Would it be too much to ask that some measure of objectivity could be maintained in discussing harm and benefits of vaccines?
Vaccines are not "injected directly into the blood stream" . They are injected subcutaneously.
Is there a non-zero incidence of dangerous reactions to vaccinations. Yes, of course!
Are court cases considered to be a reliable means of settling scientific questions? No.
Could a child suffer irreversible brain damage from a vaccination. Quite possibly. But the long history of vaccinations, epidemiological studies, and carefully gathered statistics, tell us that serious adverse reactions have a very low incidence.
When a child has been vaccinated, and then develops, at a later time, a mental disorder does it prove that the vaccination caused it? No, off course not. If a child develops autism immediately after being vaccinated, does it prove vaccination caused the autism? No, but in that case you would certainly want to know how many other vaccinated children developed autism immediately after being vaccinated. Is it possible to know exactly when a child develops autism? No, not under current means of diagnosis. If a large number of children after being vaccinated developed the same mental disorder would that prove that the vaccination caused the disorder? No it wouldn't. It could only be proved by carefully designed and controlled studies. In the latter case would you want to be cautious, and suspend the use of the vaccine in children. Yes naturally. Would you want further studies? Most likely.
In the present world it is difficult to know if there has been any increase in the incidence of autism since vaccinations began to be widely used because the the definition of autism and means of diagnosing it have changed at the same time. There are now more specific types of autism recognized them previously. Autism has tended to be diagnosed at an earlier age then previously. These factors, greatly complicate the task of looking for a link between autism and vaccination.
There is too small a non-vaccinated cohort in the developed world to allow for a simple, straight forward, controlled study. The low incidence of diagnosed autism among vaccinated individuals suggests, however, that there is either no link or a very weak one. Furthermore the higher incidence of autism today, when thiomersal is not much used, compared to prior times, when thiomersal was much used, neither proves nor disproves that thiomersal causes autism. Even inferences that it doesn't are clouded by the changes in diagnosis.
There is as yet, no peer reviewed, creditable link between vaccination and autism. There is however excellent and dependable data to show that mankind has reaped tremendous health benefits from vaccination in general. But might some vaccines present higher risks than others? Yes, of course. If it were true that vaccination does not cause autism, would it be possible to prove that it does not. No. And the answer would still be "no" even if a cause for autism was discovered, and it likely will be, because there could always be an undiscovered additional cause. Only if vaccination caused autism would it be possible to prove it in the scientific sense. It has not been proven so far.
The difficulty of proof, in itself, suggests that the causal link one is looking for does not exist, just as the difficulty of proving that god exits suggests god does not exist, but it is not proof.
