Did the Guardian present any research showing there is no evidence showing a connection between vaccines and autism, or are they insisting that it is so because they say so?
Let's ignore any single article from the Guardian and instead talk about the larger public health question: "Do vaccines have side effects that are great enough to prevent their use"? It's a classic risk benefit problem with additional societal complexity (most vaccines work much better at high rates of vaccination) and a fair amount of subtlety to the outcomes (people who are vaccinated can still get sick, the vaccine itself can have short-term side-effects).
Of course, there are many different vaccines and each needs to be treated more or less independently of any other in terms of risks. The technology used to create, store, and deliver the vaccine matters tremendously. We have had terrible outcomes with vaccines before, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cutter_Laboratories#Cutter_inc... was an example where an error cause a bunch of people to die after they were vaccinated for polio.
But throughout my whole life, people, regardless of their political orientation, always thought the polio vaccine was a great thing. One exception: I worked with a guy whose parents didn't get him vaccinated for polio, and he was in a wheelchair for the rest of his life.
Anyway, back to the scientific story. As we know, you can't "prove a negative" (can't prove there is no vaccine/autism causative relationship), but scientifically speaking, nobody has been able to come up with a reliable experiment demonstrating that it does ("proving a positive"). This is not for lack of trying; the problem is inherently challenging, because running trials like this skirts ethical issues.
What we do know is the original paper by Wakefield that purported the vaccine/autism relationship was fraudulent- contained false information - and more importantly, similar studies that were not fraudulent (to the best of our knowledge) did not replicate the results. And all of that led to a number of trials where a great deal of evidence of Wakefield's actions (which include close to half a million pounds in payments from a vaccine manufacturer) was presented and Wakefield was found guilty.
Not sure where you're really going with your question other than to muddy some fairly clear waters. Nobody has shown replicable evidence that there is a causative relationship between vaccines and autism.
The Wakefield red herring as usual.
Did anyone mention that the MMR was derived from a vaccine that was banned by the Japanese Govt, and that it was one of the reasons that prompted Wakefield to research it?
There are more than enough papers showing a correlation between vaccines and autism, even a case where the CDC prompted its researchers to distort and remove evidence which indicated a correlation between a vaccine and autism in black boys.
The Wakefield paper was written with with 12 other co-authors. 3 of the authors Wakefield included were struck off by Britain's GMC. They all fought their case in court and 2 of them were reinstated except Wakefield which is why it is called the Wakefield case.
The primary case of the GMC concerned the ethics of the research not its findings but the papers don't focus on that. The authors of the paper still stand by the clinical conclusions no matter what. The Lancet withdrew the paper not because of its clinical conclusions but because of the ethics. Go figure.
I feel like of all the issues and problems in medical research, chasing after vaccine/autism association is one of the less likely to bear any useful fruit.