\n President Donald Trump made numerous false or misleading claims about vaccines and autism on Monday.\n <\/p>\n
\n Trump has long pushed vaccine misinformation<\/a>. He delivered his latest inaccurate remarks at a White House event during which he signed an executive order<\/a> that recommends that US children receive fewer vaccinations over a longer period of time than they do today.\n <\/p>\n \n 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.\n <\/p>\n \n He again wildly overstated the size of the vaccine doses children receive, which are nowhere near \u201cthe size of a bottle of soda.\u201d 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.\n <\/p>\n \n Here is a fuller fact check of some of Trump\u2019s comments.\n <\/p>\n Studies have debunked the idea of a link between vaccines and autism<\/p>\n \n 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, \u201cI came in and I said, \u2018I want to find what\u2019s going on with autism.\u2019 It\u2019s many, many times what it used to be years ago, and it gets progressively worse, and we had progressively more and more vaccines. \u201c\n <\/p>\n \n Studies have shown<\/a> there is no connection between vaccines and autism \u2013 as the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention flatly stated<\/a> on its website until the Trump administration baselessly changed the site\u2019s language to include unscientific talking points last fall<\/a>.\n <\/p>\n \n \u201cThere\u2019s no new science,\u201d Dr. Aaron Milstone<\/a>, professor of pediatrics at the Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine and member of the American Academy of Pediatrics\u2019 Committee on Infectious Diseases, said in a briefing Monday. \u201cAll the data say that there\u2019s no association between vaccines and autism. Study after study have continued to show no associations between vaccines and autism. So I think that\u2019s clear, and there are no new data.\u201d\n <\/p>\n \n 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\u2019Leary<\/a>, a professor of pediatrics and infectious diseases at the University of Colorado Denver Anschutz Medical Campus and Children\u2019s Hospital Colorado, said<\/a> last fall. The idea of a link between vaccines and autism has \u201cbeen debunked many times,\u201d said O\u2019Leary, adding, \u201cIt is considered settled science.\u201d\n <\/p>\n \n Dr. Alycia Halladay<\/a>, the chief science officer for the Autism Science Foundation, noted last fall that experiments<\/a> 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.\n <\/p>\n \n \u201cAll of those studies have shown no link between vaccines and autism,\u201d Halladay said. \u201cIt remains the No. 1 studied environmental factor in autism, and there is no link whatsoever.\u201d\n <\/p>\n \n 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<\/a>. There\u2019s no doubt that the known prevalence of autism has spiked in the 21st century<\/a>, but experts have attributed the increase in large part to improvements in diagnostic practices and greater awareness of the symptoms.\n <\/p>\n The MMR vaccine is highly safe and highly effective<\/p>\n \n As Trump called Monday to split up the measles, mumps and rubella vaccine into separate shots, he baselessly suggested, as he has before<\/a>, that the combination vaccine is unsafe.\n <\/p>\n \n \u201cTogether there could be a possibility they\u2019re quite lethal, and separately it looks like they are not at all lethal but just very effective,\u201d he said.\n <\/p>\n \n It\u2019s not true that the combination MMR vaccine could be \u201cquite lethal.\u201d As the CDC website continued to say<\/a> at the time Trump spoke Monday, the combination vaccine has proven \u201cvery safe\u201d and has been highly effective since it was approved in the US in the early 1970s<\/a>; it is used today in dozens of countries<\/a>. Some children experience side effects<\/a>, but those are usually mild and temporary.\n <\/p>\n \n \u201cThere have been no deaths shown to be related to the MMR vaccine in healthy people,\u201d the Infectious Diseases Society of America says<\/a> on its website. \u201cThere 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\u2019t get the vaccine.\u201d\n <\/p>\n \n At the time of Trump\u2019s remarks Monday, the CDC website still said<\/a>: \u201cNo published scientific evidence shows any benefit in separating the combination MMR vaccine into three individual shots<\/a>.\u201d And when a reporter asked Trump whether there is any evidence of lethality, he acknowledged he had none, instead saying, \u201cWhat I\u2019ve heard is that there are some people that say it is that way.\u201d\n <\/p>\n \n Whoever those \u201csome people\u201d are, they are not medical authorities.\n <\/p>\n \n \u201cNumerous studies and many decades of experience have showed us that they are safe and that they work well when given together,\u201d Dr. Adam Ratner<\/a>, a pediatric infectious diseases physician in New York City, said last fall.\n <\/p>\n \n \u201cI\u2019m not aware of any evidence that it\u2019s dangerous to give MMR together,\u201d Dr. Ofer Levy<\/a>, a professor of pediatrics at Harvard Medical School and director of the Precision Vaccines Program at Boston Children\u2019s Hospital, said<\/a> last fall after Trump made similar claims.\n <\/p>\n \n Separating the MMR vaccine into separate shots \u201cdoesn\u2019t make the vaccine safer,\u201d Dr. Paul Offit<\/a>, a vaccine scientist at Children\u2019s Hospital of Philadelphia and former member of the CDC\u2019s independent vaccine advisory group, said Monday. \u201cIn fact, what it means is that you\u2019re probably less likely to finish all those six shots, and it\u2019s more painful for the child.\u201d\n <\/p>\n \n Separate vaccines for measles, mumps and rubella are not currently available in the US, and \u201cit\u2019s impossible to separate out the MMR vaccine into its constituent components,\u201d Dr. Andrew Racine<\/a>, 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, \u201cit would take a long, long time for that to be the case,\u201d he said.\n <\/p>\n \n Trump has repeatedly<\/a> inflated<\/a> 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, \u201cI saw this early on, and I\u2019ve seen proof of it \u2014 where they have a vaccination that looks like the size of a bottle of soda poured into a little child\u2019s body.\u201d\n <\/p>\n \n 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<\/a>, has a dosage of 0.5 milliliters<\/a>, roughly a tenth of a teaspoon. Many soda bottles contain between 500 and 600 milliliters.\n <\/p>\n \n Trump has repeatedly<\/a> used<\/a> wildly inaccurate figures when discussing the known prevalence of autism 20 years ago \u2014 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 \u201c1 in 10,000 20 years ago.\u201d\n <\/p>\n \n That\u2019s not even close to true. The known prevalence of childhood autism was 1 in 110 in 2006, according to data<\/a> published on the CDC website; even in 2000, it was 1 in 150. While some of the earliest studies<\/a> 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 \u201c20 years ago\u201d Trump used Monday and on prior occasions.\n <\/p>\n \n While calling for children to receive fewer injections, Trump claimed, \u201cIn many cases, we were requiring 72 jabs for our beautiful, healthy, lovely, delicate little children.\u201d\n <\/p>\n \n That\u2019s 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\u2019t know where Trump got the \u201c72\u201d figure.\n <\/p>\n