Musket, never let the facts stand in the way of a good rant!

I won't bore 'catters with chapter and verse - it's all there for the taking at great length on Wikipedia anyway. Just to summarise: Wakefield was taking money (large, very large amounts of it) from a commercial interest which was marketing a competitor product to the MMR vaccine and which had a vested interest in getting MMR off the market. To advance the hypothesis that it caused autism, Wakefield did a lot of very, very dodgy research during which he put numerous children at risk (he was struck off the medical register for it), falsified results, incorrectly controlled his trials and published these results in respected medical journals. Read the reports if you don't believe me.

The hypothesis that MMR causes autism is still around, but there is no (as in none, zilch, nada) evidence to support it. And no-one has yet been able to evidentially prove any causative link between autism and any other factor, environmental, food, medicine or whatever.

Not to say that there aren't stll people out there loudly and shrilly declaiming that they have such proof and its all a Big Business conspiracy to shut them up. Some are dodgy doctors, some have other varieties of professional qualifications, but none of them seem to have much, if any grasp of statistical theory applied to epedemiology.