Let's be clear here: Andrew Wakefield falsified his data and was stripped of his medical license for it. He was invested in a company developing a new vaccine

Let's be clear here: Andrew Wakefield falsified his data and was stripped of his medical license for it. He was invested in a company developing a new vaccine preservative and the study was purely a scare tactic to get vaccine makers to switch from a cheap patent-free preservative (thimerosal) to an expensive patented one. Vaccines in the western world have completely dumped thimerosal out of an extreme abundance of caution. Many of the vaccines don't even use a preservative or use a trace amount since we have good refrigeration and fast transportation networks. Despite all that the rate of autism diagnosis has continued to increase completely unchanged. In fact rates of autism diagnosis hasn't been affected by anti-vax parents refusing vaccines either. If you properly control for induced bias there is no difference in autism rates among anti-vax parents and rational parents. When you hypothesize a causal relationship, remove the causal factor, and the outcomes are unaffected we call that hypothesis <i>disproven</i>. There is no link between vaccines and autism. Period. Zero. Zilch. Nada.