One must acknowledge that the MMR vaccine (the one most identified as the culprit by anti-vaxxers when it comes to autism) is a live vaccine. Live, weakened measles, mumps, and rubella virus is injected. It infects some cells which then produce antibodies to the three viruses, destroying them, with the wonderful additional benefit of rendering the injectee immune to the non-weakened virus. Is there a risk to the use of these live viruses? Of course. There is nothing in medicine, or in life, that is risk free. The CDC website enumerates those risks quite clearly (and they are small). I suppose a reasonable parent may not consider those risks acceptable. Just as state and local governments may consider the risk of having unvaccinated children in the school to be an unacceptable risk to other students. Many pediatricians will not accept children in their practices who don't get vaccinated because of the risk they pose to other patients. Its all about risk, but it must be based on empirical evidence.
As for the following: "After all it is only through the faculties of deductive and inductive reasoning that one uncovers truths...per my good friend Rene Descartes."
That is a great quote, and it is the BEGINNING of science. This is where science and philosophy part ways. Reasoning, whether deductive and inductive, is not enough. Reasoning is used to generate hypotheses about how the world works (or really how some small part of the world works). Science then requires that you collect empirical data to see if your hypothesis can be supported. If it cannot (as in the link between vaccines and autism), then the hypothesis must be discarded. Reason can then be used to try and determine where the hypothesis went wrong, and develop to new and better hypotheses. In fact, much of what scientist do every day is try to figure out why what they thought would work, didn't.
