Competing interests: None declared

I am sure that Andrew Wakefield will offer a detailed and effective rebuttal of all or most of these allegations, and note that apparently no complaints have been made against him by parents. Two factual errors in this report come immediately to light:

"Dr Wakefield also faces charges in relation to a research grant he received from the Legal Aid Board to investigate a possible link between the MMR vaccine and autism on behalf of parents involved in litigation.

"He failed to declare this funding to the Lancet. When the payment was exposed by the Sunday Times newspaper in an investigation in February 2004, the Lancet's editor, Richard Horton, declared it a "fatal conflict of interest.""

It is a matter of record that Wakefield declared the Legal Aid Board commission in a letter to the Lancet 2 May 1998 and this could not have come as news in February 2004, and was not exposed by the Sunday Times. Also incorrect is this statement:

"In March 2004, 10 of the 13 authors of the paper signed a statement retracting its finding of a link between MMR and autism."

There was, of course, no such finding in the paper and the 10 co- authors chose to distance themselves from Andrew Wakefield by retracting "an interpretation". How you can retract something which has never been stated, and how there could be "a fatal conflict" when it was not stated are interesting questions. There seems to be an element of building castles in the air here.

I agree with Jonathan Beard that this prosecution should never have been brought, and will not help to create public trust.

Competing interests: Autistic son

It is sad that the GMC has taken the MMR debate into what appears to be a vindictive cul-de-sac. One suspects that they themselves are not very happy at having been bounced along this road, politically, and by whom? Not by parents. One can only guess that the complainants to the GMC are those who have most to lose from Wakefield's uncovering of a putative regressive autism-gut condition-measles virus linkage. How many people have actually complained? Probably just one or two, whose names may already be known to those who have followed this controversy for the past decade. We can only wonder, of course, as they are screened by anonymity.

Meanwhile, forget this side-show and get back to the science, and the uncomfortable facts. The Wakefield et al Lancet paper of February 1998 offered very strong evidence of a non-coincidental linkage between regressive autism and the gut condition ileal-lymphoid nodular hyperplasia. There are now fourteen other published studies or papers, from a plethora of authors, working in four different contries, that confirm that linkage. In 2001, the Medical Research Council stated that funding further research into the regressive autism-ILNH linkage was a priority. Six years later, not one piece of research has been funded.

Then we turn to the linkage between ILNH and measles virus. Five separate studies/papers have reported on this linkage. And five further studies/papers have linked the measles virus with MMR vaccine. These are strong clues, yet are not being followed up by other scientists. The current GMC hearing is expressly designed to discourage any further would- be researchers from going down that road.

Then we turn to MMR's safety. The Cochrane Collaboration concluded in 2003 that (verbatim quote) "the design and reporting of safety outcomes in MMR vaccine studies, both pre and post marketing, are largely inadequate". In 2005, Cochrane reported that "we found only limited evidence of safety of MMR compared to the single-component vaccine". Isn't that a little worrying? And, if MMR is so safe, how come several hundred families went to the High Court in Japan recently, and won massive damages, following adverse events (including deaths) for their children? The case went to appeal, and the families won their appeals, too. Perhaps the GMC can't read Japanese.....

Finally, we come to the explosion in autism numbers. There aren't any figures in the UK, of course - the Department of Health's fixated by suspected measles numbers, but bored by the idea of collecting data on autism (very mysterious genetic condition, = can't do anything about it, = refer callers to the National Autistic Society), but the California Department of Developmental Services has just reported an increase in full DSM-IV autism from 2,700 in 1987 to 35,000 in Spring 2007. Don't tell me, it's all down to better recognition.....

David Thrower Stockton Heath, Cheshire WA4 2DZ

Competing interests: Parent of child who regressed into autism following measles vaccination