(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.
“There have been no deaths shown to be related to the MMR vaccine in healthy people,” the Infectious Diseases Society of America says on its website. “There have been rare cases of deaths from vaccine side effects among children who are immune compromised, which is why it is recommended that they don’t get the vaccine.”
At the time of Trump’s remarks Monday, the CDC website still said: “No published scientific evidence shows any benefit in separating the combination MMR vaccine into three individual shots.” And when a reporter asked Trump whether there is any evidence of lethality, he acknowledged he had none, instead saying, “What I’ve heard is that there are some people that say it is that way.”
Whoever those “some people” are, they are not medical authorities.
“Numerous studies and many decades of experience have showed us that they are safe and that they work well when given together,” Dr. Adam Ratner, a pediatric infectious diseases physician in New York City, said last fall.
“I’m not aware of any evidence that it’s dangerous to give MMR together,” Dr. Ofer Levy, a professor of pediatrics at Harvard Medical School and director of the Precision Vaccines Program at Boston Children’s Hospital, said last fall after Trump made similar claims.
Separating the MMR vaccine into separate shots “doesn’t make the vaccine safer,” Dr. Paul Offit, a vaccine scientist at Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia and former member of the CDC’s independent vaccine advisory group, said Monday. “In fact, what it means is that you’re probably less likely to finish all those six shots, and it’s more painful for the child.”
Separate vaccines for measles, mumps and rubella are not currently available in the US, and “it’s impossible to separate out the MMR vaccine into its constituent components,” Dr. Andrew Racine, president of the American Academy of Pediatrics, noted in the Monday briefing. Since the hypothetical separate vaccines would have to be manufactured and tested before they were deployed, “it would take a long, long time for that to be the case,” he said.
Vaccine doses are nowhere near ‘the size of a bottle of soda’
Trump has repeatedly inflated the size of the vaccine doses American children receive as he has criticized US vaccination practices. He did it again Monday. This time, he said, “I saw this early on, and I’ve seen proof of it — where they have a vaccination that looks like the size of a bottle of soda poured into a little child’s body.”
In reality, no vaccine injected in a little child is even close to the size of a soda bottle; doses are far smaller than a teaspoon. The MMR vaccine, to cite a typical example, has a dosage of 0.5 milliliters, roughly a tenth of a teaspoon. Many soda bottles contain between 500 and 600 milliliters.
Autism was far more common 20 years ago than Trump claimed
Trump has repeatedly used wildly inaccurate figures when discussing the known prevalence of autism 20 years ago — shrinking that 2006 prevalence to make it sound as if there has been a far faster increase than there actually has been. On Monday, he said, as he has before, that it was “1 in 10,000 20 years ago.”
That’s not even close to true. The known prevalence of childhood autism was 1 in 110 in 2006, according to data published on the CDC website; even in 2000, it was 1 in 150. While some of the earliest studies on the subject, from the 1960s and 1970s, estimated autism prevalence to be in the range of 2 to 4 per 10,000 children, that was much further back than the “20 years ago” Trump used Monday and on prior occasions.
There are far fewer required shots than Trump said
While calling for children to receive fewer injections, Trump claimed, “In many cases, we were requiring 72 jabs for our beautiful, healthy, lovely, delicate little children.”
That’s a significant overstatement of the number of injections Americans are required to receive even by age 18, let alone during their littlest years. Racine said in the Monday briefing that he didn’t know where Trump got the “72” figure.
Trump did not explain his math, but he appeared to be separately counting every single dose of every vaccine an American might receive by age 18 as a “jab” — even though some of those doses are commonly given orally or in a combination shot rather than in a separate injection. And Trump did not explain that it appears around half of the shots included in a “72” count would be optional annual flu and Covid-19 vaccinations; no state is “requiring” these shots for children to attend school.
Isa Mudannayake, Meg Tirrell, Brenda Goodman and Asuka Koda contributed to this article.
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