I don't know much about medical science and vaccination...
...but I do know smear jobs when I see them.

Maybe Andrew Wakefield is completely bonkers, and MMR is safe and there is no risk of any complications from the vaccine.

Maybe Andrew Wakefield is onto something, and there is something amiss with the MMR vaccine which warrants further study.

I don't know the scientific merits of the case.

However, I do know the vilification that Wakefield got in the media, which naturally leads one to wonder just who was behind it, and with what motives.

If Wakefield was a completely off-the-wall fruitcake, and his ideas about MMR and autism had no basis in proper science, why was such a smear job carried out against him? Why wasn't he just ignored as a loony and left alone to moulder in obscurity?
( flake has nothing against your right leg, Wed 25 Feb 2009, 0:50, 1 reply)

The scientific paper
which Wakefield wrote should never have been published according to one of my lecturers. She told us that anyone with a knowledge of science would have been able to pick apart his research methods. Journalists with no knowledge of such matters took the paper at face value and ran with it.

It is also claimed that he was asked to find a link by a group of people who believed the MMR vaccine caused the autism in their children. So he wasn't being objective.
(ToysForBigBoys would spread her legs for Nick Clegg., Wed 25 Feb 2009, 9:59, closed)

Also, he lied.
It turned out recently that a lot of the already rather poor data that all this scare was based on was falsified. And yeah, IIRC he was hired to *find* a link by a group who were going to court over it.
(julius, Wed 25 Feb 2009, 10:14, closed)