The MMR vaccine might cause autism
The old claim turned out to be wrong and was rejected by evidence.
TaughtA 1998 Lancet paper raised a possible link between the MMR vaccine and autism. The question was presented as open and legitimately debated, and worth being cautious about.
NowThe paper was retracted in full by The Lancet in February 2010, and Andrew Wakefield was struck off the UK medical register in May 2010 for dishonesty and unethical conduct. Studies covering millions of children have found no link. The research was fraudulent, not merely mistaken.
What actually happened
The 1998 paper described twelve children. Twelve. It never demonstrated a causal link even on its own terms, but the press conference around it did the damage. Investigative reporting by Brian Deer, published in the BMJ in 2011, established that the patient data had been altered, that Wakefield had been paid over 400,000 pounds by lawyers preparing litigation against vaccine manufacturers, and that he had filed a patent on a competing single-measles vaccine. The BMJ's editors called it an elaborate fraud.
The epidemiology is about as settled as epidemiology gets. A Danish cohort study of over 650,000 children published in Annals of Internal Medicine in 2019 found no increased risk, including in children with autism risk factors. Taylor's meta-analysis covering more than 1.2 million children found nothing. There is no signal.
The cost was not theoretical. UK MMR uptake fell from about 92 percent to below 80 percent, and measles, which had been declared eliminated in the UK in 2017, returned; the country lost elimination status in 2019. Measles kills. This entry is here because "the science was unsettled" is exactly what a generation of students was taught during those years, and it was never true.
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Who was taught this
Still standard through 2010, so anyone who finished school between 1950 and 2010 learned the earlier version.