His paper speculated that the MMR vaccine might be linked to a behavioral syndrome that included symptoms of autism. While the publicity around Wakefield’s paper precipitated a dramatic drop in vaccination against measles, the paper itself concluded, “We did not prove an association between measles, mumps, and rubella vaccine and the syndrome described,” and the primary finding was that more research was needed. Over the next decade, study after study would fail to find a link between the MMR vaccine and autism, and even researchers sympathetic to Wakefield’s hypothesis were unable to
...more
