False: Vaccinations cause autism
A British doctor Andrew Wakefield had published a study in 1998 claiming that the rubella (MMR), mumps and measles vaccine could trigger autism. In the proceeding years, MMR vaccinations rates have dropped below 80% among 2-year-olds in England.
Journalist Brian Deer reported undisclosed conflicts of interests in 2004 and that’s when the claim began to unravel. Wakefield had applied for a patent on his own measles vaccine and had been given money from a lawyer trying to sue companies making the MMR vaccine. Further concerns about misrepresentation and ethics were cited – The Lancet retracted the paper in 2010. Not long after that, the United Kingdom’s General Medical Council permanently pulled Wakefield’s medical license.
However, the MMR-autism falsehood made headlines again when Wakefield directed and released Vaxxed in 2016. The movie is based on an investigation into the CDC’s destruction of a study linking autism to MMR vaccine. Bioengineer, Brian Hooker, took issue with a 2004 CDC study that found no overall difference in vaccination rates between kids without and with autism. The data was reanalyzed in 2014 by Hooker and claimed CDC had hidden evidence that the vaccination could increase the risk of autism in black boys. In fact, CDC noted in the paper that in the oldest age groups the rates of vaccination were a little higher in kids with autism.
These claims encouraged a veer of studies finding no evidence that MMR causes autism. For instance, a 2014 meta-analysis in Vaccine examined studies that included a total of nearly 1.3 million people. In the same year, a paper in the Journal of the American Medical Association reported that no difference existed in autism rates between thousands of unvaccinated children and vaccinated.
False: Spreading out vaccines can be safer for children
Some vaccine skeptics claim that the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s (CDC’s) current vaccination schedule, which protects children from 14 diseases before the age of 2, requires too many vaccines in a very short period of time—overloading children’s immune systems early in life. The skeptics contend that the overload leaves children prone to a host of disorders including diabetes and neurodevelopmental delays. Experts totally dismiss those claims. According to CDC, a child’s immune system must deal with with thousands of foreign antigens each day, whereas the 2014 recommended vaccine schedule exposes a child to only about 300 antigens by the age of 2. Paul Offit, a vaccine expert of the Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia in Pennsylvania, suggests 11 vaccines given to an infant at one time would momentarily “use up” only 0.1% of the child’s immune system. And even though the number of recommended vaccines has increased over the years, advances in vaccine development mean that the number of antigens contained in those vaccines has dropped—yet rates of diabetes and autism have not.
In a 2015 survey including 534 pediatricians and family doctors that was published in the journal Pediatrics, only around 1% agreed that vaccines should be spread out. But almost all of them had occasionally given in to parent requests to do so, and some doctors have published “alternative” vaccination schedules. On the other hand, alternative schedules pose many problems, Offit mentions. The most obvious problem of extending the schedule leaves children defenseless to dangerous diseases for longer. It’s also more likely that kids will not get all their shots if vaccinations are spaced out. A proposed alternative schedule would require 19 doctor visits over 6 years—12 of those by age 2.
False: Mercury in vaccines acts as a neurotoxin
In 2005 the magazines Rolling Stone and Salon copublished a story by environmental lawyer Robert F. Kennedy Jr., promoting anti-vaccine propaganda. Claiming a mercury-containing preservative once used in vaccines, can cause brain problems, including autism. Several corrections appeared shortly after, including the incorrect statement regarding mercury levels. Multiple corrections soon appeared, including one noting that Kennedy had incorrectly stated the mercury levels. Salon retracted and removed the story in 2011 due to the continued revelations of the flaws and fraud tainting the science behind the connection.
Kennedy continued to promote the idea, and vaccine skeptics have called for a new “vaccine safety” commission with Kennedy at its head. Yet according to the World Health Organization and CDC in Atlanta, there is no evidence to support that thimerosal from vaccines causes health problems in children.
Thimerosal was removed from all childhood vaccines in the United States except multidose vials of flu vaccine, In 2001, well before Kennedy’s article or his related book. Frank DeStefano, director of CDC’s Immunization Safety Office, mentioned that the number of cases of autism hasn’t leveled off or gone down even after thimerosal was taken out of vaccines. A rumor that autism incidence dropped in Denmark after it removed thimerosal in 1992 was also not true. Apparently, the rumor arose from a misinterpretation of epidemiological data.
