Science is “very certain” that the measles vaccine doesn’t cause autism.
— Megyn Kelly on Monday, February 2nd, 2015 in a broadcast of “The O’Reilly Factor”
As the number of cases of measles slowly grows across the United States, it has revived a past debate over the safety of the vaccine that for decades prevented an outbreak.
Two Fox News hosts, Bill O’Reilly and Megyn Kelly, tackled the touchy topic of mandatory vaccinations on The O’Reilly Factor on Feb. 2, 2015.
Kelly said she had all three of her children vaccinated and that for immunization programs to work, they must be mandatory. Kelly, however, cut some slack for parents who might have decided otherwise a few years ago.
“They were given bad information years ago by a U.K. study that came out in 1998,” Kelly said. “Five years ago the science wasn’t even as certain as it is today. It is very certain today.”
In this fact-check, we take a look at the scientific certainty over the safety of vaccination.
We told Fox News we were digging into this and didn’t hear back, but Kelly’s five-year mark lines up with the formal retraction of that United Kingdom study she mentioned. To quickly recap, in 1998, a British medical journal called the Lancet published a paper by Andrew Wakefield and a dozen colleagues that claimed to show a link between the MMR (measles, mumps, rubella) vaccine and autism. Many parents responded with predictable fear and vaccination rates began falling. The impact was strongest in the United Kingdom where the rate fell from the 90 percent range down to 80 percent. The United States saw a minor dip. In some states, the rate dropped below 90 percent although nationally the rate remained higher.
In 2010, roughly five years ago, the Lancet retracted Wakefield’s study. This seems to be the benchmark for Kelly’s comparison. What we heard from the public health community is that not only is the medical science clear today, it was back in 2010 as well.
The scientists were sure
Dr. Mark Schleiss is director of Pediatric Infectious Diseases at the University of Minnesota Medical School. Schleiss told PunditFact that the science was clear in 2010, and it’s clear today.
“Wakefield’s work had been discredited within a year or two of publication,” Schleiss said.
Schleiss dates efforts to test the safety of childhood immunizations back to the 1980s when there were reports that the whooping cough vaccine caused developmental disorders. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and the Institute of Medicine conducted studies and found the whooping cough reports without merit.
The Wakefield study had such a high profile that it spurred further rounds of research. In 2001, the Institute of Medicine published a report that found no evidence of an association between the vaccine and autism. In 2004, the institute conducted another review.
The institute said in a press release, “14 large epidemiological studies consistently showed no association between the MMR vaccine and autism.”
Dr. Marie McCormick, a professor at the Harvard School of Public Health, oversaw the committee that conducted the 2004 IOM vaccine safety review. McCormick told us that there were no divisions within the scientific community at that time.
“I think that the data were pretty firm as of 2004,” McCormick said.
By 2004, 10 of Wakefield’s co-authors had withdrawn their names from his study. Other things also had happened. Brian Deer, a British journalist, documented shoddy data that underlay the results. Deer also found that Wakefield never disclosed that he had been paid by a lawyer representing some of the children cited in the article. In the British Medical Journal, Deer later exposed how Wakefield engaged in an elaborate scientific fraud.
Wakefield sued the British Medical Journal and lost. Editor-in-chief Fiona Godlee told PunditFact that “the science has been much the same throughout the MMR scare caused by Wakefield’s paper.”
McCormick said the one thing that did change over the years was the public reporting around the topic. At the height of the scare, McCormick said news coverage suffered from a systematic flaw.
“If a reporter interviewed a scientist about the results, she would almost automatically give equal time and weight to an opponent of vaccines regardless of the validity of their opinion,” McCormick said. “Thus, to the viewer or reader, the issue would seem evenly balanced, even when it was not.”
Our ruling
Kelly said that the science on vaccine safety is certain today.
The researchers we contacted said that as far as the science is concerned, certainty had been reached at least 10 years ago with the release of a major national study debunking the link between the measles mumps, rubella vaccine and autism. Five years ago, the British journal the Lancet retracted the original report that triggered the initial wave of fear.
That decision was the final nail in the coffin of a discredited report.
We rate the claim True.
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