I had mixed feelings when I first heard it, I thought it had something to do with mercury.
Okay, this is where it gets confusing. There's a mercury-based preservative called thimerosal that's used in some vaccines (although now being phased out).
Part of the vaccination-autism scare involved vaccines containing thimerosal (and I can certainly understand people being concerned about mercury compounds). Another part of the scare involved the MMR vaccine - I think the MMR scare got a bigger share of the coverage in the UK than it did in the USA, possibly because Wakefield is UK-based. Sometimes the two get blurred together, and people have claimed that thimerosal in MMR causes autism... even in areas where thimerosal isn't actually used in the MMR vaccine.
(And yes, MMR vaccination has side-effects up to and including death, but nowhere near those from the diseases it protects against.)
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Date: 2009-02-09 10:15 am (UTC)Okay, this is where it gets confusing. There's a mercury-based preservative called thimerosal that's used in some vaccines (although now being phased out).
Part of the vaccination-autism scare involved vaccines containing thimerosal (and I can certainly understand people being concerned about mercury compounds). Another part of the scare involved the MMR vaccine - I think the MMR scare got a bigger share of the coverage in the UK than it did in the USA, possibly because Wakefield is UK-based. Sometimes the two get blurred together, and people have claimed that thimerosal in MMR causes autism... even in areas where thimerosal isn't actually used in the MMR vaccine.
(And yes, MMR vaccination has side-effects up to and including death, but nowhere near those from the diseases it protects against.)