It is not the dreaded anti vaxxers freely injecting poison... A truly ironic turn of phrase. Where I am living currently, it is the conservatives leading the anti vaccine initiatives.
You really should study the issue seriously, not just ignore it based on some wacko site’s content, or worship the promises of the white robed priests of the god pharmacia. Study the middle ground, that is where truths can be discovered.
It is a Democrat thing to believe lies from those who pretend to be respectable, and who promise they have your best interest at heart. Don’t fall for it again!
I have studied the issue in far more depth than ANY anti-vaxxer, and furthermore actually understand the biochemical basis of how vaccines work. I have devoted a large part of my professional career as a scientist to understanding this issue.
The "autism-vaccine" meme came about because a money-hungry physician, Andrew Wakefield, managed to get the Lancet, a respectable journal, to publish his "research" that supposedly showed a link between the MMR vaccine and autism. The "research" itself was bogus--I have no idea how it got through the peer-review process, unless the reviewers were asleep when they reviewed the paper. Unlike most papers that are retracted, this one is still available in its entirety, with the word "Retracted" printed in large letters diagonally across each page.
I will not go into all of the details about how Wakefield's "research" was bogus, but I will say that it consisted of subjecting mentally handicapped children to invasive and dangerous procedures. This "research" was never approved by an ethical review board, as is required for all research involving human or animal subjects, and would probably have not passed ethical review.
There are two ways in which Wakefield was hoping to profit from this "research." One is that he was involved in developing a single-component measles vaccine. Since there really is no market for a single-component vaccine, when parents would rather give a 3 in 1 vaccine and spare their children the extra needle pokes, Wakefield needed a way to convince people to use his vaccine. Therefore, in the bogus paper, he concluded that parents should give the measles, mumps, and rubella vaccines separately, spaced out over a year. I will point out that he did NOT advocate that parents should stop giving the vaccines--this was a later development. The other way he wanted to profit was through acting as an expert witness in lawsuits. His paper would serve as documentation that there was a link between MMR and autism; thus, he could testify on behalf of parents of autistic children who would file lawsuits against vaccine manufacturers for damages. Oh, and he was in cahoots with a lawyer for that effort; he and his lawyer friend stood to make millions through lawsuits.
Wakefield has been discredited and lost his medical license years ago. His paper has been retracted. I'm surprised that anyone still brings up the bogus vaccine-autism link, but I guess bad pseudoscience never really disappears.
Autism is a genetic disease. Unfortunately, a lot of money was wasted by researchers trying to validate Wakefield's claims (they never could, because the claims were fake). That money could have been better used researching exactly which genes are involved and how genetically altered brain development results in autism.