You may do anything you like to your child; as long as I have the legal right to refuse any medical treatment that I feel is dangerous for my child. I believe the MMR to be a very dangerous live virus vaccine, particularly after infants received 187 mg of ethlmercury (thimerosal) in the first two years of life.

Diana, Clinton, MI

As a paretn of 3 children I can definately speak from experience. When I had my first two children and I wasn't aware of the effects of all immunizations and got them immunized, not all the way thank God. When I had my third son, whom is almost two, I have never immunized him and never will. My last son has not had one health issue at all. My second one was diagnosed with asthma, which I control by regular check up with the chiropracter. I really don't have much use for none of the medical field because I feel like they are all full of lies and want our money. The shots are killing and robbing our babies of the most important thing their life. Please research and dig to find the truth about these shots, don't depend on poeple who are suppose to keep us healthy to tell you the truth. I have done years of research and will never put another shot in any of my children

stephanie, bowling green, kentucky

At this moment I am trying to stay calm at some of the emails sent in Yes Ignorance is bliss when you are not in full knowledge of the facts. MMR does not cause autism, it maybe a trigger in some children resulting in autism there is a difference. Which may explain why only a percentage of children have the bowel condition. Please open your eyes to the wider picture. Putting the Autism issue to one side I would like to know why my son had his MMR at seventeen months, up until then he had not had one illness since being born and ate a normal diet. After MMR developed chronic diarrhoea and vomiting everyday and was no longer able to eat a normal diet, and finished up in hospital twice WHY? Fact not my memory playing tricks on me, by the way I know when children develop I am a qualified nursery nurse. My child use to roll round on the floor screaming in pain well diarrhoea ran down his legs, He did this for two years well the medical profession stood by until I contacted Dr Wakefield, it is very easy for people to sit in Ivory towers judging us parents without the facts.
My Son is not retarded this just shows the ignorance, no thanks to the medical profession, but he is a wonderful young man that I have worked very hard to get him where he is now, I don’t see pound signs, that’s the pham companies or do people really think they not in the business to make money.

Tracy, staffordshire,

Ignorance is bliss.
People making medical decisions based on hearsay and hazy memories of when there child changed from being intelligent and thriving and hey presto he/she just became autistic within a few days of receiving the MMR jab. Or are they too frightnened to admit they never noticed the signs before that, or perhaps they see pound signs because they can blame a drug company. Perhaps a closer look at the parents is required rather than the vaccine.

Ryan, newcastle,

Dr Wakefield is a disgrace to the medical profession specifically and to the scientific community at large. His research has repeatedly been shown to be flawed and without merit, yet he still continues to try and profit from the furore he has caused. It is a shame that some misguided and perhaps desperate parents still support this man despite the overwhelming evidence against him.

To claim that the current action against him is a witch hunt is to ignore the evidence and, instead, to favour a conspiracy theory of an overbearing and centralised scientific community joining together to silence a brave dissenter. The reality is that the governing body of the professional organisation to which Wakefield belongs is performing its proper function to investigate and, if found guilty, punish its members' misconduct.

Steve Murphy, Bolton, UK

Being a vaccine victim myself I am aghast that the doctors can inflict so much pain on trillions of babies all over the world. If only the medical community experienced the pain that we have been suffering for decades they would certainly come to their senses. There is nothing healthy in "healthcare" today. We all know it. But some of us, including the media, don't want to admit it. Sometimes the truth hurts, and hurts like hell. Maybe even more than the jabs.

Jagannath Chatterjee, Bhubaneswar, Orissa, India

I can't understand why, given the usual moral panic whenever the word "paedophile" is mentioned, people are siding with this guy - he illicitly took blood samples without any form of consent whatsoever from parent or child.

This guy needs sending down, for his hugely questionable methods of bribing children for their blood and for scaremongering over the MMR jab. Then we need to find out if there really is any link between MMR and autism, probably likely some are more predisposed to it than others. I've had it about 4 times and it's not done anything to me.

Ask yourself this - would you rather have your child autistic (maybe) or blind/deaf/sterile/encephalitic as a result of any of these illnesses. Never mind the risk of passing it on to other people's children.

Martin, St Andrews, Scotland

Whilst the impact of medication on any individual is to be lamented, the scientifically accepted facts are that Wakefiled and his cohorts were neither as complete or as independent in their scientific analysis.

