Immunisation

Because he's allergic to egg white, in which the vaccines are cultured, they, the medical staff felt that it was safer for him to have his jabs in a controlled environment in case he had an allergic reaction, so that he could be taken care of quickly and effectively. And so we took him to hospital. He had his MMR jab and was absolutely fine. Had absolutely no reaction whatsoever to it, not even a slightly swollen leg or any, you know, anything at all, he was absolutely fine. But he will be having his MMR booster in hospital as well, just to make sure that he's okay.

So there wasn't any reaction at all?

Nothing at all, no, absolutely fine.
 

And after the MMR, did your daughter have any reactions after that?

No, she didn't. She was fine. Her usual self, you know, she was playing. You know, babies, it's just, you know, sometimes there might be side effects. But it's one thing that you have to take your chances I think in protecting your baby. But I didn't have any side effects, my daughter didn't have any side effects with any immunisations.
 

The MMR, you know, I could have chosen any time any day and it was just like a routine appointment at the doctors. I don't seem to, I don't think it was anything different, it wasn't like a clinic as such, it like the primary ones.

And how was she, how were both of them after?

Well absolutely fine. There was, it, there, it wasn't anything like the primary ones. I, I had given them Calpol but they were a lot older, they didn't bother, they didn't have a sleep, it made absolutely no difference to them at all. It didn't give them a temp-, there was, there was just no difference in their behaviour. They had obviously that little lump, a tiny, tiny little lump under the skin where the, the needle had gone in and after a, I can't remember, probably in a few days it had gone. But they, they had no reaction whatsoever in any way, both of them. And in fact my younger daughter suffers from eczema and I had been told by a homeopath to be very careful in my decision-making she said, because she felt that it would exacerbate her eczema. But there wasn't even that reaction in her skin.
 

When the link was first suggested in the media of a link between MMR and autism, obviously I looked into it very carefully, because this was just at the time when my son had been diagnosed, or a couple of years after he'd been diagnosed as autistic. His autism was quite profound and very troublesome at the time. And I was obviously very interested to look into any possible explanation for the development of this condition, and particularly anything that might suggest some intervention, which might be effective. So I looked at it very carefully. And I must say from the outset I was really shocked by how insubstantial the so-called case linking, the evidence linking MMR and autism actually was. If you looked at that original Lancet paper that caused the furore, it was based on a very small number of cases. There was no actual evidence presented in the paper of a link between MMR and autism beyond the conviction of eight of the twelve parents, parents of eight of the twelve children that they believed that there was a link. But no actual evidence of any such link. And indeed although the team that was promoting this idea indicated their intention to produce evidence of the link subsequently through virological studies, through epidemiological studies, they have conclusively failed to do that over the over the five, six, seven years since.  

And I think the great surprise and really the shock of the MMR thing is how such an insubstantial theory ended up having such an impact. And I think there's a number of reasons why that happened. But I think it's had a very unfortunate effect. But certainly from the outset, I must say looking into it I found it utterly unconvincing.

I sympathise very much with the experience of parents who have had that experience of having a child who's developed apparently perfectly normally up to a certain stage, often 12, 18 months, longer, and then appeared to regress into a state of autism. And I'm sympathetic with that experience because I've had that experience, because that's exactly what happened to us. I mean our son [name] appeared to be developing perfectly normally until about 18 months and then appeared to regress. And I can well understand that parents who found that time of regression coincided to some extent with the MMR immunisation might link the two. Although it's always somewhat difficult because the regression is never an overnight phenomenon. In my experience it's a gradual process, takes place over a few weeks rather than a few days, indeed months. Whereas obviously immunisation is a definite event. But nonetheless I can see if the immunisation took place around that time that you might link the two. Now in our case the immunisation, when we look back, because we never thought of any link at the time. 

And it turned out that we noted the signs of his regression from about the Christmas and that he'd had the MMR in the August. So it was about four months before, when he was just over 12 months old. And, which is right round about the normal time that children have it. He was about 14 months when he had it. But we never noticed anything at the time. And in retrospect it didn't seem to be any link either, because it was four months later. So some people might say, 'Well, it was four months later but maybe there was some relation'. But we'd certainly never thought of any. And honestly it never seemed at all plausible.