[Cass]

The phrasing of this question seems meant to imply that because one explanation doesn't satisfy you (better diagnosis), it must be the other (vaccines). This sets up a false dichotomy, though--there's no reason it would have to be one or the other.

We know vaccines aren't the cause, because large-scale studies have been done that show that autism rates aren't higher in vaccinated children. This leaves us with basically every other possible cause, including not just better diagnostics (I personally find that explanation highly plausible), but also changes in nutrition, effects of some sort of virus, pollution, microplastics and everything else under the sun that's changed in the last decades.

[collyw]

You don't know that at all. There were no studies involving all the shots that kids in the US are getting together these days. You are in denial if you don't consider the correlation a possibility. Best take another booster and trust the $cience. Safe and effective.

(Did you have any idea other than "anything but the vaccines"?)

[sdiacom]

> There were no studies involving all the shots that kids in the US are getting together these days.

It's been decades; the kids are the study. Also, they're no longer kids. Do people who have taken the vaccines report higher rates of autism? It would be relatively simple to check for that.

> Did you have any idea other than "anything but the vaccines"?

Increased awareness of autism, increased medical attention on kids at large, increased medicalization of societal deviance, less socialization, less parental time, environmental factors (more CO2, more exposure to pollutants, more exposure to forever chemicals), dietary factors (more sugar, more carbs, more fat, microplastics), derived factors from any of the above (more screen time, earlier occurence of obesity and diabetes, higher prevalence and normalization of societal deviance).

All of those are as likely as vaccines; which is to say, extremely unlikely. We can test for them. Or we can keep testing this one thing we've already tested for, over and over, until as statistically expected, a study eventually happens to agree with your preconceptions about vaccines, proving the all-encompassing conspiracy of $cienti$t$ and $tati$tic$ and error margin$, and plunging us into another two decades of unvaccinated idiocy.