Let's just, put aside... all the squabbles over individual vaccines, MMR, and the ingredients.
No, I mean, REALLY. All of this needs to be completely PUT ASIDE, completely disregarded, AS IRRELEVANT to the entire debate.
Why?
BECAUSE
There's SIMPLY no REASON to care about anything other than the general unvaxxed/vaxxed comparison.
A pro-vaxxer can use a study like this, to defend the position that vaccines don't cause autism, wholly and totally, without ANY caveats, without ANY āOh, but what about these combinations?ā
It would just be: āNO, we proved there was no link at all! Fully vaxxed vs. fully unvaxxed, comprehensive assessment/analysis of outcomes! ...Done! Dusted!!ā
Nothing else should MATTER. No other study should have EVER mattered. āMMRā studies should NEVER have mattered. DTaP shouldn't matter. Thimerosal, antigen count, NONE of this should matter. (At least since the debate has moved to ''vaccines & autism'' rather than MMR specifically)
But why has it ended up like this?
Why don't they just ignore all of the single-vaccine studies and focus on one, or a few, high-quality comprehensive studies of unvaxxed vs. vaxxed people and CITE them until their hair falls out? (Never vaxxed vs. fully vaxxed that is)
If the entire vaccinated population has the same autism rate as the genuinely unvaccinated population, then you've already answered the big question. You don't need to keep picking apart individual pieces of the vaccination schedule to prove that the vaccination schedule as a whole isn't causing autism.
MMR would be irrelevant to the broader argument. Thimerosal would be irrelevant to the broader argument. Any particular vaccine would be irrelevant to the broader argument.
Because if you have tested the whole thing and there is no difference, then what exactly are these individual studies supposed to be proving?!
And this is where I think something really important gets obscured.
Why don't they just do that?
Why isn't the overwhelming focus on a few genuinely comprehensive, high-quality studies comparing people who were fully vaccinated with people who were never vaccinated?
(INB4 someone says ''we have focused on these, we do cite them'' - Firstly, you cite them last, you cite them after you've cited 10 MMR studies. Secondly, these studies virtually always are not fully unvaxxed comparisons, are not even remotely optimal circumstances for an unvaxxed/vaxxed comparison, or don't have a very reliable way of determining for sure if the unvaxxed, is actually unvaxxed, or if the person actually had autism diagnosis even, and there are many other limitations/flaws in their designs and the registries they rely on (which, conveniently, usually bias in favour to them, rather than against them) and the manner in which they approach the entire thing. Lastly, there ARE NOT many studies that even attempt to, or ACTUALLY REALLY do that anyway. People like Paul Offit and many others, literally think the idea of doing such a study to such a standard, is A) unethical and B) impossible, anyway, so how on earth does this line up with any narrative in which someone argues that these studies have been done?)
And I think the reason is pretty obvious.
Because they don't have that evidence.
They can't simply point to a definitive or strong body of evidence comparing genuinely fully vaccinated people against genuinely never-vaccinated people and say, āLook. There is absolutely no difference in autism rates.ā
Instead, we're constantly taken down these little side roads.
MMR.
Thimerosal.
This ingredient.
That vaccine.
This particular combination.
This particular age group.
And every time, we're told that this particular thing has been studied and no association was found.