A paper was published in The Lancet in 1998 linking the MMR vaccine to autism. It was later discovered that the primary author, Andrew Wakefield, breached several protocols: the sample size was only 12, and cherry-picked to suit the conclusion. In addition, the authors were paid by anti-vaccine lawyers to highlight these findings. As a result, the paper was retracted. A meta-analysis in 2014 showed that in over 1.2 million children studied, there was no relationship between vaccines (or the components used to make them) and autism.

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