I am wondering about the silent majority (once again) of parents who have been through the ringer un-necessarily. My children were vaccinated using the MMR protocol and they were vaccinated within the broader global immunity the UK had at that time.

I now feel a lot more empathy with parents (including my brothers) who have the real anguish of having to wait until their children are old enough for the vaccine in the hope that the indiscriminate viruses do not attack in the intervening period.

The reason for the drop in herd immunity? Well that would be parents, who having never been denied private prescriptions, decidied that the nation should pay for their consternation? Who pays for afflicted 6 month old and their care needs in the future? Wakefield? I think not!

Christopher , Reading, UK

Dr Wakefield's research may have been unauthorised but the point is elsewhere. Certain jabs appear to have dangerous side effect which means that the pros and cons of having some of them (being protected against a disease that one may be unlikely to come across vs. having a small propability of a nasty side effect) may need to be reestimated. A similar debate exists re the Hepatitis B jab in France. Unfortunately it seems difficult to have a non-passionate debate about those issues. Jabs manufacturers are unlikely to favour those discussions for obvious reasons and there is very limited funding for research which try and challenge main stream vaccination culture ("the more vaccines the better").

Philippe, London,

Talk about shooting the messenger! i notice they're not arguing about his results. this is just a case of anything goes to stop the boat being rocked.

Philip Barnes, Preston,

The situation is that there is there is that the scientific evidence, as presented in multiple studies has found no connection between MMR (or indeed, any vaccine) and autism. The triple jab is safe, and from public health grounds is by far preferable to individual jabs. The government's responsibility is to provide the treatment that best ensures the highest possible immunity throughout the community - which means the triple jab. This provides protection quicker and ensures that the chance of incomplete immunisation (through missed shots, for example) is lower. The responsible choice is the triple jab, though if parents wish to independently pay for single jabs, well that's their choice.

Ross, Bristol,

Dig-up all the dirt you want its a set-up for a scapegoat!
Nothing more Nothing Less!

Charles Linskaill, Edinburgh, UK

Oh, please. The MMR vaccine is the innocent bystander in the witch-hunt to find something to blame for autism. As a parent I feel for those whose children are afflicted with autism, but to withhold vaccinations is criminal. As a medical student in Africa I saw babies die from measles. As a doctor I have met young men who are infertile from mumps orchitis. And what young mother wants to discover that her child is profoundly deaf because her parents failed to vaccinate her against rubella as a child? These diseases are preventable and children can die from them. It is the disease that the child's immune system cannot cope with, not the vaccine. How many more children need to suffer before the anti-vaccination lobby is finally and properly silenced?

Rachel Stanton, Edinburgh, UK

I am concerned too that Dr Wakefield and colleagues are being pursued, not for technical reasons, but because they have incurred the wrath of the Government.

Publishing results of research in medical journals allows peer review. And that's where the debate belongs, not in trumped-up discipinary proceedings. Uncormfortable as it may be for public health policy, research and indeed dissent must be encouraged.

Should this sham trial proceed to the disqualifiatin of the three researchers then this will be the equivalent of the Government's crushing the BBC after the Iraq war.

Richard, Bakewell , UK

The main problem facing concerned parents is that professionals and especially the GMC, have shown themselves to be untrustworthy. Likewise Government scientists, are so closely controlled in the interests of their political masters, that they have also become untrustworthy.

1 in 100 children in this country have autism. Translate that onto the ground and you have an enormous number of parents or damaged children, who have no recourse but to fight unwilling authorities who lie and lie and lie again, rather than give the Statemented help. I have experience of that because of my autistic grandchild.

It's time to stop the patenting of vaccines. That - and its cash - is a great cause of the cover-ups which are known to take place.

Dr Wakefield comes across as more honest than those mentioned above.. and he's trying to help.

