I am not here to belittle your opinion on vaccination and autism. If you have a valid reason (backed up with evidence) to believe that vaccinations cause autism, I would love to hear your explanation. In my experience, however, I've noticed that many people are simply just misinformed. For that reason, I decided to write an article to hopefully enlighten you about the history of why some people now come to believe – quite unfortunately – that vaccines lead to autism.
There are many risks involved with not getting vaccinated. Vaccinations are basically just weakened or killed germs that are injected into the body that allows your body to create antibodies that will recognize and destroy the germs. Later in life when you are actually exposed to these pathogenic species, your body will respond more quickly destroy them because they've already been exposed to it and know how to fight against them. If you're not vaccinated, your body will take a long time to gather the fighting machinery – at which point your body could get defeated before it could defeat the germs.
You've probably gotten a Measles, Mumps, and Rubella (MMR) vaccinations before. Before 1963, "nearly all children got measles by the time they were 15 years of age." This "widespread use of measles vaccines drastically reduced the disease rates" and by 2000, "measles was declared eliminated" in the United States. So how does this relate to autism?
Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD), which is colloquially known as autism, is a developmental disorder that may be characterized by deficits in social and communication skills among many others. The paper that most often people would refer to when incorrectly arguing that vaccines cause autism was published in The Lancet with Andrew Wakefield as the first author. Wakefield was hired by a lawyer named Richard Barr to attack MMR vaccinations to raise a lawsuit against the successful drug companies that manufactured this vaccine. According to a British investigator, Beer Deer, "the instrument of their attack was to find what he called at the time "a new syndrome" of bowel and brain disease caused by vaccines." Barr had notified Wakefield in a letter half a year before this study was released, "I have mentioned to you before that the prime objective is to produce unassailable evidence in court so as to convince a court that these vaccines are dangerous."
The subjects used in the paper were children of Barr's clients. Furthermore, Wakefield was incentivized by money that earned him "more than eight times his reported annual salary." Although the paper was finally retracted over a decade after it was published, it has left a detrimental effect on our society.
Due to the vaccine and autism myth, some may choose to deny vaccinations, which can be extremely harmful when they are exposed to the pathogens the vaccines were designed for. What's more, it prevents pathogens from being completely eradicated, allowing them to evolve and return in strengthened forms that continue to threaten us and our loved ones.
