree spoke in Salem, Ore., at a rally against a bill aimed at getting more children vaccinated against measles and other preventable diseases. A day later, he led a similar protest in Sacramento.
In a recent interview, Bigtree said he had discovered “this ability to be able to talk to legislators that I didn’t know I had.”
Bigtree also produces a weekly online talk show broadcast through Facebook and other social media that has brought in new supporters. Among them are New York City real estate executive Stephen Benjamin and his wife, Elizabeth.