Just to let you folks know, there is an awful lot of misinformation out there about the MMR vaccine.

The facts are that the original piece of research (Wakefield, 1998) that suggested a link between MMR and autism has been entirely discredited by several much larger, very careful studies that have been done in several different countries since (I don't have the citations to hand but they are easy to find). Almost all of the original authors (I think everyone except Wakefield himself) have since disavowed the study as being flawed (ie the result cannot be trusted in their expert opinion), and Wakefield is currently under investigation for charges of professional misconduct - apparently the study is full of things like suggesting that a child was totally fine before their vaccination when in fact they were not, or saying that their behaviour changed straight after the vaccine, when in fact it changed months afterwards.

You need to be extremely careful about what you read on the internet. Science is not perfect, and statistics are both difficult to understand and, in this kind of thing, frequently misinterpreted by non-professionals. Don't believe anything that doesn't give references to peer-reviewed journals. Even if there is, as in the Wakefield case, a peer-reviewed journal that has published a result, you have to look further to see how many studies of what calibre have confirmed the result, and how many have disputed it. In the end, science works on a "majority rules" way, since it's so easy for one study to get a wrong result, but it is much less easy for lots of studies to get the same wrong result.

Now, I don't expect anyone here with sense to believe me just because of what I have written here. But this information, with the essential references, is easy to find online. I'm happy to hunt down some examples if you'd like, though it's probably better to find them yourself - that way you can have more confidence in the results.

Now, this is an aside, and not suggesting you feel this way, but the question I'd like to ask parents who don't vaccinate because of autism fears (if there was a real connection, which there does not seem to be), is why they would rather risk their child dying of a disease than risk them being autistic. Death is rather more severe a thing...

Also, it's not true to say that a younger child is not at risk if the older child is vaccinated (not that Schmickers said exactly that). The fact is, young kids aren't perfect in their hygiene, and they get exposed to a lot of bugs. While your older child is very much safer than if they weren't vaccinated, the vaccines aren't perfect, as we all know, so there is still some chance of them contracting the disease and passing it on to your younger child. This is why the schedule has been designed as it has: to minimise the window of time in which babies are totally unprotected from the diseases in question, and thus to save as many lives (and serious illnesses) as possible.