The actual problem is that the surveys routinely ignore all the articles showing vaccines causing problems. There is always a lot of attention to whether thimerosal causes autism, or whether MMR causes autism. There is never any examination of whether the aluminum in vaccines causes autism, or whether getting any vaccine at all at a critical period of brain development causes autism, or whether getting too many vaccines too soon causes autism*, for all of which there are published peer reviewed papers indicating a likelihood they do, or the contaminants in vaccines cause autism (contaminants suggested in the literature include human DNA, which is suggested to cause autism, Simian retroviruses, Simian virus SV-40, and Mycoplasmas), nor any comparison of vaccinated to fully unvaccinated individuals. I did a quick survey of the surveys cited above, and none of them considers aluminum. I also wrote a survey article on some of the literature suggesting early and adjuvanted vaccines cause damage, and none of the dozens of peer reviewed papers I found suggesting damage is cited in the IOM's numerous 800+ page surveys. My survey can be found at http://whyarethingsthisway.com/2014/03/08/example-1-pediatrician-belief-is-opposite-the-published-scientific-evidence-on-early-vaccine-safety/

If you read later posts in that blog you will find more criticism of the cognitive biases and outright omissions in the vaccine safety and effectiveness literature. Basically there is extensive scientific evidence indicating that any vaccine that happens to come during critical periods of brain development may harm development, and that various cumulative effects of vaccines may cause problems. The safety surveys basically only compare patients who got one specific vaccine and many others to patients who got many others, so they are blind to the kinds of damage that seem likely to be occurring. Also, the only RPC study I know of that injected saline or vaccine randomly into children and followed their health (not whether they got a specific disease) for more than a few months found the vaccine recipients (a flu vaccine) got 4 times as many respiratory illnesses as the recipients of the placebo.

*The paper of Stefano et al that is sometimes cited as showing this, upon closer examination effectively only compares patients who got DTP and other vaccines to patients who may have gotten DTaP, but did not get DTP, and got other vaccines. See the survey above for more discussion. I've never seen any other paper mentioned on the subject.

I would be very grateful to people who can supply citations to articles I haven't yet found contradicting my conclusions, for example other RCP studies following health for a prolonged period, especially of children.