The vaccine community bitterly contests Wakefield's measles claims. Brent Taylor, who, like Wakefield, serves at the Royal Free Hospital in London, completed a study this year that showed no epidemiological evidence for a measles vaccine-autism link. Wakefield's studies of the measles vaccine, which appeared in the Lancet, have received enormous press attention in the United Kingdom. Two of the new cases were infants who had to be hospitalized with pneumonia complications. Wakefield acknowledges that his is a hypothesis.
Government scientists are skeptical.
For Schwartz and many others, the fact that a significant portion of autistic kids regress into silence shortly after their MMR shots is just a sad coincidence. A small group of scientists hypothesize that low-grade infections caused by live viruses in MMR and other vaccines may overwhelm the immune systems of a small percentage of toddlers. Proving this requires complex experiments in an arcane field called neuroimmunology. Neurologist Candace Pert and her virologist husband Michael Ruff, co-directors of Georgetown University's Institute For New Medicine, are members of this cutting edge, or fringe, as the case may be. They step lively where most scientists fear to tread.