Dr. Andrew Wakefield, who coauthored a paper suggesting a potential link between autism and Measles-Mumps-Rubella vaccine, is one of the most vilified medical practitioners of recent times. He carries the extremely rare dishonor of a retraction of his paper in The Lancet medical journal.
History will ultimately judge who was right and who was wrong about proposing a possible association between vaccination and autistic spectrum disorder. But while Wakefield's critics can condemn, retract, decry and de-license all they want, that does nothing to stop or alter the march of science. The evidence that autism is increasing at alarming rates is now so irrefutable that, finally, the U.S. federal government is climbing aboard the environmental research bandwagon.
Those who have protested with shrill certainty that autism is almost purely genetic, and not environmental in nature, and therefore not really increasing at all, will hopefully recede from the debate. And if those people were dead wrong about environmental factors in autism, couldn’t they also be mistaken in their equally heated denials about a possible vaccine-autism link?
There are now at least six published legal or scientific cases of children regressing into autistic spectrum disorder following vaccination -- and many more will be revealed in due time. More than 1,300 cases of vaccine injuries have been paid out in vaccine court, in which the court ruled that childhood immunizations caused encephalopathy (brain disease), encephalitis (brain swelling) or seizure disorders. Encephalopathy or encephalitis are found in most if not all ASD cases, and seizure disorders in about a third of them.
Nobody seriously thinks that the retraction of The Lancet article, and the international vilification of Dr. Andrew Wakefield, will do anything to make this debate go away. And they are right.