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Originally Posted by Undertoad
That covers the overview and (partially) one of the studies, what of the other 19?
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You have to remember to distinguish between three suspected problems: thimerosal, the MMR vaccine without thimerosal, and the overly-aggressive vaccination schedule in general.
The majority of the studies are on only thimerosal, which is basically a moot point by now, because most countries have removed it from almost all childhood vaccines anyway. But if you're truly interested (which, no offense, but I suspect you actually aren't, because you don't have a kid in the game)--
this book systematically debunks the methodologies used in each of the studies you are referencing. They range anywhere from using bad data to deliberately altering the survey parameters four different times until they could come up with a result they liked. I can't cite all of the information in it, because it's a book's worth of information. But as one example, an often-cited study from Britain showed that after thimerosal was removed from vaccines in the UK, new autism cases continued to rise. However, looking at the data shows that they were counting newly
diagnosed cases, including children who were 3 years and older--
meaning they'd had the shots. If you separate the data by birth year rather than when they were diagnosed--the exact same data set that this study used, not a new survey--there was a clear downtick in the number of cases after they removed the thimerosal. (And yet, again, it obviously did not end autism altogether--even the anti-thimerosal advocates agree that it was just one contributing factor, not a silver bullet. If you are being stoned to death, which one stone is the one that kills you?)