Andrew Wakefield is a Fraud

The anti-vaccine debate is something that has been raging for over a decade.  The debate started in 1998 when British doctor Andrew Wakefield published a study that said vaccines may cause autism in toddlers.  The result was that millions of parents refused to vaccinate their children, decided to space vaccines out, or also selectively vaccinate their children.  The result was that many children were sickened by vaccine-preventable diseases and some died.  There were people who were vaccinated and came down with the illnesses because their vaccines weren't enough to give them full immunity.  Some diseases that were almost non-existant in some areas made comebacks among those unvaccinated populations.
This anti-vaccine debate boils my blood.  First, the risks of vaccinating are low.  They are so low that in fact, when someone does have a reaction to a vaccine, doctors are not sure if the vaccine caused the distress or something else.  Even then, the risk of getting the infectious disease is far worse with not vaccinating than to worry about a reaction to the shot.  Not vaccinating is a deadly choice because vaccinations have saved billions of lives.
One reason why there is the vaccine debate is because the current generation of parents has forgotten the history of vaccinating.  Up to the turn of the 20th century, many children died before the age of five years due to childhood diseases.  Measles, Mumps, Pertussis (Whooping Cough), Scarlet Fever, and others were things that nearly every family dealt with.  The Polio outbreak of the 1950s sent thousands of children into iron lungs, sometimes for life.  Jonas Salk was hailed as a hero when he made the Polio vaccine.
Do we really want to go back to having those childhood diseases?  Some parents these days have gone as far as to purposely expose their children to diseases.  Grassroots efforts have started "Measles Parties" and even "Flu Parties" where people will bring their healthy children into contact with sick children because they think getting the disease will benefit their kids somehow.  They think getting a disease will help their children's immune systems to get a "workout".
Now, there is no proof at all that vaccines cause autism.  Andrew Wakefield worked with a dozen cases and it has been proven that he has tweaked the results in order for it to look like autism was caused by vaccines.  It is a coincidence that autism symptoms show up when a child has their vaccines because both happen in toddlerhood.
Unfortunately, it will still take years for this debate to be cleaned up, because there are still some people who think that vaccinations are unhealthy.  Those people have been hindering the eradication of many diseases from the public sphere. I do hope that the unmasking of this fraud will make those parents wake up to the reality that vaccines need to be given to children.
This isn't the only time a fraud has caused such a stir.  Piltdown Man ruined many careers in paleontology.  There are still people who are blaming vaccines for Rheumatoid Arthritis, Diabetes, Pervasive Development Disorder (PDD), and Fibromyalgia.  It will take much more research to convince some people that they should vaccinate.  At least there has been more research directed at autism, that is one good thing about this.