Dr. Peter Hotez at The Hill:
There is no link between vaccines and autism. I trace the modern anti-vaccine movement alleging vaccine-autism links back to 1998 when a paper was published in The Lancet, a prestigious medical journal, claiming that the live measles-mumps-rubella (MMR) vaccine (especially the measles component) might lead to pervasive developmental disorder, a term then used to refer to autism.
That paper was subsequently retracted by the journal editors and shown to be fundamentally flawed and scientifically invalid. In addition, several large population-based studies showed that children who received the MMR vaccine were no more likely to get autism than children who were not vaccinated, while further studies found that autistic children were no more likely to have received the MMR vaccine than children not on the autism spectrum.
However, claims of autism and vaccines then shifted from the MMR vaccine, when it was alleged thimerosal preservative that used to be found in many childhood vaccines (but which now has been mostly removed) caused autism. Again, population-based studies showed no links between autism and thimerosal-containing vaccines and indeed after thimerosal vaccines were removed from markets in the United States, Denmark and elsewhere, autism rates did not decline.
From there, the assertions moved to the concerns that somehow spacing vaccines too close together was the issue, but that too does not hold up, and lately there are new rounds of allegations claiming that aluminum-based adjuvants found in some childhood vaccines cause autism, which is also not true.
The point being that this is the modus operandi of the anti-vaccine movement — a strange type of vaccine “whack-a-mole” — forever looking for new vaccine links only to have them disproven time and time again.
The World Health Organization has named vaccine hesitancy as one of the top 10 health threats of 2019. Kate Wheeling at Pacific Standard:
One of the biggest reasons that more and more parents are choosing not to vaccinate their children could be a lack of trust in physicians, according to Dennis Rosen, a pediatric specialist:
The ongoing erosion of trust in the medical establishment as a whole is also to blame, as frequent reports of dubious financial relationships between physicians, professional medical societies, and the pharmaceutical industry leave many questioning whether or not physicians can be trusted.
Unsure of what to do and whom to listen to, many seek answers to their questions elsewhere, or simply rely on their gut feeling, without speaking to those one would presume to be the most qualified to provide science-based guidance specifically tailored to the patient's own values and cultural sensitivities.
That's why the WHO is dedicated to supporting health workers on the ground all over the world as it confronts this and other top health threats of 2019. "Health workers, especially those in communities, remain the most trusted advisor and influencer of vaccination decisions," the organization writes, "and they must be supported to provide trusted, credible information on vaccines."
