We are at a point where this had to be published, but Stat has here gathered the actual data into one easy-to-read explainer for why we actually do really, truly know that vaccinations don’t cause kids (or anyone) to become autistic:
In 2004, researchers in Denmark, which keeps meticulous and centralized health records, published a study of all children vaccinated there between 1971 and 2000.
“There was no trend toward an increase in the incidence of autism during that period when thimerosal was used in Denmark,” the researchers wrote. And the increases continued after thimerosal was discontinued.
Other observational studies also showed no relationship: One study of 14,000 babies in the United Kingdom found that vaccines, if anything, were associated with fewer cases of autism; another, of 103,403 British children, found a possible relationship between vaccines and tics, a symptom of some people with autism but no other association with the condition. (This finding has not been replicated by other studies.) Another study gave a battery of neuropsychological tests to children and found the results did not support the idea that thimerosal caused any health conditions.
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The work was discredited in part because other scientists, mostly using money from their respective governments, did study after study — at least 20 of them — demonstrating that the mechanisms Wakefield had proposed didn’t make much sense. But on a bigger scale, again, they showed that children who received MMR were not more likely to develop autism.
Quickly after the paper appeared, researchers in Finland published a study saying that there was no sign of the syndrome Wakefield described in the country’s monitoring of children who had received the MMR vaccine over the course of 14 years. A 1999 study of autistic children in the U.K. found that there was no relationship between vaccines and an autism diagnosis, regardless of whether the children were vaccinated, or how early they were vaccinated. It also found that autism diagnoses didn’t just occur shortly after MMR vaccination. A 2001 study showed no correlation between when children in California got the MMR shot and whether they developed autism. A study in Atlanta produced similar results. A 2010 roundup of studies on the MMR shot lists six major studies from the U.K., two from the U.S., three from Finland, and one from Denmark.
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“I’ve gotten many letters from people fighting autism thanking me for stating how dangerous 38 vaccines on a baby/toddler under 24 months are,” Trump said in a social media post at the time. “It is totally insane — a baby cannot handle such tremendous trauma.”
Researchers have had two responses to this allegation: First, data don’t indicate that vaccines increase the risk that children will contract other infections. Second, vaccines have become much more targeted over time, often involving fewer antigens to stimulate the immune system than earlier versions. Vaccines for pneumococcus, whooping cough, and other diseases now often contain only sugar molecules or proteins from the coat of a virus in order to produce an immune response. By this measure, children get more shots, but they contain fewer antigens.
But again, the way to test this is not through arguments about how the body works, but by looking at children who are vaccinated more and seeing whether they are more likely to develop autism. It’s possible to measure how many antibodies generated by different vaccines children have, and a 2013 study by researchers at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention found there was no relationship between a measure of these vaccine antibodies and risk of an autism diagnosis.
There’s more — and an awful lot of in-line links, including in the above-excerpted text — at the link.