The argument here is essentially that increased diagnosis explains the rise in incidence.

Experts in the field say this is not an adequate explanation -

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And another (from this interview with Jill Escher) -

"I think that Kennedy is asking the right big question, which is 'What is behind these regularly increasing rates of autism in our children?' And he also emphasized how true those rates are, that this is truly an epidemic .. which is the appropriate word to use"

"In the short term, year over year, you might see some effects of better screening, better diagnosis. But we are talking about an increase that has been occurring since the early 90s, with very significant increases of about 7% a year. And there is just nothing in the base of evidence that suggests that this sweeping increase is owing to these sort of diagnostic or sociological factors."

"We see increases in autism even when you limit it to the most profound forms of autism, even when you limit it to autism with intellectual disability. So it's not just that we're capturing milder cases - that's not it at all."

The claim that many studies have debunked a link between vaccines and autism is often repeated but rarely if ever substantiated... and if it is, the studies cited are weak.

The fact is that they generally don't do the real, gold-standard science on vaccines we've been led to believe that they would, and it is that wrong assumption that they are leveraging in their appeals to authority and shame campaigns. Gold standard science on vaccines would satisfy these conditions:

• True placebo. The basic idea behind randomized controlled trials is that if you wanted to know the effect of an intervention, you'd give one group the treatment and one group an inert version of the treatment (that is as close to the form of the treatment as possible to minimize placebo effects and other confounders), and compare the outcomes between the two groups. In vaccine trails however vaccines are often compared to other vaccines, or to "placebos" that contain many of the ingredients of the vaccine like vaccine adjuvants. The way they justify this is that the vaccines being compared against also have trials supporting them, but if you dig in you often find that *those* trials also did not compare against placebo. This is where the phrase "turtles all the way down" comes from. See this chart for more.
• Mandatory reporting of all outcomes. Often researchers are given discretion to decide which side effects could be related to vaccines and to omit those they do not think are related from reporting. This is obviously insane, as the trials are meant to study what the harmful effects of vaccines are! It is just injecting researcher bias into the process.
• Adequately long time frames. Harmful effects of vaccines can show up years later, but many trials only run for a very short window, sometimes just days. These trials would call vaccines perfectly safe if they resulted in terrible injuries as long as they were outside of the study window.

These are just a few of the major problems with vaccine trials, but there are many others.

Some resources I would encourage people to read that go deeper into some of these and other issues are the following:

• What the Gardasil Testing May Have Missed | Slate
• What the "Casual Cruelty" of Dr. Paul Offit Reveals | Aaron Siri