Stories about autism and vaccines often trigger indignant calls and e-mails.

Still, the reaction was surprisingly intense last week when I wrote a story about the mysterious visit of Andrew Wakefield, the British-born researcher at the heart of the vaccine safety debate.

The headline said: "Anti-vaccine doctor meets with Somalis"

His supporters were irate. "He's not anti-vaccine," they wrote. He's just against the dangerous ones.

The other side was irritated, too. He's not a doctor, they said. Wakefield was stripped of his medical license in England, and his 1998 study on autism and vaccines was retracted, exposing it as a dangerous myth.

Wakefield arrived at the Safari restaurant in Minneapolis around 5 p.m. on March 23 and brushed past the waiting journalists without comment. We were told no reporters were allowed in the meeting, and he would grant no interviews.

Over the next few days, I tried to find out how many parents had shown up. One witness said: "30 to 40." Another said: "About a dozen." A third said: "Only six."

One of the most striking things about this subject is the level of suspicion and distrust that some people have for the medical establishment and anything it says about vaccine safety. It is, one angry reader wrote, an "organized criminal enterprise dressed up as disease prevention." Reporters are "lapdogs" when we report that the overwhelming majority of medical experts dismiss any link between autism and vaccines.

Doctors, meanwhile, fear that even reporting on these beliefs will further drive down vaccine rates.

As journalists, we struggle with what it means to be fair and balanced when one side has all the emotion and the other side the weight of science, as imperfect as it is.

At least now, I can be pretty confident reporting how many people showed up for Wakefield's meeting.

There were 30 or 40. Or about a dozen. Or only six.

maura.lerner@startribune.com