Vaccination Confusion

There's a lot of confusion about vaccines recently. Some say they're good, some say they're bad. A link between childhood vaccines and autism is discovered and then denied. We fear the effects of vaccination and also fear the diseases we vaccinate against.
All I can say about the autism connection is that discovering something new and important that flies in the face of conventional belief is a great way to lose your license to practice medicine. Remember Ignaz Semmelweis, who discovered the link between the lack of hand-washing and disease. He lost his license for daring to suggest that doctors' hands might carry diseases as they went from the autopsy room to the maternity ward. He was so despised by his colleagues that he died in an insane asylum after all the "experts" denied the truth of his findings. Suggesting that there is a cure for cancer that does not involve chemotherapy and/or radiation will get you the same response. How's that war on cancer going?
And what about vaccines? Which should we worry about more? The diseases we might get without them, or the diseases we might get because of them? It's not an easy question to answer. Most publications tell you to discuss the risks and benefits with your veterinarian, who will steer you in the right direction. Really? Can you trust the word of a brainwashing survivor? How prepared is your veterinarian to entertain new concepts, or think new thoughts?
Then there's the fear factor on the part of the veterinarian. What if I tell my client not to vaccinate their pet against XYZ disease, and then their pet goes and gets that disease? This is a real legal risk, as we Americans are no longer required to take responsibility for any of our own actions.This is why we can sue the cigarette companies for holding guns to our heads and forcing us to smoke their toxic products......oh, wait, that's not how that happened......
It seems that there is some progress being made. Fewer people got the flu vaccine this year. There are more and more complaints about those people who are not vaccinating their kids putting all the vaccinated kids at risk of getting the diseases they're vaccinated against (does that make any sense to anybody?).
I hope that in the long run, wisdom - the real product of thought and contemplation and experience and assimilation and incorporation of ideas - will prevail, and we will overcome our collective, reflexive, ineffective fear of disease. This fear leads us to induce disease in order to avoid disease. Fear-driven thought is not logical thought, even though it can be rationalized to look like it. In order to become better, more effective people, we need to be smarter than our fears, and not let our actions be governed by them.
I think we Americans are smarter than we are given credit for. Let's prove it.