Can I just say: PIMS - you are engaging in trollery on a thread involving vaccine damage and sometimes, the parents of damaged children. Yes, I have reported you for trolling behaviour.
Seeker: you are engaged in classic bullying behaviour. Disappearing when you are non-plussed, because you can't stand up for yourself, and coming back with sarcasm and sniping when you think you can egg someone else on.
A conclusion for me is that many pro-vaccinists do not understand their own stance. They do not understand how absolutist they are on MMR: and how that absolutism results from their views in the wider vaccine debate. They allow their views on vaccines generally to affect their views on MMR.
In reality: the MMR link stands alone to be proved or disproved. The pro-vaccine lobby would like to attach it to the general vaccine debate.
This is because the entire vaccine icon teeters, at present, on the MMR question. If only one case is admitted of MMR-autism in a "normal" child, the floodgates will open.
No one will trust governments or pharmaceuticals on the issue of vaccines, vaccine take up will plummet, compensation will almost bankrupt producers. If Wakefield is allowed any credibility at all, the absolutist stance - "NO" link at all - of the pro-vaccine brigade will be profoundly undermined.
This is why the "no link" stance is so fiercely defended, although it is not proved, although the evidence shows otherwise, this is why trolls and bullies appear on these threads. The last one, for example, had people posting "amusing" videos of a vaccine damaged child and comedy poems rhyming "ballistic" with "autistic".
The reports I gave all came from neurologists and doctors' reports all FULLY ACKNOWLEDGED by Wakefield before the study, during the study and when reporting his findings. I will have to look up the rest but I am confident the pattern will continue.
I'm leaving the thread: indeed, leaving MN. So now I can say this with impunity: it's partly because of the bullying, mainly because of the sheer callousness of posters on this particular board, and partly because I've realised that I'm spending time arguing with some rather stupid people that I wouldn't waste a moment on in real life. So basically - I need to go and get a life.
Good luck and best wishes to silver, Tabitha, Beachcomber, pag and bubbley in efforts regarding familes and wider issues. And rosi too, though I can't say I read much of yours but your energy is quite something