In your new book, “The Autistic Brain,” you seriously entertain possible links between vaccines and autism in children, links that scientists have vehemently dismissed.
Well, there’s only one vaccine that could possibly be a problem, and that’s the measles-mumps-rubella vaccine. Now that they’ve changed the vaccine, it has fewer antigens, and that would make it a lot safer. But with the old version of the vaccine, I have not yet come across a study that looked at regressives — when a child had some speech but lost it.
There has been a highly emotional battle between mothers of autistic children and the scientists who dispute their theories.
I have talked to maybe five or six of those mothers, and that’s the reason I don’t pooh-pooh it. Those mothers have all described the same things. They all have the vaccine, and then they talk about fevers and the weird wailing that started in just a few days. When I brought this up to an expert and asked, “Have you ever studied the regressive group separately?” I got silence.