The link between vaccines and autism doesn't even make sense. One reason there's little evidence is that nobody has ever taken the link seriously enough to investigate.
Except they did. Quite a lot of research was done in the Wake of Wakefield’s now discredited publication in The Lancet in the late ‘90s and they could not replicate his findings.
“… In the late 1990s, Andrew Wakefield, a physician at Royal Free Hospital in London, published an article in
The Lancet, claiming to have found the explanation for autism in the measles virus.<a href="
Vaccination as a cause of autism—myths and controversies - PMC">6</a>
Initially, Wakefield reported that the measles virus was responsible for the colonic lesions seen in Crohn disease. Although this theory was soon disproved and put to rest, Wakefield was impressed by cases brought to his attention in which apparently normally developing children manifested autistic symptoms shortly after administration of the MMR triad vaccine. Despite his previous blunder with Crohn disease, he hypothesized that the measles virus had triggered inflammatory lesions in the colon, disrupting the permeability of the colon through which neurotoxic proteins reach the bloodstream and the brain, thus causing autism. Eight out of eight autistic children on whom he had performed colonoscopies exhibited the hypothesized lesions, leading him to assert that the measles vaccine virus caused autism.
[his theory became a cause celebre for some time and got a lot of media attention, BUT…]
… In 2005, an investigative reporter alerted
The Lancet's editors that Wakefield's study had been flawed by severe research misconduct, conflict of interests, and probably falsehood. After investigating the matter,
The Lancet retracted the article, and the British Medical Association took disciplinary actions against Wakefield.
Since the Wakefield report, any direct connection between autism and the MMR vaccine has been discredited by dozens of studies investigating the epidemiology of autism and the biological effects of MMR and the mumps virus.<a href="
Vaccination as a cause of autism—myths and controversies - PMC">7</a>,<a href="
Vaccination as a cause of autism—myths and controversies - PMC">8</a>
Decreases in the rate of exposure to MMR were not shown to correlate with similar decreases in the incidence of autism. On the contrary, although more and more parents were opting out of MMR vaccination, the rates of autism had been rising.
Mumps viruses or their respective biological fingerprints were not consistently found in biological fluids or tissue taken from autistic children at higher rates than nonautistic children (for a comprehensive review rejecting the mumps virus-autism link, see Stratton et al<a href="
Vaccination as a cause of autism—myths and controversies - PMC">9</a> and Modabbernia et al<a href="
Vaccination as a cause of autism—myths and controversies - PMC">10</a>). …”
Despite significant progress in the study of the epidemiology and genetics of autism, the etiology and patho-physiology of this condition is far from being elucidated and no curative treatment currently exists. Although solid scientific research ...
pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov
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“…Vaccines do not cause autism. A small study in 1998 suggested a link between vaccinations and autism spectrum disorder. The study was reviewed further and retracted. In addition, the author's medical license was revoked due to falsified information.
Since then, numerous studies have debunked a connection between autism and the measles, mumps and rubella (MMR) vaccine.
In April 2015, JAMA published the largest study to date, analyzing the health records of over 95,000 children. About 2,000 of those children were classified at risk for autism because they had a sibling already diagnosed with autism. The study confirmed that the MMR vaccine did not increase the risk for autism spectrum disorder. ..”
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