On Twitter, I found a tweet about the link between vaccines and autism.
And that got me curious, could they really be linked? If so, what causes it? If not, why do people think they’re linked?
- I checked snopes, a fact checker website, and vaccines and autism are not related.
But, the user followed up with multiple articles showing studies that prove that more and more babies have been diagnosed with autism. So I visited the sites, which were all from the United States National Library of Medicine.
2. After checking their sources, I confirmed that it was a legit website by checking their Wikipedia page.
3. But I still wasn’t convinced, so I searched up the author of the article and their source of information.
The author of the article, Gayle Delong had been proven to spread false information on the internet. She was a professor in the finance department at Baruch College in New York and had no experience in science.
4. I then checked other sources.
I searched up “Gayle Delong” which gave me articles written about her spreading false information. After, I searched up “autism and vaccine link” and they all concluded with that that, vaccines do not cause autism.
5. An extra step
After my research, I asked other people what they thought, and they all believe that vaccines do not cause autism. Still curious, I dug a little bit into why and I learnt that yes, there are more people getting diagnosed with autism, but no, not from a vaccine. In fact, the research I found shows that it isn’t that there are more autistic people, but more people are getting a properly diagnosed and genetics.
Thank you for reading this post, stay safe and don’t get sick!