Checked 18 August 2026
We checked
Claim: Vaccines cause autism
No — decades of large-scale research across millions of children, most recently reaffirmed by WHO's vaccine safety committee in December 2025, find no causal link between vaccines and autism. This is a settled question, not an open dispute with evidence on both sides.
Claim: Vaccines cause autism
No — the evidence is against itDecades of large-scale research — including a Danish cohort of over 650,000 children, a 2.5-million-child US cohort, and a nationwide Danish aluminum-adjuvant study of over 1 million children — have consistently found no association between vaccines (including MMR, thimerosal, and aluminum adjuvants) and autism, and WHO's independent vaccine safety committee reaffirmed in December 2025 after reviewing 31 studies that there is no causal link.
ReferencesWakefield's team publishes in The Lancet, reporting a 'genuinely new syndrome' linking MMR vaccine to autism in 12 children.
Sunday Times journalist Brian Deer reveals Wakefield was paid by a solicitor suing vaccine makers; ten of Wakefield's 13 co-authors publicly withdraw their support for the paper's interpretation.
UK General Medical Council rules Wakefield acted dishonestly and with 'callous disregard' for the children studied.
The Lancet fully retracts the 1998 paper, stating elements had been falsified and the journal had been deceived.
Wakefield is struck off the UK medical register; in January 2011 BMJ journalist Brian Deer's investigation and an accompanying editorial describe the study as an 'elaborate fraud.'
The claim traces to a single 1998 paper by British gastroenterologist Andrew Wakefield in The Lancet, describing 12 children and proposing a new syndrome linking the MMR vaccine to autism. Investigative reporting by journalist Brian Deer later found Wakefield had been paid by lawyers preparing litigation against vaccine manufacturers and had misrepresented the children's medical histories, and Britain's General Medical Council found he had acted dishonestly; the Lancet fully retracted the paper in 2010. Despite retraction and multiple large studies finding no link, the idea took root in public consciousness through the intense media coverage the original paper generated and has persisted since.
ReferencesReviewed 17 September 2026 — nothing had changed.
Claims on this page are re-checked periodically; any change of finding is reviewed by a person before it appears here.