You'll continue to ignore reliable evidence in favour of the word of a man who falsified data as part of a study that was funded with the intent of supporting planned litigation, and who set up companies with the aim of profiting from his deception.
Wakefield is a quack and a fraud who has done untold damage to public health. Believe whatever else you want but please believe that.
I've had way too many downvotes to just give up on Wakefield like that.
My experience tells me, when I get voted down a lot on HN about non-hacker subjects, I'm usually right. You guys stick to your guns, I'll stick to mine.
Let's assume that you (or rather Wakefield) is right and that the MMR vaccine does cause autism (it doesn't but curiously it actually doesn't change much in terms of what you should do).
Given that the risk of any one of mumps (complications including pancreatitis, encephalitis, spontanious abortion in pregnant mothers, impotence in men), measles (kills 0.3% of those who get it in the US, up to 28% in developing nations) or rubbella (can cause miscarriage in pregnant mothers and cardiac defects and brain damage in new borns) is greater than the risk from autism (both in terms of impact and probability), how does opposition to MMR and vaccination in general make any sense?
Even if you accept the most extreme claims of anti-vaxxers in terms of what they might be causing and at what level, it's still better than the alternative.
We've forgotten just how potent these diseases are because we're not exposed to them often these days. Drop vaccines and that would change very, very quickly.
Get vaccinated, and you may be diagnosed with autism. Avoid vaccines, and you will live... at least for a while. And then, dying in your beds, many years from now, would you be willing to trade all the days, from this day to that, for one chance, just one chance, to tell Andrew Wakefield that he may make fun of our single-minded preoccupation with model trains, but HE'LL NEVER TAKE OUR HERD IMMUNITY!
In short: if you don't change the authorities you use, you may hurt your case :)
The problem of course is that not all vaccines are given for herd immunity reasons. Pertussis herd immunity really only exists among kids, and one way to read this is that while this is important in the public school setting, the fact is that the disease will never be controlled in the wild. The CDC makes ever longer lists of Pertussis vaccination recommendations but we have no way of really knowing what's required and once people reach the age of majority, society doesn't have many options, so relatively short-lived immunity as in that vaccine is not a global herd immunity issue but rather an attempt to control herd immunity in a very specific setting.
Similarly, you are never going to get enough herd immunity to make a flu vaccine worthy of mandating for this reason but that doesn't keep the CDC from issuing recommendations.
Vaccines are given for a number of reasons. Some truly present population-wide herd immunity considerations (Measles, Polio, possibly to a far lesser extent Diphtheria, but that is complicated by the fact that we simply don't know how common sub-clinical diphtheria is in vaccinated populations given that the vaccine targets exotoxins rather than the organism itself).
The vaccination regimes have become out of control. There is no need to require the vast number of vaccines that are routinely given today. Stick with the big ones. Don't require all the others. Use the others in the case of individualized risk. Yes, I know the autism theorists suggest the big vaccines are to blame but there is little evidence there. However, aside from MMR, DTaP, and Polio, there are few diseases out there which are so severe a menace to public health and safety that we can't just let people decide on their own.
What if I don't braveheart?