Where does the false claim that vaccines cause autism come from?

Parents’ worries that the MMR vaccine could trigger autism in their kids have been fuelled by many false claims circulating online for two decades.

It all started with a 1998 study published in the Lancet, a British medical journal. The article has since been retracted.

There is no link between the vaccine against the childhood diseases of measles, mumps and rubella – the MMR vaccine – and children developing autism.

This was confirmed by a massive 10-year study of more than 600,000 children published in the Annals of Medicine in March 2019.

Read more on the topic: Big data study confirms: Vaccines do not cause autism

This content was created by Africa Check, a non-partisan fact-checking organisation. View the original content here.

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