Facts of the Matter: Discredited vaccine study reverberates 27 years later

In 1998, a paper appeared in the respected medical journal The Lancet that sent shock waves through the public health world. The paper suggested a link between the MMR vaccine — measles, mumps and rubella — and autism. Parents were alarmed, vaccination rates dropped and outbreaks of measles surged.

But there was one major problem: The paper was wrong.

The study, led by British physician Andrew Wakefield, examined just 12 children. That’s not a typo — 12. That’s fewer kids than you might find in a single preschool classroom. Worse, the children weren’t randomly chosen. All of their parents already believed the MMR vaccine had harmed their children. This alone makes the results unreliable, as it introduces bias into the data. In science, you must start with an open question, not a conclusi