“Vaccines are safe and do not cause autism. We know this from decades of high-quality research, such as a study in Denmark involving more than half a million children.

Instead, autism is mostly explained by genetics. It is part of who children are, and not an accident, illness, disease, or event. The vaccine myth - which emerged in the late 1990’s from fraudulent research - is categorically untrue. But it continues to haunt and hurt children and families today.

There is the emotional toll that comes with parents being told that they did something wrong. There is the physical toll that comes when children are denied immunisations that safeguard their health and sometimes save their lives.

There is the emotional toll that comes with telling autistic people that they are somehow broken, and in need of cure. And there is the financial toll, when huge sums of money are wasted on research that goes over the same old ground, hoping for a different answer.

Everyone wants better outcomes for autistic children and their families. Rather than prop up and propagate the vaccine myth, we need to be investing in science, services, and supports that have a genuine positive impact on their lives.”

"Robert F Kennedy Jr, the head of the US Department of Health and Human Services, has campaigned against COVID-19 vaccines since 2020. He has sacked the leading vaccine advisory committee, the Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices (ACIP), and appointed people with limited vaccine expertise, some of whom have a history of anti-vaccination campaigning.

The ACIP will meet this week, and there are reports of a plan to present research that misrepresents data from a database designed to monitor vaccine safety, called VAERS. The VAERS database allows people to report an adverse event following immunisation. It doesn’t restrict what is reported, and you see a huge variety of reports, from a true vaccine reaction to a car accident on the drive home from the vaccination appointment. To know if the vaccine caused the problem, you need further investigations. So, VAERS is only one part of a good vaccine safety investigation system.

Reports also suggest the committee could alter its recommendations for the hepatitis B vaccine. That vaccine is now recommended for all infants at birth. It has helped protect thousands of infants born to mothers who are hepatitis B positive from acquiring that infection during the birth process.

Any changes to the hepatitis B birth dose vaccine recommendations will see a significant decline in vaccination rates. This happened in the US in 1999 after a temporary suspension of the universal recommendation. Many hospitals failed to reinstate their universal vaccination program in a timely way. There were infants born to hepatitis B positive mothers who missed out on protection against hepatitis B - a disease which can become chronic and cause liver disease and cancer later in life. That first day after birth is this window of opportunity for the baby to have something that can protect them from this disease.

The impacts of these possible changes to US vaccine recommendations would be insidious. They could undermine confidence in vaccines, but also make vaccine access harder. As people lose access, vaccination rates will decline even further than they have. The impacts can take a while to show themselves, but the result is more preventable disease. This would be tragic.

In terms of the COVID-19 vaccine that is also on the ACIP agenda, it’s generally very safe. Most people are familiar with the minor side effects, like a sore arm.  The mRNA COVID-19 vaccine carries a very small risk of myocarditis – inflammation of the heart muscle. This is usually a condition that people recover from completely. Some take a while longer to recover, as recent Australian research has shown. In Australia, there was one death reported that was thought to be vaccine-related. On the other hand, for older people especially, having a COVID-19 vaccine reduces their risk of being hospitalised and dying from the disease, as Australian research has found. In the US, 232,000 deaths from COVID-19 could have been prevented if people had had the vaccine, according to a 2022 estimate.

Australians are trying to make sense of all this noise coming out of the US. People want to do what’s best for their health. It’s sad that we’re now having to warn people to be so discerning about what they will hear from the current US government on vaccines.

Fortunately, in Australia, we have multipartisan support for vaccination, and we are well served by our experts who look carefully at the evidence and are committed to vaccine safety. People can continue to trust Australia’s vaccination recommendations. We need to keep an eye on sentiment trends to see if the US-effect is influencing our uptake."

"Vaccines are one of the most powerful public health tools, preventing millions of deaths and long-term health consequences from devastating diseases each year. As they are given to healthy persons to prevent disease, robust surveillance systems are in place in Australia and overseas to monitor their safety and promptly flag any potential issues to regulatory bodies. Adverse events following immunisation (AEFI) include any untoward occurrence that follows a vaccine, including signs, symptoms, or abnormal test results. Importantly, these events are not always caused by the vaccine itself; many occur coincidentally. For example, when large populations are vaccinated, some unrelated conditions will naturally occur around the same time as vaccination.

