“The vaccine study and the doctor who did it that caused that furor were proven to be frauds.”
I read about that, but just because a study is discredited does not disprove the connection. Many parents of autistic children have said that their child’s behavior changed soon after, or even the very week, of receiving a vaccine. The claims have been denied by those in power and by the pharmaceutical industry, the people who have the most to lose if the connection were proven.
More studies should be done — unbiased ones. But who would do them? Everyone has a stake in the outcome.
I know a family to which that happened. Their daughter is severely autistic, but she had been normal for almost two years or so. But now the only thing that child will willingly eat is soda pop and hot dogs. And that's what they give her because otherwise she shrieks like a banshee. Still in a diaper at age 10.
The vaccines are given at approximately the same age as when autism starts presenting itself in a noticeable fashion due to the physical and mental development of the child.
Correlation does not imply causality.
Note that mercury hasn't been used in vaccines for a decade, and yet there's no sign of autism rates dropping, but rather, they continue to increase. Does that correlation mean that vaccines with mercury can prevent autism? Of course not.
I have read Wakefield's study. It was extremely poor science, and should never have been published. The peer review process is supposed to stop junk science from being published, but did not work on this one.
If you really want, I can go through, point by point, exactly how Wakefield's "study" linking vaccines and autism lacked any scientific merit. The original article has been retracted, meaning that the journal that published it has found it to be scientifically unsupported.
More studies should be done — unbiased ones. But who would do them? Everyone has a stake in the outcome.
Many people have wasted their time, as well as hundreds of thousands (or maybe millions) of dollars trying to repeat Wakefield's "study". That's money that could have been better used to try to track down what exactly causes autism or to develop treatments for autism. I wish Wakefield would be held responsible for reimbursing that money to the various funding agencies.