“All of a sudden,” she said, “I had one-star reviews.” Anti-vaccination reviewers tried to sink the book's rating in a coordinated, 48-hour campaign a month before Hanukkah. Reviewers called her story “extremely disturbing and franky [sic] inaccurate” and repeated falsehoods about “vaccines that are not at all safe.”

Years of careful scientific study have thoroughly disproved any link between autism and vaccines, including the one for measles, mumps and rubella. The 1998 report that suggested a connection was retracted, and an investigation concluded that the author, who has been stripped by Britain of his medical license, had committed scientific fraud.

Yet in the alternate reality of Amazon reviews, Koffsky was accused of being a shill for the medical industry. “I am not in the pocket of big pharma,” she said.