Nana,
The problem is this. Many people believe, and there are a minority of doctors that believe, that the innoculations required today have some impact on the number of autistic children. The number of autistic kids has risen dramatically recently. The number of “required” vaccinations have as well. We avoided innoculating our daughter as long as “possible” (we finally gave her the big innoculation that is suspected when we saw a story that there was a minor outbreak of measles or mumps or some such in the mid-west). We might not have made the same choice if our child was a boy since they are more prone to autism than girls. That’s what the shooting is about.
In the first aspect, the number of autistic kids has risen for two reasons: the definition of what constitutes "autism" has been dramatically expanded, and federal moneys are allocated for kids diagnosed with autism, thus encouraging reports of borderline cases or outright fraud. Applying Occam's Razor, either or both of these circumstances are far more likely to have an effect on the number of kids labelled as "autistic" than inoculations. Moreover, since the diagnosis has been significantly refined as well, kids with the same symptoms who were formerly labelled as retarded have been reclassified as autistic.
In the second, coincidence in time does not equal cause and effect. Autism usually begins to show its first symptoms right around the same time kids get their early immunizations . . . and this was true before kids were routinely immunized.
When you add to this the fact that a couple of studies have been unable to show an actual link, it's not as scary as it looks. Not easy to persuade worried parents of that, but there you are.