So far, the year 2018 has been a good news/bad news story with regard to vaccinating the world’s children. On the positive side, Gavi, The Vaccine Alliance, recently announced that it’s on track to immunize 300 million children in developing nations within Africa, Asia, and Latin America by the year 2020. But in Europe and the United States we’ve seen a slip in vaccine programs. The World Health Organization just announced that Europe experienced more than 40,000 measles cases during the first half of 2018—largely attributed to a lack of immunization—while in the US my collaborators and I identified communities in some states where large numbers of schoolchildren are not being vaccinated. The situation in both Europe and the US exists mostly because of well-organized antivaccine movements alleging that vaccines cause autism.
I wrote Vaccines Did Not Cause Rachel’s Autism in response to the rapid acceleration in vaccine exemptions across ...
