Are you kidding? I hope to god you’re kidding.

Look at who is on the “there’s no link side” - the CDC; the American Academy of Pediatrics; an academic pediatrician vaccine specialist at the best pediatrics hospital in the country; the FDA; and the NIH.

On the other side: a northern Florida non-profit run by a Toni Krehel, AP; the Autism Research Institute; a non-peer reviewed book; Jenny McCarthy and her organization; and a personal blog by a non-scientist.

On one side, that is, you have the entirety of all the opinions of all mainstream science and medicine in this country; and on the other you have a couple of people, half of whom have no training or credentials of any kind.

If you are truly going to throw up your hands and say, well, there’s no way of knowing, then you should stop blogging on this subject entirely. There is NO CONTROVERSY HERE: and you are hurting people by pretending that there is one.

Could this be a cause of rising autism? Isn’t that why some people say that vaccines cause autism? Because of the mercury? I don’t know if mercury will cause autism but here is some more information on the study I found: http://blog.calorie-help.com/2009/02/09/high-fructose-corn-syrup-andautism/

Andrew Wakefield, the UK physician who first claimed a connection between the MMR vaccine and autism, fabricated most of his data.

The most in-depth review is at Science-Based Medicine.

http://www.sciencebasedmedicine.org/?p=370

Antivaccine hero Andrew Wakefield: Scientific fraud?
Published by David Gorski under Science and the Media, Vaccines
Comments: 11

Pity poor Andrew Wakefield.

Actually, on second thought, Wakefield deserves no pity at all. After all, he is the man who almost single-handedly launched the scare over the MMR vaccine in Britain when he published his infamous Lancet paper in 1998 in which he claimed to have linked the MMR vaccine to regressive autism and inflammation of the colon, a study that was followed up four years later with a paper that claimed to have found the strain of attenuated measles virus in the MMR in the colons of autistic children by polymerase chain reaction (PCR). It would be one thing if these studies were sound science. If that were the case, then Wakefield’s work would have been very important and would have correctly cast doubt on the safety of the MMR. Unfortunately, they were not, and, indeed, most of the authors of the 1998 Lancet paper later withdrew their names from it.

I’ve done another round-up post — who is saying what about the Deer articles on Wakefield in the London Times.

11 years on, Wakefield Manufactured Data showing MMR-Autism Link?

However the last study mentioned did not find autism was not caused by vaccines or a series of vaccines. It simply found that earlier data showing the MMR vaccine virus strain in the digestive systems of autistic children was inaccurate. That is far from proving that autism is not caused by or made worse by vaccines.

I know of mommas who have never vaccinated their child, have never been vaccinated themselves and had intervention and drug free pregnancies/homebirths but still have a child with autism. I also know other mommas who have had their child regress significantly after receiving vaccines so as you said at the end, we’re back to square one.

In the case of my kiddos, my vote goes for a genetic predisposition to autism/Asperger’s syndrome.