I have a medical background having been a medical student and coming from a medical family, father was a doctor, mother a night sister at Birmingham Children's Hospital having trained at Great Ormond Street Hospital, and my brother was a doctor. One of my aunts was also a doctor, teaching Anatomy at Dalhousie Univerity in Canada.
Having been involved in research for the early part of my working life with a big multi-national I have seen how easily scientific work gets corrupted for the benefit of big business. Personally i believe that there is something in this. I have two grandchildren, they both received the MMR vaccine. One is now diagnosed as being Autistic and the other one is awaiting evaluation as he is not yet 3. My eldest grandchild went into retrograde development soon after receiving the MMR vaccination. He cannot speak properly yet and toilet training is very difficult. He started at Nursery school but had to be taken out as the staff could not cope with him. There has never been a case of autism in my family or my sons wife's family.
It should be noted that Dr. Wakefield's paper for the CDC was a case study and not a case controlled study and his summary was to suggest more research was done on a case controlled study, something the CDC and its BigPharma masters have refused to do. Certainly a lot more research into vaccines and bacterins is needed. From what I have seen, Merck & Co makes safety secondary to profits. There are questions over a number of its products, Gardasil being another one. The same goes for it veterinary products. Nobivac L4 killed my lovely 5 year old Akita, having had to have her put to sleep after 6 weeks of illness following the second part of the injection. This same company also produced the "safe" painkiller, Vioxx, which possibly killed as many as 3 million Americans. When it comes to safety versus profit, profit wins every time.