That's the whole problem: it has.

But like so many things, the facts don't matter to some people.

The next time someone tells you that, like, science and knowledge is, lik, just your opinion, man, keep in mind that sort of willful ignorance is far from harmless and can be quite damaging.

Yes, it more or less has been settled. I have not heard of a reputable study showing that vaccines cause autism. The problem is that if you try hard enough you can stretch/fake/politicize scientific results to show just about anything. There is at least some causal link between giving the vaccines and autism (there has been a large rise in autism cases that coincide with the usage of certain vaccines).

Since no one can explain why the incidents of autism are increasing so rapidly there's a ton of crackpot theories which desperate parent's latch on to.

What is a sensible person to do, get hold of some of the actual studies by oneself? Without prior knowledge of the problem, I feel inclined to believe the "no causation" camp. But I can also imagine that it is easy to select the proper studies to prove just about anything. For the book in question, how can I be sure that the author didn't chose to only quote the "no causation" studies, and not other ones that might come to other conclusions?

As I said, I would tend to believe the "no causation" camp, but I also don't have 100% faith in doctors...

Recently I was in a heated discussion with a friend about "The China Study", which claims that animal protein causes most of the worst "civilization diseases" like cancer and heart disease. At face value it sounds absurd, because it seems as if people have always been eating lots of meat (not sure if they really have, 150 years ago). So my friend completely rejected the possibility. The book sounded convincing to me, though - but at the end of the day, it is just one guy... At least I tried to Google for articles debunking the book and found none, but there is still a nagging feeling that one might fall for yet another diet scam (although as I said, the book really made a very solid impression on me). Just saying it is a similar problem, who is one to believe?

I think this is one of the problems with so called "un-biased" reporting in the media. They tend to give equal time to competing theories as if they were equals. Vaccinations causing autism in the media has been really hyped up in the media because its an extremely interesting, link-bait type story.

The vaccination story gets so much media attention I'm sure there are many people who believe that its true simply because its in the news so frequently.

Yes, there is.

http://www.cdc.gov/ncbddd/autism/vaccines.htm

But as the page that leads into that link notes, "The weight of the evidence indicates that vaccines are not associated with autism. But CDC knows that some parents and others may still have concerns about this issue." If people don't look up the evidence for themselves, they may act contrary to the evidence when deciding what to do for their children.

From that site I found references to about 5 studies that caused the autism scare, but according to the site, don't really provide evidence. If that is really all that is to the scare, I guess I will really take it upon myself to look up those studies should I ever have kids.

That's the point of the book that this article is about. The author tries to explain why scientists and doctors don't think there is a link between vaccinations and autism.