Autism and Vaccines

With all the concern about autism and John McCain injecting himself into the debate, politics takes another low road. Politicians will do anything to get a few extra votes. The problem occurs when a rare incident is used as representing a common occurrence. Clinical investigation and analysis is a difficult enough task to perform properly. My belief is that less than 10%, probably a lot less, of published articles meet good scientific evidence. If this is the case among careful educated scientists, how on earth can we expect laymen to understand all the ins and outs of such research. Then we have the lawyers and activists who rush in and say "You haven't proved nothing happened". There is no way to prove the absence of an effect, only its presence. Study after study, performed at great effort and with great cost has failed to prove that immunization has any common bad outcomes. When any action is performed millions of times injury may occur concurrently, just by chance. This is not to say that 'A" causes "B", although activists, politicians and lawyers rush to judgement. We should be very concerned that the current belief of many people that no one should be harmed by anything", or that "the individual is more important than the population" may lead us down the road to the point where we can do nothing to prevent a disease in case the preventive intervention might harm one person in one million.