Up to 1 in 50 children can have this condition. It is therefore not rare but rarely diagnosed before vaccination occurs. It is also a fairly recent discovery but that doesn’t negate the fact that it could be responsible for the thousands of children whose parents believe their Autism is linked to vaccines. You are dismissing any causal link by stating the causal link! That doesn’t make sciantific sense. There should be mandatory health checks for such conditions before routine vaccinations commence don’t you think? Or are a few thousand damaged children a year an acceptable consequence?

Admin edit: Just because you have read that from Kirby et al it doesn’t make it true. You are long on assertion, short on fact.

Admin edit: so could many people. What about the parents and people who post at LB/RB who have very different experiences and opinions to yours?

In the UK there is a tendency to think that MMR has only been available since the 1990s because that is when it was introduced here – unlike the US where it was available from the 1970s.

Not everyone is going to be a scientist, that’s a given. HOWEVER, everyone is going to make decisions ABOUT science in their lifetime: whether it’s about their health, or whether to vote for embryonic stem cell research, or how to read food labels.

We need a thread in school science that teaches people to do that. Kids need to learn what good scientific method looks like, how to ask the right questions, how to follow an argument, where to look for the information they need to make an informed decision, how to weigh the ethics of a new scientific discovery. If the general populace had known how to ask the right questions, Wakefield would have been outed before he did all that damage.

The first thing people in their late 30s would have thought was, “Wait. *I* received an MMR jab. It has been out since ca. 1970. SURELY, had there been a statistically significant increase in autism, SOMEONE would have noticed it over the last 30-odd years. Over to you, Dr Wakefield. Care to answer that?”

We’ve become a culture of ‘quick fixes’ and style over substance – the anathema of good science. That’s why people like Patrick Holford, Gillian McKeith, etc. have been allowed such free rein – they promise simple, novel fixes. No need to look beneath the surface or consider multiple factors. It’s the ‘guru complex’ – someone else is telling me what to do and responsibility for my life is taken away from me.

It doesn’t excuse them, by any stretch. But we the people shouldn’t be excused for abdicating our responsibility to look at what’s really going on rather than accepting something this dangerous at face value.

People need to take a really hard look at what life was like before vaccines – very few remember polio and measle epidemics and the horrific complications and deaths that can ensue. If what I’m hearing is correct, we’re already well below herd immunity levels – minimum is 85% and for something like pertussis, it’s closer to 95%, IIRC.

Please, folks, make sure your children receive their jabs – if you need to be convinced, I’m sure my mother, who is a paediatrician who has practiced in Pakistan, could give you some graphic descriptions that would make you forget anything Holford and Wakefield have to say.