America’s antivaxx crisis exposed: A QUARTER believes MMR injection causes autism and a THIRD thinks Covid vaccines have killed thousands, polls show

America’s growing anti-vaxx crisis has been exposed in a national poll that shows large swaths of the country believe in conspiracy theories about safe shots.

A quarter of adults said they believe the measles, mumps, and rubella (MMR) vaccine causes autism — a widely studied and discredited claim that emerged in the 1990s.

The Kaiser Family Foundation (KFF) survey also found that a third of adults believe the Covid injections caused thousands of sudden deaths in otherwise healthy people.

The vaccine skepticism movement across the country intensified following the Covid pandemic, linked to the push back on Covid vaccine mandates and increased disinformation as people spent more time online.

Growing sentiment has led figures like Robert F Kennedy Junior to rise in the polls and campaign with an anti-vaxx message despite being a fringe political figure for most of his years.

In a podcast released last month, Mr. Kennedy made one of his most sensational claims to date about vaccines, arguing “there is no vaccine that is safe and effective.”

The KFF survey found that more than a quarter of participants also believed that the Covid vaccines have been proven to cause infertility – despite there being no evidence that the Covid shot affects male or female fertility.

The study, the Health Misinformation Tracking Poll Pilot, was conducted from May 23 to June 12 and involved 2,007 adults. It looked at false claims related to Covid and vaccines, reproductive health and firearms. The most widespread claims of disinformation have had to do with Covid and vaccines.

About 10 percent of respondents said the claim that Covid vaccines killed thousands of healthy people was “definitely true,” while 23 percent said it was “probably true.”

There has been a conspiracy in recent years that the population-level Covid vaccines have caused a spike in heart problems in healthy young people.

But data from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) shows that cardiac deaths among Americans under the age of 34 are similar to pre-pandemic levels.

Vaccines have been associated with a very small risk of myocarditis in young people, affecting about one in 30,000 under 40s after their second shot.

But cases are normally mild and clear up on their own, without medical intervention. Covid infection is also more likely to cause myocarditis than the vaccines, studies show.

About 23 percent of the survey participants also said that the statement “The MMR vaccines have been proven to cause autism in children” was “definitely” or “probably” true.

Claims that vaccines can cause autism have been made by anti-vaxxers for nearly 25 years, but the connection has been repeatedly disproven.

Disgraced British physician Andrew Wakefield made this claim in a now-repealed 1998 Lancet study.

Dr. Richard Horton, editor of The Lancet, publicly described the research as “fundamentally flawed” in 2004 — nine years after it was published.

Dr. Horton claimed that Andrew Wakefield, the gastroenterologist behind the paper, was paid by a group that filed lawsuits against vaccine manufacturers.

The prestigious medical journal eventually retracted the article in 2010.

Just three months after his papers were revoked, Wakefield was banned by the General Medical Council from practicing medicine in Britain.

In 2011, the British Medical Journal conducted a damning investigation of the findings of Wakefield’s original study.

The study found that only two of 12 children developed autistic symptoms after being vaccinated – as opposed to the eight Wakefield claimed.

Since then, studies involving millions of children have failed to find a link between the MMR vaccine and the neurodevelopmental disorder.

But growing concern about vaccines during Covid has led to a drop in childhood vaccination rates.

Measles is so contagious that about 95 percent of the population must be vaccinated to achieve herd immunity. But MMR coverage was only 93 percent nationwide among preschoolers in the US this year.

In 2021, a record nearly 40 million children missed their measles vaccine, according to the CDC.

This was attributed to disinformation about Covid vaccines scaring parents, leading them to reject normal childhood vaccinations, despite immunizations being the most effective way to protect children from measles.

In December 2022, a measles outbreak in Ohio had more than 80 children contracting the viral infection. Almost all cases involved unvaccinated children.