NASHVILLE, Tenn. (WKRN) — With more Tennessee families saying “no” to vaccines for kids, News 2 took a closer look at the debate over public health versus personal freedom this week.
On Thursday, WKRN hosted a town hall with medical experts who addressed concerns that vaccines cause autism. Viewers also asked about the use of heavy metal in vaccines. Dr. Buddy Creech, the Director of the Vanderbilt Vaccine Research Program, said both the use of heavy metals in vaccines and their causation of autism are decades-old rumors.
Inside the Vanderbilt lab tasked with testing vaccine safety
“The challenge is we don’t know all the things that contribute to autism. We simply don’t know why some kids develop it and some kids don’t,” Creech said. “What we do know is that the most common age of diagnosis is shortly after the first birthday, which is in close proximity to when children get their MMR [measles, mumps, rubella] vaccines. But I also want to caution us to say that just because two things are related doesn’t mean they cause each other. Even though children are getting MMR around a year — year-and-a-half of age, and that may also be the time that they have an autism diagnosis, we need to be careful about putting those two together.”
Creech went on to share examples of correlating data that doesn’t indicate causation…