Anti-vaccine misinformation can terrorize new parents, but science leads to truth

by Elizabeth Jacobs, Ph.D.

As a parent, you may have come across the frightening claim that vaccines cause autism. After hearing such a claim, you might wonder if you should vaccinate your baby. I get it. It happened to me, too, if only for a single day in 2004. This is the story of what happened and how I not only became as certain a scientist can be that vaccines do not cause autism, but also why I became furious with those who claim that they do. 

In 2004, my husband and I were getting ready for our first child. We went through the preparations of all new parents, and read voraciously about the things we needed to know about raising a child. We were nervous. We wanted to get things right. One day, I stumbled across a website that claimed that vaccines caused autism. It had links to alarming scientific papers about mercury in vaccines causing all sorts of developmental delays. There was also a link to a paper by Andrew Wakefield, a doctor in the United Kingdom, which claimed to show an association between the MMR vaccine, colitis, and autism.

My heart skipped a beat. I had no idea that anyone thought that vaccines might be harmful. Like many new parents, I hadn’t ever given any thought at all about not vaccinating my own children. I knew from my education and training that vaccines prevented all sorts of nasty illnesses--polio, diphtheria, measles, mumps and rubella, to name a few. I grew up in Pittsburgh, where the polio vaccine was developed by Jonas Salk; that vaccines were likely the most effective prevention strategy ever devised seemed clear. So until that fateful morning, I had simply planned to have my children vaccinated according to schedule. And that is exactly what I ultimately did. But before then, I spent a few hours mired in a cesspool of emotionally driven vaccine misinformation that, in the end, enraged me.

New parents or parents-to-be are a very vulnerable population. Like me, many haven’t thought before about things like whether a baby should sleep on their back or stomach, or at what age they should start walking or talking. First and foremost, our thoughts as parents are about  protecting our tiny, tiny babies. We flock to the internet to find information, searching and googling all of our questions. I was quickly overwhelmed not by science, but by accounts run by people now known as “influencers.” They are good at what they do—hitting our emotional centers with things that get us talking so we bring more people to their blogs and social media accounts. Evidence-based and factual information doesn’t usually attract and maintain eyeballs; imagine going to someone’s social media every day only to see that the only thing they have posted, again, is “vaccines are safe and effective”. The parentosphere is fueled by influencers who must produce new content to stay relevant. They flood the sphere with emotionally driven claims that have tenuous links, if any, to scientific evidence. 

Back in 2004, I did what I always do when I come across a scientific claim that interests me. I dug into the scientific literature on the topic, and this is where I may differ from some other parents: I had the advantage of knowing how to access and evaluate scientific research. This is how I came to be scouring PubMed, a database of published scientific papers, for evidence that vaccines might actually be harmful to children. By the time I emerged from this task, night had fallen and so had my mood. 

I started with the paper published by Andrew Wakefield in The Lancet. I knew this was a very prestigious journal. But as I started reading it, I noted that the paper lacked many things that I’d been trained to understand were important. A good study usually has data from a lot of individuals. In my career I would go on to publish studies with thousands of participants. But this paper only had information for 12 children--an immediate and serious red flag. There were other problems. The study design did not adhere to recognized scientific standards. The conclusions were wildly overblown and not supported by the results. Every alarm bell that I had been trained to recognize was ringing loudly. It was no surprise when later, some of the authors took their names off the paper, and it was retracted by the journal. 

Next, I dug into the other papers that were often cited as proof that vaccines were harmful. I learned that the references to mercury that led me to imagine the contents of an old-timey thermometer being injected into my child were utterly false. Thimerosal, a form of mercury used as a preservative in vaccines, has been found repeatedly to be safe and is not comparable to other, more dangerous forms of mercury. Further, by the time I was doing this exploration in 2004, thimerosal had already been removed from the manufacturing process of every childhood vaccine in the United States. 

Other claims about vaccine ingredients led to papers where massive doses of compounds were injected in rats or mice. These were doses that no human could ever attain through vaccination. It was at about this point that my thinking started shifting from being concerned about vaccine safety to being angry at myself for being hoodwinked by pseudoscientific claptrap, if only for a brief period. For me, the obvious next question was: what about the studies that do not show a relationship between vaccines and autism? What do those papers look like? 

The answer was swift in coming. It was only moments before papers with the type of science that I was taught to expect popped up on PubMed—studies that included hundreds of thousands of children using the most reliable study designs. Every one of them showed that there was no association whatsoever between vaccination and autism. Not even a blip or a concerning signal. 

By the time I emerged from this proverbial rabbit hole, I felt deep disappointment, perhaps even contempt, for the people who have similar knowledge and training to mine, yet continue to spread misinformation about vaccines. Since that dark day in 2004, more and more papers using solid, rigorous, and thorough scientific methods have shown, time and time again, that there is no association between vaccines and autism. In my experience, the consistency of these findings is notable. I was lucky to have the training and access to scientific papers that could counter the frightening online lies that were only attempts at manipulating new parents. Your kids’ pediatrician has even more of this training. 

This is why you should listen to your doctor and not a pseudoscientific influencer on the internet who is aiming to build their following, with little care for those they harm. Nor should you listen to the Secretary of Health and Human Services, Robert F. Kennedy Jr., who has seen the same data I have seen, but lacks the training, education, and desire to understand the volumes of data showing the safety and efficacy of vaccines. There is no there there, except the whim of those addicted to attention, money, or ill-gotten power. 

Elizabeth Jacobs is an epidemiologist and professor emerita at the University of Arizona as well as a founding Coordinating Committee member of Defend Public Health.