Carol Buxton wants to know why the UK Department of Health has become so resistant to a possible link between MMR and autism. In 2001 its Vaccine Damage Unit accepted that the triple jab had caused her daughter Hannah’s death, pointing out that “the reaction to the MMR vaccination was exactly at the expected period of time” and that her development had been “halted and, if anything had deteriorated to a marked and obvious extent”.

A week after being given the MMR jab Hannah developed a high temperature and a rash, then began to have fits. Within two weeks she was having 1-40 fits a day. Her neurological development up to this point had appeared to be normal but then she began to regress (ed.- as had been observed in many of the children studied by Dr Andrew Wakefield) to the point where she lost all speech apart from the word ‘mummy’. At the end of a day which had been surprisingly fit-free, she died from a fit in her sleep.