There is no causal link between vaccines and autism. This has been demonstrated repeatedly. The nature of his claim - that a correlation between vaccines and autism existed in a subset of the population his group studied - would, at this point, be like the claim that mean annual temperatures have been anomalously low in the eastern United States over the past couple of years. It may be true, but doesn't really outweigh the massive amount of evidence that global mean annual temperatures have shown a marked upward trajectory over a longer period of time.
So I stand by my claim that the vaccine-autism link is on the same "scientific" level as global warming denialism, the view that HIV doesn't cause AIDS, creationism, and using hypnosis to recover memories of alien abduction. One can find people with advanced degrees, and backgrounds at prestigious institutions, who support all of them. They, too, may claim that the evidence supporting their side has been censored from the peer-reviewed literature by a cabal of academic purists uninterested in looking controversy in the eye, or by groups with a big stake in the outcome (e.g. companies making anti-retroviral drugs). Claims of censorship or conspiracy in the scientific community are always going to set off the bullshit detector of anyone who knows how scientists actually work. Extraordinary claims needing extraordinary evidence and all that.
If, as Dr. Thompson claims, evidence for such a link was omitted from an earlier paper, it should be published. I can't evaluate his claim (or re-evaluate my own view, which is based on what's been discovered by published research over the past couple of decades) otherwise.
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