Organisers have blamed a "campaign of highly co-ordinated abuse and intimidation" for their decision to dump "Vaxxed: from cover up to catastrophe" from the Castlemaine Local and International Film Festival.

CLIFF felt "personally and professionally threatened," an organiser stated in a Facebook post on Thursday night.

"It is a sad reflection on the state of Australian democracy that legitimate questions cannot be raised in a public forum without inciting a campaign of ill-informed and dishonest intimidation," the post read.

The move comes after Fairfax Media first reported the fledgling film festival in country Victoria was planning to host Vaxxed's Australian premiere, after it had been cut from the prestigious Tribeca film festival by co-founder Robert De Niro.

Although it was being heavily promoted by anti-vaccination networks, CLIFF creative director David Thrussell had denied the film was "anti-vaccination", and said it was unanimously selected by the festival's committee after "vigorous debate" on its merits.

"There's a clear public interest in the film, it was the number-one best selling documentary on Amazon last week," he said. "We won't be intimidated, we've shown controversial films before, we try to touch on a whole lot of areas of public interest".

Among the many criticisms of Vaxxed is the director and co-writer of the film, disgraced former doctor Andrew Wakefield, was the man responsible for the false 1998 study that first suggested a link between autism and MMR (measles, mumps and rubella) vaccinations.

Wakefield's study was retracted in 2010 by the British journal  that published it, The Lancet, after a UK General Medical Council investigation found it had been proven false and that he had acted  "dishonestly and irresponsibly".

Hours before pulling the film, the festival organisers had posted a note to Facebook purporting to be from Wakefield on their Facebook page, which had commended them for supporting his movie and urged them to "stand firm".

On Thursday, Victorian Health Minister Jill Hennessy lashed CLIFF for jeopardising the health of children and appealed to the community to ignore the film.

"It's irresponsible to promote messages that have a harmful impact, not just on kids in Castlemaine but on all kids," Ms Hennessy said.

Castlemaine has vaccination rates that are consistently about 10 per cent below the state average but are worst for two year olds, of whom only about 80 per cent are vaccinated.

"We've got to keep challenging the anti-science myth pedalling that goes on around vaccination - and a film that goes out there to say 'vaccinations aren't safe' is really, really unhelpful, particularly in communities where the vaccination rates are in many circumstances lower than what the state average is," Ms Hennessy said.