Question: when was it settled science that vaccinations don't cause autism?

[mike_c]

80. of course, it has never been settled and can never be "settled..."

...if by settled you mean complete confidence that no vaccine can ever cause autism. I'm sure you know that science doesn't work that way. All it would take is one case of autism caused by a vaccine to falsify the hypothesis that vaccines do not cause autism.

What we can say is that the likelihood is vanishingly small, because that falsifying instance has not occurred despite millions and millions of trials, i.e. the number of inoculations that have been administered. But in science, the only things that are certain are those that unambiguously falsify hypotheses, so the question in the OP simply doesn't fit the investigatory framework of science.

Less ambiguous are some of the other risks of inoculation. Some very small proportion of patients sometimes get the disease they're being vaccinated against, depending on the vaccine itself of course, or another disease, perhaps because of contamination. Some suffer other side effects. No medical procedure is risk free. An informed patient considers those risks realistically however, and weighs them against the risks associated with disease, which are usually much higher. Some folks magnify those very small risks of vaccination all out of proportion and neglect the much greater risks of acquiring preventable diseases.