The measles outbreak has spread across the states, and yet anti-vaxxers seem to be crying out even stronger that vaccinations will cause disorders such as autism. The anti-vaccination movement generally stems from two primary sources. The first and most obvious is social media and the flow of biased or outright falsified information that is widely spread and rarely fact-checked. The second is a 1998 study published in “The Lancet,” a weekly general medical journal, that claimed a link between vaccinations and developmental disorders. According to the U.S. National Library of Medicine, Andrew Wakefield and 12 of his colleagues wrote an article which suggested that the measles, mumps and rubella (MMR) vaccine may have a causal link to developmental disorders in children such as autism. However, after review, “The Lancet” retracted the article, finding evidence of falsification of data, ethical violations and scientific misrepresentation all resulting from financial interests where Wakefield had been funded by lawyers who were advocating for parents in lawsuits against vaccine-producing companies. In short, Wakefield et al. had made up data and come to a false conclusion that vaccines cause developmental disorders because they were being supported monetarily by those who wanted the vaccine companies to lose.
This study and its falsification is well-known and yet it is still used to support the anti-vaccination movement. Recently, according to the New York Times, yet another study by Danish researchers who looked at more than 650,000 children over 10 years concluded that there was no association between vaccinations and autism. However, to anti-vaxxers, this doesn’t matter. It does not matter how many scientific studies have been done to discredit Wakefield’s, it does not matter how many of their children die from preventable diseases, because many of them believe that no data can be trusted. These people do not believe in herd immunity, a mass of resistance which does not allow diseases to spread. Their evidence is based on alleged short and long term side effects of vaccinations which are often trivial when compared to the severity of these preventable illnesses.
Other anti-vaxxers claim that harmful substances such as mercury are found in common vaccines like the flu vaccine. Thiomersal, a mercury compound, is used as a preservative in some vaccines. Anti-vaccination activists promote the false claim that the thiomersal used in vaccines is the cause of autism in many children even though there is no scientific evidence to support this claim. Major scientific and medical groups such as the Institute of Medicine and World Health Organization as well as governmental agencies such as the Food and Drug Administration and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention who have studied this claim report an overwhelming consensus that vaccines, and thiomersal in some vaccines, does not cause autism. This consensus is supported by several lines of evidence such as the fact that mercury poisoning symptoms are very different from the symptoms of autism. The rates of autism have continued to increase despite the removal of thiomersal from most vaccines.
In the end, anti-vaxxers claim that vaccinations can cause autism or other developmental disorders, which has been proven false again and again. This stems from misrepresentation of data online, the spread of false ideas, and data from a falsified study. In any case, even if vaccines did cause autism, the reality is that autism is not worse than the death of your child or anyone else’s child.
