The Claim:
The old claims are never gone. Once again, anti-vaxxers claim that unvaccinated children are less likely to be diagnosed with ADHD, allergies, asthma, chronic sinusitis, ear infections, eczema, GI disorders, learning disabilities, seizures, and eye or speech disorders.
The Facts:
The tweet starts out strong by claiming that “Vaccine safety research is forbidden and our government will not release its safety data,” yet you can find hundreds of research articles addressing vaccine safety here.
Anti-vaxxers that unvaccinated children are healthier than vaccinated children in myriad ways. They often cite some studies to try to back up those claims. However, all these studies suffer from a lot of the same fallacies. Many are simple surveys.
Surveys are often victims of self-selection bias, or volunteer bias, in which participants can decide whether or not to participate in the study, along with recall bias and reporting bias.
One refrain you often hear from anti-vaxxers is “Follow the money.” So we did, and we found one study funded by two different anti-vaccine organizations (Generation Rescue, Inc., and the Children’s Medical Safety Research Institute). This study was eventually retracted. Twice.
Disclaimer: Science is always evolving and our understanding of these topics may have evolved too since this was originally posted. Be sure to check out our most recent posts and browse the latest Just the Facts Topics for the latest.
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