Charlotte Peters Rock, Knutsford,

Parents want help, parents want research, there are now 1:100 children with autism why is this acceptable. Why are the government taking no notice of medically damaged children, whose lives are adversley affected after vaccinations, not just the MMR but the 19 vaccinations they are given by the age of 4 months. Why the urgency to vaccinate babies, there immune systems are not capable of dealing with vaccines & toxins that are put in as preservatives. As parents we are told not to give our child calpol before the age of 3 months! but we can give 19 vaccinations no problem. 32 in total by age 5.

larissa, kent,

A witchhunt against Dr. Wakefield, you say? The man performed unethical and invasive on autistic children, made a claim that he found the measles virus in the gut, when an associate of his, Dr. Chadwick, proved them to be false positives, as testified in the ongoing "Autism Omnibus" hearings in the States. Oh and far from being the "honest" and "independant" researcher JABS has attempted to paint him as, he constantly failed to declare a conflict of interest where he received more than £400,000 from the Legal Services Commission and he also filed for a measles single-vaccine months, before the Lancet paper was published.

So what do we have in return for all this? Rising cases of three dangerous and fatal diseases and a load of JABS-trap from those claiming Dr. Wakefield is subject to a witch-hunt.

M Abbas, Birmingham (ENG),

It's a disgrace this man and his colleagues are being pursued like this - The public should be able to decide for themselves; We should have easy access to having these three vaccinations separately, as we used to - it should be our choice and right should we wish to pay for it. Yet another glaring example of the rigid, authoritarian thinking and ignorant arrogance that has so epitomised this Labour Government.

Andrew Iddon, London, UK

If your child had been injured by the MMR as ours has, your faith in vaccine manufacturers and the Government's glib reassurance on the safety of this vaccine would be shattered forever.
We have spent 9 yrs trying to put our son back together again, mentally and physically. I would not wish his and our pain on anyone else. These children need justice. They need to have their day in court. This witchhunt against Wakefield is outrageous and a convenient smokescreen for Big Pharma.

Sue Lawson, North Yorks, UK

If the government was honest and companies had nothing to hide then surely they would not try to gag independent scientists and doctors who try to give warnings against vaccines. Its common sense that vaccine producers are making billions of dollors are the expense of lives of other people’s children. They dont care whether thousands of kids suffering life long disability from their harmful vaccines. Its all a big money game.

Peter Anderson, Manchester, UK

I feel very sorry forR Preece and your nephew, but what needs to be remembered that at the time children are given the MMR jab lots of other changes take place. Just because MMR was given at the time does not mean it caused it.

Wakefields study was so unscientific and only on a sample of 12 children. There have been so many studies with far greater science behind them showing MMR to be safe. Wakefield has probably caused more children to suffer by making them miss important vacinations

John, Scotland, Scotland

I cannot understand why he is on trial , this can only be a witch hunt . I wonder who's the driving force behind this ? I would have to agree that it must be the drug companies following the same kind of aggressive defence that worked for the Government against the BBC after the Kelly affair .

Benzo, Nr Chelmsford,

As a parent my heart goes out to those parents whose children have been diagnosed with autism. When things don't go quite as we planned, it helps if there is an explanation and if there is none, the vunerable tend to gravitate to those who claim to have one. Remember the Cook Report and its flawed claims that toxic fumes emitted from certain types of mattresses caused cot deaths. From the press reports, Dr Wakefield's research was not objective; he was commissioned by a firm of lawyers to find a link between the vaccine and autism in support of pending litigation. He should have made that clear when publishing his paper so that it could be properly considered in context. After all this time, no link has been proved between the MMR vaccine and autism. The outcome of this debacle has been a resurgence in measles, putting lots of children unnecessarily at risk. Canthe academics please, no matter how meaning, stop scaring parents with their sensational unproved theories.

Stephen , Newcastle upon Tyne,

This is a witchhunt against Dr Wakefield ..My personal experience is that of my nephew .. A lovely normal happy little boy until he had the MMR triple vaccine and suddenly that lovely boy was changed for ever . Now 19 he has no chance of a normal life and we blame it on the triple jab . The powers that be only continue to refute the charge because the compensation bills would be astronomical . If Dr wakefield is charged no other person will ever come forward to say something is wrong with a certain drug and we,ll have another thalidomide on our hands . hang your heads in shame all who dismiss dr Wakefields evidence

R Preece, Malveren , Worcestershire

Give us the choice......allow us to be able to have single jabs on the NHS as well! As long as you push MMR AND prevent us having single jabs, the public will continue to distrust the medical authorities - a truth too manifest to be contradicted.

Phil, Preston,