In news that will shock nobody except for your one auntie who shares the dodgiest Facebook links, an absolutely huge study in Denmark has “definitively confirmed” that there isn’t a link between autism and the MMR vaccine.
The study examined every Danish child born between 1999 and 2010 – that’s 650,000 kids – and found that the measles, mumps and rubella vaccine had absolutely no link with diagnoses of autism.
There were no clusters of autism amongst vaccinated kids. It didn’t increase the likelihood of an autism diagnosis even in kids already in “high risk” groups.
“[The link] is just not there,” Professor Ian Frazier, the Aussie scientist and Australian Of The Year who pioneered the HPV vaccine, told Fairfax.
“It even goes further than previous studies have done in that it looks at people who might be regarded as high risk for autism … to see if there was any linkage … and confirmed that there is none.”
The news follows reports of another study published just last week suggesting that vaccines protect you against more than just the diseases they were made to combat.
Adults who were vaccinated against typhoid were also shown (in more than one study) to be more resistant to influenza and yeast infections. And in decades of observation, doctors have reported that kids who were given MMR also had lower rates of death from things like pneumonia and diarrhoea, and tuberculosis vaccinations have a similar effect.
It also comes after a massive measles outbreak in the Philippines that killed over 100 of the thousands of people infected, and a reported 42 cases of measles in Australia just this year alone.
A five-year-old boy who had not received the measles vaccine went on holiday to Costa Rica with his parents.
The country had been measles free for five years before his arrival.https://t.co/d6l8vfmBVW
— DW News (@dwnews) February 23, 2019
The fight against the spread of anti-science misinformation has ramped up in response to the outbreaks, with YouTube and Facebook both taking steps to de-platform anti-vaxxers, and reports of unvaccinated kids trying to bypass their anti-vaxxer parents in order to actually get preventative medicine.
The movement is considered one of the greatest threats to global public health.
It sprouted like a stinking weed from a single mouldy pot: a study linking vaccines and autism that was published in a medical journal but was later debunked, and its author banned from practicing medicine after authorities discovered he had falsified evidence.
Given that that study involved just 12 subjects to this one’s 650,000, surely the people who were unfortunately taken in by the first one will find these new results 54,166 times more convincing.