True Stories

To beat anti-science trolls, sometimes you have to think like one.

- By Kiera Butler

Let’s do a little experiment. I’m going to tell you two stories, and at the end of this article, we’ll come back to them.

Here’s the first story: Last year, millions of children in the United States received the vaccine for measles, mumps, and rubella—and only a few had a serious reaction to it. Shortly after the injection, about 1 in 4,000 children developed a fever that caused a seizure. About 1 in 40,000 children experienced a blood disorder.

Here’s the second story: A baby I’ll call Jayden was developing normally until he received a set of routine vaccinations at 15 months. The next day, he awoke screaming and went into fits of rage. He began to engage in repetitive behaviors. By 18 months, he could no longer recognize his parents or siblings. He lost the words he had previously known, and over the next few months, he became violent. At age 2, Jayden was diagnosed with autism.

The first story comes from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and is based on meticulously collected data about vaccines’ safety and efficacy. Jayden’s story was one of the hundreds of narratives in a Facebook group called Vaccine Injury Stories, where anti-vaccine advocates post anecdotes about friends or family members, mainly kids, who they believe were hurt by immunizations. Anyone can contribute a story, and no one verifies whether it’s true.