Vaccines and Autism
The notorious vaccine-autism connection started with Andrew Wakefield’s tiny 1998 study of 12 children. The research was later retracted for fraud and funded by lawyers suing vaccine makers. Jenny McCarthy’s 2007 Oprah appearance supercharged this myth. Meanwhile, a massive Danish study of 657,461 children found zero autism link. The real tragedy? U.S. measles cases hit 1,282 in 2019 outbreaks due to vaccine hesitancy based on this falsehood.