SHOTS! SHOTS! SHOTS!…Don’t Cause Autism

Nathaniel Baker, Special to The Big Red

This past October, I visited my doctor’s office to receive a flu vaccine, in the waiting room many families sat and waited for their turn. Children, one by one, came out into the waiting room crying as they left; setting off a chain reaction in the other toddlers that made the room quite noisy.

When the heart of flu season is rapidly approaching, people scramble to get vaccinated.

According to the CDC, vaccines take about two weeks for your body to produce antibodies effectively, meaning that vaccines should happen sooner rather than later. It’s encouraged that people visit their personal care doctor, clinics or a pharmacy to receive their flu shots before influenza spreads around them.

Despite the obvious positives of vaccines, there will still be people that do not get vaccinated during the flu season.

There are two main arguments that I hear about against vaccines. People who are against vaccines because of their religious beliefs, and people who believe vaccines are harmful to the human body, a large margin of that camp believe that vaccines lead to autism. I’m going to focus on the latter idea, vaccines do not cause autism.

While it’s a plausible thought that injecting anything into your body could have negative impacts, there is no substantial proof that vaccinations lead to autism in children.

The CDC has conducted studies on possible links between autism and vaccines, and all have concluded that there is no link. Furthermore, the CDC has conducted or funded studies attempting to find a link between thimerosal and autism.

Thimerosal is a specific ingredient that in the past, was in many vaccines for children.

The studies again found no connection between the ingredient and autism. (Some types of flu vaccines are the only current childhood vaccines containing thimerosal).

Other than the flu, measles has had a couple of outbreaks recently in the news, which as of the week of March 14, 2019, has seen six outbreaks according to the CDC. The government agency blames pockets of people lacking vaccinations for the further spread of the measles.

Even though it’s not commonly talked about as a particularly deadly disease, in the 2012-2013 flu season, up to 56,000 people died from it. Both illnesses kill people, and with no proof that vaccinations cause ASD, I believe that we should continue to put our trust in modern medicine to help protect ourselves and others.

After all, I don’t want to be getting sick because someone else decided that they wanted to believe in falsehoods. Do you?