In Australia, vaccine safety monitoring is robust and informed by multiple sources, including information from peer-reviewed scientific publications and surveillance systems both locally and overseas. Therapeutic Goods Administration (TGA) operates a system comparable to the US Vaccine Events Reporting System (VAERS) and reviews any events identified via voluntary reporting by vaccine service providers, public health units, vaccine recipients or others. This information is publicly available and searchable. They also review whether an event is more likely to occur after a vaccine, compared to the general background rate. Active surveillance is also undertaken in Australia by AusVaxSafety and the Paediatric Active Enhanced Surveillance (PAEDS) collaboration. These systems proactively gather targeted information from vaccine recipients and review medical records to provide a more complete picture of vaccine safety."

What do we know about vaccine safety? 

"COVID-19 has been a global health event of unprecedented impact with recorded cases now estimated to exceed 700 million and deaths exceeding 7 million. While the public health emergency of international concern was declared over on the 5^th of May 2023, the impact of COVID-19 continues. The ability to rapidly develop a number of vaccines that were approved by regulatory bodies and deployed around the world has undoubtedly had a tremendous impact, with estimates suggesting cases averted as a result of vaccination likely to be at least in the 10s of millions and deaths in the 100s of thousands, if not millions.

Vaccines for COVID-19 were able to be developed rapidly due to many important innovations and based on many years of research, preparing to be able to more rapidly respond to a novel emerging pathogen such as that responsible for COVID-19.

All the usual phases of clinical trials (including with placebo controls) were completed with numbers of participants exceeding that usually seen in other similar clinical trials. To achieve regulatory approval, these vaccines (as with all vaccines that are approved by our and other similarly rigorous regulators) demonstrated both high levels of efficacy as well as safety. Once approved, safety as well as effectiveness was continued to be carefully observed, and while it is clear that vaccines for COVID-19 are associated with adverse events (as with essentially any intervention), for the majority of vaccines approved, the rate of related adverse events was such that the benefits outweighed these risks hence these regulatory approvals and associated recommendations have remained in place. The raw number of adverse events may seem high, especially if compared to other vaccines, however, the denominator, or number of doses given in such a short space of time, which is now over 13.5 billion doses of COVID-19 vaccines, does need to be taken into account.

The distinction between correlation and causation also needs to be considered given the majority of the world's population has now been vaccinated. This does not mean that anything bad that happens to anyone is a direct result of having received a COVID-19 vaccine."

On the US Vaccine Adverse Event Reporting System – what it is, its limitations and how it compares to Australia’s vaccine event reporting systems. 

"Adverse event reporting systems are an important part of the ongoing monitoring of the safety of vaccines, both in the USA as well as here in Australia. We do however, need to make sure that this data is interpreted correctly. The reporting of adverse events or deaths that occur after someone has been vaccinated does not necessarily mean the vaccine directly or even indirectly caused the event or death. Once again, the distinction between correlation and causation is important. The VAERS website provides guidance on interpretation to this effect, even stating, 'VAERS collects data on any adverse event following vaccination, be it coincidental or truly caused by a vaccine. The report of an adverse event to VAERS is not documentation that a vaccine caused the event', however, this point is often omitted when this data is used to try to overestimate safety concerns of vaccines (VAERS - Guide to Interpreting VAERS Data)."

On other safety concerns

"When assessing vaccines in clinical trials, for regulatory approval and for ongoing use, safety remains the primary consideration and is very carefully monitored. If it is not abundantly clear that the benefits of a vaccine outweigh the risks that are associated (and there are always some risks), it will not progress through clinical trials, much less be approved and used. Unfortunately, misinformation such as the firmly refuted link between vaccination and autism can cause tremendous harm and undermine trust in vaccination, such that the impact of vaccine preventable diseases is greater than it should be."

"The safety of COVID-19 vaccines has been extensively tested and closely monitored worldwide. In Australia, approved vaccines passed rigorous clinical trials and continue to be tracked through AusVaxSafety—a national surveillance system working with the Therapeutic Goods Administration and health departments to ensure vaccine safety.

Over 6.8 million safety surveys in Australia, and billions of doses globally, confirm that COVID-19 vaccines are safe and effective. Most side effects are mild and short-lived, such as sore arms, tiredness, headaches, muscle aches, and chills.

Rare but serious side effects like myocarditis (heart inflammation) have been linked to mRNA vaccines, especially in males aged 15–40 after the second dose. Another rare condition, TTS, was associated with the AstraZeneca vaccine, which is no longer available for use.

Importantly, no deaths related to COVID-19 vaccination have occurred in children or teens in Australia.

Vaccination remains an important way to protect those at risk of severe COVID-19. Annual boosters are recommended for adults aged 65–74 and those aged 18–64 with severe immunocompromise, while those aged 75+ years of age are advised to receive a booster vaccination every 6 months."