The archive / Health and environment
1998–2010 · Britain and worldwide
Childhood vaccine may cause autism!
The MMR vaccine and autism
Panic meter
The verdict
A study linking the MMR vaccine to autism turned out to be fraudulent. The fear brought measles back.
Reality meter
What was said?
In 1998 the doctor Andrew Wakefield and colleagues published a study in The Lancet of twelve children, and at a press conference Wakefield suggested that the combined vaccine against measles, mumps and rubella might be linked to autism. The news spread around the world, and vaccination rates in the United Kingdom fell sharply.
The verdict: what happened next?
The Lancet retracted the paper in 2010, and Wakefield was struck off the medical register the same year. The journalist Brian Deer showed that details about the children had been manipulated. Large studies, including a Danish one of more than 650,000 children in 2019, have found no link between MMR and autism.
The panic had real consequences: measles outbreaks have returned in countries where the disease had all but disappeared.
Comments 0