Does the MMR vaccine contain poison? No, that's not true: the MMR jab which is used to provide immunity to measles, mumps and rubella has been proven to be safe by health regulators around the world. Misinformation about the safety of the MMR vaccine has circulated for over two decades since a discredited former British doctor made a non-existent link between the injections and autism.
The claim originated from a video (archived here) published by TikTok on January 3, 2024, with a caption, translated from Bosnian into English by Lead Stories staff, that reads:
Protect your children from poison so that there will be no crying later!!
This is what the post looked like on TikTok at the time of writing:
(Source: TikTok screenshot taken on Thu Jan 04 07:41:19 2024 UTC)
The video shows a letter written by the Tuzla Canton Institute for Public Health in Bosnia & Herzegovina, archived here, which says there have been 10 confirmed cases of measles so far this year within the Tuzla area. A portion of the letter, translated into English, highlights the importance of the MMR vaccine in preventing the spread of the measles virus among children.
The most important disease prevention measure is vaccination with the MMR vaccine. The vaccine is mandatory and safe. We invite all parents who have not vaccinated their child against measles to contact the Vaccination Center of the competent Health Center so that vaccination can be carried out and thus prevent children from getting sick.
MMR vaccines have been mandatory since before the breakup of Yugoslavia in the first half of the 1990s, and Bosnia & Herzegovina recorded measles epidemics in 1997/1999, 2014/2015, and again in 2019. Following the 2019 outbreak, researchers found that vaccination rates had fallen due to a variety of factors including disruption caused by years of conflicts that broke apart the former Yugoslavia as well as the spread of discredited claims linking the vaccines to autism and childhood ailments.
One key source of false claims about the safety of MMR vaccines (archived here) came several years ago when, in 1998, former British physician Andrew Wakefield and his colleagues published a paper in the respected medical journal The Lancet, in which they falsely associated vaccination with autism. The authors of the 2019 report wrote:
The key event, which happened 20 years ago, was probably Andrew Wakefield's paper published in the Lancet, in which the author falsely associated vaccination with autism. Although the paper has been retracted as fraudulent, it has done an enormous harm to the public health, like no other thing in the past 100 years.
In 2010 Andrew Wakefield was banned from practicing as a doctor after Britain's General Medical Council found that he had acted in a "dishonest," "misleading" and "irresponsible" way during his research. The Lancet medical journal subsequently retracted his paper.
The MMR vaccine has been deemed safe by regulators in the European Union, the United States, and the United Kingdom.
The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention says that while some vaccines contain preservatives such as thimerosal, our bodies can safely and easily remove the chemical and it is considered safe because the dosage volume is so small. However, due to fears by anti-vaccine groups that thimerosal could cause autism, vaccine manufacturers replaced it and it was subsequently removed from childhood vaccines. According to the CDC:
Many well conducted studies have concluded that thimerosal in vaccines does not contribute to the development of autism. Even after thimerosal was removed from almost all childhood vaccines, autism rates continued to increase, which is the opposite of what would be expected if thimerosal caused autism.
