[colechristensen]

>Further research necessary.

The autism link to vaccines isn't at the "further research necessary" stage, it is at the "not absolutely impossible but much evidence against" stage.

The only reason the link exists at all is that vaccines and first signs of autism can happen at similar times and often a vaccine will make a person/small child briefly feel unwell which gets pointed to as a "first sign" because humans find patterns where there aren't any and want something, anything to blame instead of not knowing.

[gavinhoward]

Until it's absolutely impossible, further research is necessary. Who knows? It could be a combination of things. Perhaps vaccines are not aggravating factors by themselves; maybe you also need to combine them with, I don't know, Tylenol or another pain killer.

Saying the equivalent of "the science is settled" is always not true because how could we possibly know all of the variables that matter. And in science, all factors matter.

[colechristensen]

>Until it's absolutely impossible, further research is necessary.

There is no such thing, you can study something until the heat death of the Universe and still have a nonzero uncertainty.

>Saying the equivalent of "the science is settled" is always not true because how could we possibly know all of the variables that matter. And in science, all factors matter.

There is a wide gap between "further research is necessary" and "the science is settled" and you seem to be arguing on both sides depending on if that argument is in favor of the autism link. The link stopped being an interesting or pressing scientific question, the necessity or urgency of continuing to research it is quite low and anyone making funding decisions would be wise to allocate mostly elsewhere. There's no problem with continuing to search if a research group wants, researching unpopular questions is important, but let's not misrepresent the state of the research and the reasonable conclusions which can be drawn from the data. "further research necessary" is a phrase that evokes a sense that there is little evidence on which to base conclusions, there may be a hint of an effect, perhaps with contradictory evidence. This is not the case for the autism link, there is indeed a large statistically sound corpus of evidence pointing in the "no link" direction.

[gavinhoward]

There is no gap between "the science is settled" and "further research is necessary". Either it is settled, or research is necessary.

I am not arguing that vaccines could cause autism. What I am arguing is that we don't know what causes autism and that we don't know if vaccines are an aggravating factor. That seems like an important question to me.

By the way, there can be a "large statistically sound corpus of evidence" for "no link" and still be wrong. Most importantly, all of that evidence could have missed important factors.

But beyond that point, as the medical field has lied to us more and more this past year, I no longer take what they say at face value. I dig in myself. And while they have convinced me that there is no direct link, they haven't convinced me that vaccines are definitely not an aggravating factor.