Fact check: Trump makes numerous false and misleading claims about vaccines and autism - CNN

President Donald Trump made numerous false or misleading claims about vaccines and autism on Monday.

Trump has long pushed vaccine misinformation. He delivered his latest inaccurate remarks at a White House event during which he signed an executive order that recommends that US children receive fewer vaccinations over a longer period of time than they do today.

Trump again floated the idea that vaccines cause autism, though that notion has been thoroughly debunked by extensive research in multiple countries. He again baselessly impugned the safety of the combination vaccine for measles, mumps and rubella, which has for decades proven highly safe and highly effective.

He again wildly overstated the size of the vaccine doses children receive, which are nowhere near “the size of a bottle of soda.” He again wildly understated the prevalence of autism 20 years ago. And he again exaggerated the number of injections children have been required to receive.

Here is a fuller fact check of some of Trump’s comments.

Studies have debunked the idea of a link between vaccines and autism

Trump did not explicitly assert that there is a connection between vaccines and autism. But he did once more hint at the idea that there might be a link, saying, “I came in and I said, ‘I want to find what’s going on with autism.’ It’s many, many times what it used to be years ago, and it gets progressively worse, and we had progressively more and more vaccines. “

Studies have shown there is no connection between vaccines and autism – as the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention flatly stated on its website until the Trump administration baselessly changed the site’s language to include unscientific talking points last fall.

“There’s no new science,” Dr. Aaron Milstone, professor of pediatrics at the Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine and member of the American Academy of Pediatrics’ Committee on Infectious Diseases, said in a briefing Monday. “All the data say that there’s no association between vaccines and autism. Study after study have continued to show no associations between vaccines and autism. So I think that’s clear, and there are no new data.”

Independent researchers across seven countries have conducted more than 40 studies involving over 5.6 million people to conclude that there is no link between vaccines and autism, Dr. Sean O’Leary, a professor of pediatrics and infectious diseases at the University of Colorado Denver Anschutz Medical Campus and Children’s Hospital Colorado, said last fall. The idea of a link between vaccines and autism has “been debunked many times,” said O’Leary, adding, “It is considered settled science.”

Dr. Alycia Halladay, the chief science officer for the Autism Science Foundation, noted last fall that experiments in countries including Denmark, Sweden, Finland, Israel and Japan collected data from large groups of people and tracked their vaccination patterns and whether they had an autism diagnosis.

“All of those studies have shown no link between vaccines and autism,” Halladay said. “It remains the No. 1 studied environmental factor in autism, and there is no link whatsoever.”

The notion of a connection between the measles, mumps and rubella (MMR) vaccine and autism was popularized by a fraudulent, debunked study in the 1990s. There’s no doubt that the known prevalence of autism has spiked in the 21st century, but experts have attributed the increase in large part to improvements in diagnostic practices and greater awareness of the symptoms.

The MMR vaccine is highly safe and highly effective

As Trump called Monday to split up the measles, mumps and rubella vaccine into separate shots, he baselessly suggested, as he has before, that the combination vaccine is unsafe.

“Together there could be a possibility they’re quite lethal, and separately it looks like they are not at all lethal but just very effective,” he said.

It’s not true that the combination MMR vaccine could be “quite lethal.” As the CDC website continued to say at the time Trump spoke Monday, the combination vaccine has proven “very safe” and has been highly effective since it was approved in the US in the early 1970s; it is used today in dozens of countries. Some children experience side effects, but those are usually mild and temporary.