The thought that autism is provoked by vaccinations has been growing because the rate of autism diagnosis increased widely in the last 20 years as well as the percentage of vaccinated babies.People started thinking about those parallel percentage as there was a correlation between them.The fear that vaccines cause autism spread from that point for the following decade.
In 1998, a UK physician named Andrew Wakefield published a paper that claimed he found a correlation between autism and MMR vaccination(for rubella,mumps,measles).The study was about 8 children that after one month from the vaccination started showing autism’s symptoms.Wakefield stated that MMR vaccine caused intestinal inflammation that led to the release of specific molecules to the bloodstream and, later, to the brain, where they affected development.
The disagreement about this evidence consist of the method used and the depth of the research,in fact 50,000 British children per month received MMR vaccine between ages 1 and 2 years—the same age time when autism typically presents and is diagnosticated—coincidental associations were inevitable.
This makes Wakefield research less believable: the age range of children who are vaccinated is the same of the children that receive autism diagnosis.That means that there is an high possibility to find a child who has received an autism diagnosis and who has been recently vaccinated as well, but this does not necessarily mean that vaccinations affect brain development,so autism.Furthermore Wakefield conduct his research on 8 individuals,too few to affirm his warming assumption.Another fact that could led to less reliability is that in the period of the research, Wakefield was trying to apply to a patent for a new measles vaccine. He had conflict of interest about the current vaccine.
