In the British Medical Journal, Deer spells out exactly what he found, and it's rather shocking that this study was ever published in the first place. (See the pop-up chart in this report for details.) He concluded, "No case was free of misreporting or alteration." In other words, Wakefield, the lead author of the original report, manipulated his data. 3) Study author Andrew Wakefield manipulated and misrepresented his dataĪ British investigative journalist, Brian Deer, followed up with the families of each of the 12 kids in the study. Again, the totality of the evidence opposes this vaccine-autism theory. (Wakefield also proposed a link between the vaccine and a new inflammatory bowel syndrome, which has since been called "autistic enterocolitis" and also discredited.)īut don't stop with the retracted study. Finding in this case that among a group of a dozen children, most of them happen to have both is not at all surprising and in no way proves that the MMR vaccine causes autism. Many children have autism and nearly all take the MMR vaccine. "Case reports" are detailed stories about particular patients' medical histories, and - because they are basically just stories - they are considered among weakest kinds of medical studies. Wakefield's association between the MMR vaccine and autism was based on a case report involving only 12 children. 2) The MMR vaccine-autism study was just bad science Studies published in The Lancet, The Journal of Pediatric Infectious Diseases, PLOS One, and The Journal of Autism and Developmental Disorders, among others, have also found no association between the vaccine and autism. "This study provides strong evidence against the hypothesis that MMR vaccination causes autism," the authors wrote in the New England Journal of Medicine. In another of the most thorough studies to date, nearly half a million kids who got the vaccine were compared with some 100,000 who didn't, and there were no differences in the autism rates between the two groups. "These findings indicate no harmful association between MMR vaccine receipt and ASD even among children already at higher risk for ASD," the researchers concluded. They found the MMR vaccine was not associated with an increased risk of autism, even with children who had older siblings with the disorder. Most recently, the journal Jama looked at nearly 100,000 children who got the shot and their family histories of autism. Large-scale studies involving thousands of participants in several countries have failed to establish a link between the MMR vaccine and the mental developmental disorder. 1) The best available evidence overwhelmingly contradicts the notion that vaccines cause autism Here are six reasons - and many links to further reading - that should remind you why the vaccine-autism claim is bogus. This study, led by the discredited physician-researcher Andrew Wakefield, has since been thoroughly eviscerated: The Lancet retracted the paper, investigators have described the research as an "elaborate fraud," and Wakefield has lost his medical license.īut public health experts say the false data and erroneous conclusions, while resoundingly rejected in the academic world, still drive some parents' current worries about the MMR shot, and famous folks like Trump continue to push the idea. The claim that vaccine cause autism rose to popularity in 1998, when an esteemed medical journal published a paper with the now infamous conclusion: that the measles, mumps, and rubella vaccine - administered to millions of children across the globe each year - could cause autism. " You take this little beautiful baby," he said, "and you pump - I mean, it looks just like it is meant for a horse, not for a child, and we had so many instances, people that work for me, just the other day, 2 years old, beautiful child went to have the vaccine and came back and a week later got a tremendous fever, got very, very sick, now is autistic." Trump, meanwhile, persisted with his own version of the science. Ĭarson, a pediatric neurosurgeon, pointed out (correctly) that researchers have throughly discredited the notion. Republican presidential hopefuls Donald Trump and Ben Carson dived into the question of whether vaccines cause autism in the Republican debate Republican debate Wednesday night.
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