Unethical Manipulation of Data by Anti-vax pro-disease liars

A problem for the anti-vax pro-disease crowd is that they often mistake incidence with mortality.  They will quite often pull up (irrelevant) graphs showing that death rates from specific diseases went down prior to the introduction of vaccines.  There are many problems that present themselves with these tactics.  First there is the unethical manipulation of data to show what you want.  Not only that, but they will show graphs for bacterial diseases that aren't even treated by vaccines.  And add to the deception used by these nutters, they don't bother taking into account that we have made other advances in medicine, hygiene, technology, etc.  To them, they want to proclaim that it would be foolish of you to spend $40 to save the life of your own child.

And the pro-disease people want you to still think that vaccines lead to autism, even though the link has been shown to be false over and over again.  Take this study for instance:

Identification and Evaluation of Children With Autism Spectrum Disorders
Chris Plauché Johnson, MD, MEd, Scott M. Myers, MD and the Council on Children With Disabilities
PEDIATRICS Vol. 120 No. 5 November 2007, pp. 1183-1215
http://pediatrics.aappublications.or...urcetype=HWCIT
PDD-NOS means Pervasive Developmental Disorder-Not Otherwise Specified

The prevalence of autism and, more recently, ASDs is closely linked to a history of changing criteria and diagnostic categories. Autism first appeared as a separate entity with specific criteria in the DSM-III in 1980.17 In 1987, the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, Third Edition, Revised (DSM-III-R)38 listed broadened AD criteria and the new subthreshold category of PDD-NOS, both of which promoted inclusion of milder cases. Later, these changes received criticism for being too inclusive and for promoting overdiagnosis.39 The DSM-IV3 criteria published in 1994 reflected the result of years of analyses to reduce the overinclusiveness of the DSM-III-R criteria; however, it included AS for the first time, which, in effect, broadened the range of disorders. Studies have revealed that the DSM-IV criteria have better specificity (0.87) than DSM-III-R criteria.40 The DSM-IV-TR4 criteria for AD and AS are unchanged; however, the text description of PDD-NOS was edited slightly to increase specificity. Collaboration with European groups that worked on the revised International Statistical Classification of Diseases and Related Health Problems (10th edition)41 promoted better conformity between the 2 classification systems.

If anything, maybe this graph indicates that vaccines also prevented autism, but only if they had thiomersal in them!

Yeah, that graph has nothing to actually do with vaccines, thiomersal, and autism having any causation.  The root of that graph lies in the previously cited study, not anything to do with vaccines...