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... Why is thimerosal controversial?
Fears about the safety of thimerosal in vaccines spread for two reasons.
First, in 1998, a now discredited report was published in a major medical journal called The Lancet. In it, a British doctor named Andrew Wakefield described eight children who developed autism after receiving the MMR vaccine, which protects against measles, mumps and rubella.
However, the patients were not compared with a control group that was vaccinated, so it was impossible to draw conclusions about the vaccine's effects. Also, the data report was later found to be falsified. And the MMR vaccine that children received in that report never contained thimerosal.
Second, the federal guidelines on exposure limits for the toxic substance methylmercury came out about the same time as the Wakefield study's publication.
During that period, autism was becoming more widely recognized as a developmental condition, and its rates of diagnosis were rising.
People who believed Wakefield's results conflated methylmercury and ethylmercury and promoted the unfounded idea that ethylmercury in vaccines from thimerosal were driving the rising rates of autism.
The Wakefield study was retracted in 2010, and Wakefield was found guilty of dishonesty and flouting ethics protocols by the U.K. General Medical Council, as well as stripped of his medical license.
Subsequent studies have not shown a relationship between the MMR vaccine and autism, but despite the absence of evidence, the idea took hold and has proven difficult to dislodge. ...
