Vaccine Safety

To be clear -- Vaccines do NOT cause autism

At 10 am ET, RFK Jr’s confirmation hearing will begin. I will be in class teaching, which is a blessing. I do not think my heart could handle it.¹

RJK Jr and the leadership role he will likely play in the Trump Administration keep me awake at night. NO JOKE. Since November, I have been sharing my concerns and fears related to RFK Jr becoming our next Secretary of Health and Human Services, a position that will oversee NIH, CDC, FDA, the Center for Medicare & Medicaid Services (CMS), and the Health Resources & Services Administration (HRSA), among others. An article in Forbes summarizes why I am so concerned about RFK Jr becoming a federal health leader —

“He has repeatedly made false claims that vaccines cause autism and chaired the Children's Health Defense, an organization that says it wants to end childhood health crises but is a source of vaccine misinformation. He compared vaccine mandates to the Holocaust in 2022, which he apologized for, and was previously banned by YouTube and Instagram for spreading misinformation about the COVID-19 vaccine.”

On the heels of the confirmation hearing — an unvaccinated individual in Georgia was just diagnosed with measles; health authorities are working to trace and quarantine close contacts. This comes a week after new cases of measles were diagnosed in Rhode Island, Washington, and Alaska. Additionally, three fatal cases of pertussis were just reported in the US.

Why are vaccines important? They prevent disease and save lives.

Image source

Yesterday, RFK Jr’s cousin, Caroline Kennedy, spoke candidly about his lack of experience and ill-informed opinions about vaccines —

"He lacks any relevant government, financial, management, or medical experience," His views on vaccines are dangerous and willfully misinformed."

According to NPR —

“The American Public Health Association, representing 25,000 professionals in that field, has come out against his nomination, based on his ‘consistent disregard for scientific evidence.’ And recently thousands of physicians and others in health care have signed onto letters echoing these concerns.”

As we head into the confirmation hearing, I want to make something VERY clear —

There is absolutely no evidence to support the statement that vaccines cause autism.

If you don’t remember how the myth connecting vaccines and autism started, you can read the summary I wrote previously. The study where the first claims were made was discredited; it was retracted and the lead author lost his medical license. Despite these consequences — the publication of the article and the media frenzy surrounding it led to worldwide skepticism about the safety of vaccines, specifically the MMR. Today, approximately one-third of Americans believe that childhood vaccines can cause children to develop autism.

There is substantial and significant evidence from around the world showing that the MMR vaccine (and other vaccines) does NOT cause autism. A study of over 800 children (published in The Lancet) found no evidence of a causal association between the MMR vaccine and autism. The research specifically assessed the temporal relationship between vaccinations and autism diagnosis, meaning they looked at diagnoses after vaccinations. They found no increase in the number of cases of autism in the group of children who received their vaccinations and those who did not.

If you feel a study of 800 children is not big enough — then this study (published in the New England Journal of Medicine) should address those issues. Researchers here studied 527,303 children and found NO ASSOCIATION between vaccination status and autism.

And in 2014, a meta-analysis — which combined the data from 10 previous studies and included ~1.3 million children in the analysis — also found that vaccines are NOT associated with autism. The authors of this study concluded —

“Vaccinations are not associated with the development of autism or autism spectrum disorder. Furthermore, the components of the vaccines (thimerosal or mercury) or multiple vaccines (MMR) are not associated with the development of autism or autism spectrum disorder.”

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While there is no evidence to support a causal link between vaccines and autism, it is worth noting that autism is on the rise. According to the CDC,² autism diagnoses have increased 4-fold over the past two decades (currently, 1 in 36 children has been diagnosed with an autism spectrum disorder).

WHY?

The increase in autism spectrum disorder diagnoses is likely tied to a myriad of things, including —

1. A change in the definition of autism (to include a spectrum of disorders)

2. Better awareness, screening, and diagnosis

3. Parents having children later in life (older parents are more likely to have children with an autism spectrum disorder)

4. Premature babies surviving — prematurity (babies born before 37 weeks of pregnancy) is a risk factor for autism spectrum disorder; modern medicine keeps premature babies alive (when 100 years ago they may not have survived birth or their first week of life), but they are at increased risk of autism.

5. Family history

6. Prenatal exposure to drugs, heavy metals, or herbicides.

Like many chronic conditions, there is NOT one single cause of autism.

What we do know is —

There is no evidence to support the link between vaccines and autism.

We also know that most autism diagnoses occur between 18-24 months of age. This is the same time that children are receiving many of their childhood vaccinations.

Just because autism is diagnosed at the same time vaccines are given
does NOT mean that one causes the other.

They may occur simultaneously, but there is no biological mechanism by which a vaccine would cause autism. Nor is there evidence that vaccinated kids are more likely to be diagnosed with autism.

The bigger problem, summed up by Dr. Paul Offit, is —

“…not only that we’ve largely eliminated these [vaccine-preventable] diseases, we’ve eliminated the memory of these [vaccine-preventable] diseases, and for that reason, parents are now more scared of the safety of vaccines, real or imagined, than the diseases they present.”

Previously, I wrote about my grandmother (who died in 2016 at the age of 99) —

“I often wonder how she would have experienced COVID. As a child born before the 1918 pandemic, she would have known firsthand the devastation, fear, and struggle associated with influenza. I remember her stories about polio. And the fear she felt the summer that kids in her neighborhood were diagnosed with the disease. I remember her stories about cheering on the vaccination campaign in the 1950s and early 1960s that protected her (then) two boys from the disease.

I wish she was still here with us. I wish we could talk about COVID, influenza, polio.”When my grandmother spoke about polio, she spoke with fear of the disease. She spent many summers praying that her two young boys would not contract the disease. She was relieved when they were vaccinated in 1954/55 (we believe both were part of the Salk vaccine trial, as my family is from Pittsburgh). And she always reminded me that I was lucky to grow up in a world without polio. And that I got to raise my kids in a world without polio.

While I do feel grateful that I grew up in a world without polio and raised my kids without the fear that they would contract polio, I do not understand or remember polio the way that my grandmother did. While I can remember her fear, I didn’t experience it. And that makes it easy to forget. Easy to forget about the paralyzing effects of the disease. Easy to forget the deaths. Easy to forget the tragedy of the iron lung.”

Vaccine misinformation is viral and has grown into an epidemic.

Please — share this information with your friends and family.

Fight back against the misinformation.

Fill your social media posts with evidence-backed information.

Please — download, copy, or screenshot this image & share it widely.

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Please do not forget to —

1. Click the “Like” button on the posts you enjoy. It’s a small thing, but it helps.

2. Share posts, either on social media or with your friends and families.

3. And stay in touch — what questions do you have? information do you need? concerns are keeping you awake? Let me know and we can discuss them together.

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Epi(demiology) Matters is written by Dr. Becky Dawson, PhD MPH — an epidemiologist, teacher, mom, wife, and dedicated yogi. She is a tenured professor at Allegheny College, Research Director at a community hospital, and an exclusive contributor (all things health & medicine) at Erie News Now (NBC/CBS). Her goal is to create healthy communities for all. She writes Epi Matters — first & foremost because epidemiology does matter (to all of us) and she hopes that each post will help to educate and empower readers to be healthy and create healthy communities.

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1. You can watch the hearing here.

2. My goodness — isn’t having up-to-date data available to help us make sense of and prioritize our health problems a good thing? President Trump’s halt on external health information isn’t helping anyone.