Easy access to vaccine information good and bad

While looking up American vaccination statistics, the third hit down on Google was this website made by Dr. Joseph Mercola, a licensed doctor who practices alternative medicine, who has appeared on The Dr. Oz Show and The Doctors. His hobby is shooting down anything widely accepted by the medical community, such as HIV causing AIDs, sunscreen preventing skin cancer, and vaccinations improving health.
On Mercola.com, called "The World's #1 Natural Health Website," Dr. Mercola makes quite a few arguments against vaccinations that are so weak, cherry-picked, and hugely misleading, I had to check that it wasn't a satirical website.
He opens with some terrifying statistics:

"A 1992 study published in The American Journal of Epidemiology shows that children die at a rate 8 times greater than normal within three days after getting a DPT vaccination.

A preliminary study by the Center for Disease Control (CDC) found children who received the HiB vaccine ... were found to be 5 times more likely to contract the disease than children who had not received the vaccine.

In the New England Journal of Medicine July 1994 issue a study found that over 80% of children under 5 years of age who had contracted whooping cough had been fully vaccinated.

In 1977 Dr Jonas Salk (inventor of the Salk polio vaccine) testified with other scientists that 87% of the polio cases which occurred in the US since 1970 were the by-product of the polio vaccine.

The Sabin oral polio vaccine (OPV) is the only known cause of polio in the us today.

The February 1981 issue of the Journal of the American Medical Association found that 90% of obstetricians and 66% of pediatricians refused to take the rubella vaccine."

Not that I need to explain to you all why this is all so clearly wrong from the start, but let's dive in anyway.

• The 1992 study apparently claims that "children die at a rate 8 times greater than normal within three days after getting a DPT vaccination." Although I unfortunately couldn't access the original article ("Confounding in Studies of Adverse Reactions to Vaccines"), I did find what the CDC wrote about the actual risks of encephalopathy after getting the DPT vaccine. According to them, although some epidemiological studies have shown that the vaccine might cause encephalopathy (but not for sure), this has an "estimated risk of zero to 10.5 episodes per million DTP vaccinations." However, if any neurological damage did occur, it "occurred primarily during the first 3 days after DTP administration." I can only guess that Dr. Mercola must have meant an 8 times greater risk of dying in those first three days after an extremely rare complication occurred, but even that's still wrong.
• As for the HiB vaccine study, I have no idea what the source is, because the CDC reported 100% efficacy, meaning that no one who took the vaccine got HiB later on. It also has virtually no risks beyond some tenderness and maybe a mild fever in 5% of cases.
•  The 1994 study about the whooping cough outbreak is true--a sudden outbreak of pertussis occurred in Cincinnati in 1993, and 82% of patients had been fully vaccinated. The CDC investigation is ongoing, but they point out that vaccinated children had much milder symptoms, and that overall incidence had dropped dramatically (to about 2%) since the vaccine was introduced. The authors themselves, in response to a critical review of their article, also say "We agree with Hardy and colleagues that the best strategy continues to be timely vaccination of infants with whole-cell pertussis vaccine."
• There are two polio vaccines: the Salk vaccine uses a dead virus, and the Sabin vaccine uses a live one, which is considered better for places where polio is still endemic. Naturally, the live virus vaccine is indeed the only possible cause of polio today, which has been almost globally eradicated. The 87% of cases being caused by the vaccine between 1973 and 1983 also makes sense, because according to the CDC, there was an average of 14 cases per year. It's reasonable to assume those 14 cases were caused by a rare reaction to the live-virus version.That's compared to a peak of 42,003 cases in 1949, a few years before Salk released his vaccine.
• Again, unfortunately, I could not access the entire original article about doctors refusing to take the rubella vaccine. However, this was from 1981. As of 2004, rubella has been eradicated from the US, thanks in large part to vaccinations of children as well as mandatory vaccination programs for hospital employees through the 80s and 90s.

I had to wade through a lot of misinformation, anti-vaccine sites, and conspiracy theory sites (many of whom directly quoted Mercola, or vice versa) trying to find the original sources and facts. Unfortunately, those types of sites were often the first hits on a Google search for vaccine information. Dr. Mercola's #1 site and credentials (having been on TV is enough for many) gives even more credibility to people trying to expose the "truth" about vaccines, despite his complete lack of standing and respect within the medical community. Although the Internet is an excellent tool for knowledge and research, the easy access it provides to both good and bad information makes the vaccine war a much harder battle than it would've been before.
 
Article: http://www.mercola.com/article/vaccines/statistics.htm
DTP: http://www.cdc.gov/mmwr/preview/mmwrhtml/00046738.htm
HiB: http://www.cdc.gov/mmwr/preview/mmwrhtml/00041736.htm
        http://www.cdc.gov/vaccines/pubs/vis/downloads/vis-hib.pdf
Pertussis: http://www.nejm.org/doi/full/10.1056/NEJM199411243312114
               http://www.cdc.gov/mmwr/preview/mmwrhtml/00023030.htm
Polio: http://www.post-polio.org/ir-usa.html
         http://www.cdc.gov/vaccines/pubs/vis/downloads/vis-ipv.pdf
         http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jonas_Salk
Rubella: http://www.cdc.gov/vaccines/vpd-vac/rubella/downloads/dis-rubella-color-office.pdf
             http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/7463660
             http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rubella