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Desperate parents searching for answers to what is often a deeply shocking transformation of their children.

A venal, corrupt doctor more interested in fame and fortune than in helping patients comes up with a novel theory that seemingly answers the question - can never be proven by any other scientific team on the planet.

And thus the anti-vaccine movement was born with Dr. Andrew Wakefield.

Vaccines stand as one of the most important development in human history. 

The human species has been beset by a panoply of diseases - many of which strike the young, historically killing them or affecting them in such brutal ways that the rest of the person's life is severely and negatively impacted.

The invention of vaccine technology allowed humans to finally conquer many deadly diseases and literally eradicate them from most of the planet, saving millions of kids.

The damage caused by Dr. Andrew Wakefield's fraud is considerable.  His now retracted study purporting to link vaccines to the onset of autism in children seemed like the answer parents where looking for - finally and explanation.

Wakefiled became not just a scientist with a new study, but the evangelist and mouth piece for a  movement - a movement that resulted in plunging vaccination rates across the developed world and an alarming rise of children's deaths from diseases previously eradicated by diseases.

Now Wakefiled has been unmasked as an unethical fraud - with significant financial conflict of interests in the results of his "study" - but the damage he has caused to children across the globe is considerable.

Michael Fumento a science and health reporter and  director of the Independent Journalism Project, writes in today's The Los Angeles Times:

The doctor who launched the modern anti-vaccine movement acted "dishonestly and irresponsibly," Britain's General Medical Council has ruled. But fear not. Dr. Andrew Wakefield is still a hero to his many acolytes. And others, with curious credentials, fight on to terrify parents into not getting their children inoculated.

In 1998, Wakefield wrote and then vociferously hawked an article in the British medical journal Lancet linking autism to the MMR vaccine (measles, mumps and rubella). After the council's decision, Lancet this week retracted the article. Among the facts that have come out of the inquiry into Wakefield's research is that two years before his paper appeared, lawyers seeking to sue vaccine makers paid Wakefield the equivalent of $700,000.

After Wakefield's article appeared, vaccination levels plummeted in Britain and declined in the United States, and the diseases they prevented surged. Measles cases increased sevenfold in the U.S.

"One person's research set us back a decade, and we're just now recovering from that," Mark Sawyer, a pediatrician and infectious disease specialist at Radey Children's Hospital in San Diego, told me in an interview.

But are we recovering? Anti-vaccination groups have popped up like toadstools after rain (there are more than 180 on the Web), while older ones such as the National Vaccine Information Center were reinvigorated. For the most part, these groups have had only a marginal effect on national vaccination rates, but they have encouraged localized boycotts of immunization. (In one Washington county, 27% of children had vaccination exemptions in 2006-07.) The result has been a resurgence of diseases gone so long that some doctors don't even recognize them. And children die because of it.

Before the MMR vaccine became available in 1971, measles, mumps and rubella annually afflicted 530,000, 162,000 and 48,000 U.S. children, respectively, killing a total of more than 600. By the middle of the last decade, there were fewer than 7,000 new cases annually and zero deaths. But the anti-vaccine groups generally claim the injections were irrelevant and that factors such as better nutrition caused the declines.

Meanwhile, their "science" comes down to little more than that autism symptoms are often first recognized at the same age that children are getting their first vaccinations. So they lumped the MMR in with a list of other childhood vaccines that formerly contained the mercury-based preservative thimerosal, although the MMR never contained thimerosal.

And don't dismiss the power of a good old-fashioned conspiracy. "It's astounding to me that people can imagine that America's pediatricians and family physicians and public health officials are scheming to harm children," says Sawyer.

Never mind that by 2008, more than 20 articles published in peer-reviewed medical journals found no connection between MMR vaccine and autism, while two suggested a connection -- one by Wakefield.

There's also a mountain of reassuring evidence regarding thimerosal-preserved vaccines. The studies are a result of the United States and other countries -- while strongly reaffirming the safety of thimerosal -- giving in to activist demands and having it removed from childhood vaccines. That gave researchers a wonderful opportunity to do "before and after" studies.

Anti-vaccinationists initially claimed California autism cases dropped. False. The "data do not show any recent decrease in autism in California" despite the discontinuation of thimerosal use, the state's Department of Developmental Services found in 2008.

The PBS Newshour reports on the scandal: