What was claimed
The rising number of vaccine doses given to children explains why autism rates have risen.
Our verdict
False. Although children do receive more vaccine doses than in the past, and recorded rates of autism are higher, vaccines definitely don’t cause autism.
A post on Instagram shared an image that claimed to show the rising number of vaccine doses children receive, along with the rising autism rate over the same time. A caption on the post says “Some of you are just rubbish at spotting patterns”.
Setting aside whether the numbers in the image are accurate for the moment, the implication that vaccines cause autism is false. Abundant evidence proves that vaccines do not cause autism.
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Recorded autism rates have indeed risen substantially in recent decades, as this post suggests. But that doesn’t mean that autism is occurring more often. Instead, these rises reflect the gradually widening definition of autism being used, and improvements in identifying it.
The US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) reports rising autism rates in its childhood surveillance this century—including a rate of about 1 in 31 among 8-year-olds in 2022, which is close to the rate of 1 in 32 in 2024 quoted by this post. (The CDC also reported these figures before the current Trump administration, which has released misleading information about the causes of autism.) Rates of around 1 in 10,000 in the 1980s have been reported too.
Research published in 2021 suggests that autism rates among children and young people in the UK were about one in 57 in 2017, and had been rising, which is roughly in line with the figures in this post.
Its claims about the number of vaccines children received do not line up with UK figures, however. By our calculations, which we explained in a fact check in 2023, the maximum number of vaccine doses that a child here might expect to receive at the time was about 40—far below the 74 doses this post claimed for 2018, or the 90 doses for 2024.
The figures are somewhat closer to reality in the US. As we explained in a different fact check in 2019, the recommended number of doses was 11 (not 10) in 1983, and 35 (or 53 including flu doses) in 2013 (not 32). We’ve seen various figures on the number of vaccine doses currently received in the US, but they don’t mean there’s any link between vaccines and autism whether they’re accurate or not.
Other fact checkers have also written about different versions of this claim in the past.
This article is part of our work fact checking potentially false pictures, videos and stories on Facebook. You can read more about this—and find out how to report Facebook content—here. For the purposes of that scheme, we’ve rated this claim as missing context because vaccines have not caused a rise in the recorded autism rate.
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