The comparison to the smoking industry is one for a couple of reasons, and I can explain why.
A) The "smoking is safe" was never a widely accepted consensus among researchers and actual scientists.
B) Even if there were doubts about the smoking/lung disease connection, they're easily confirmed under controlled settings and peer reviewed research. You can take 100,000 smokers, and 100,000 non-smokers, evaluate them over a period of decades, and definitely reproduce certain results (pertaining to increased disease rates) with a very high confidence level time and time again. The same can not be said for the supposed vaccine/autism link. There have been 4 large scale studies conducted (The largest being the Denmark study I've linked 3 times already in this thread involving half a million people and strict monitoring over a period of years, 2 in Germany, and 1 in the Philippines), and not a single one of them demonstrated an increased risk in any sort of ASD. In every single case, the rate of ASD between vaccinated and non-vaccinated were identical. Of course, the vaccine skeptics always find reasons why they can't accept any of those studies on these supposed grounds of having this impeccable standard for research and study purity...yet most of their "evidence" stems from anecdotes and blogs that are affiliate marketing sites for "natural healing supplements".
A) Scientific consensus isn't the issue. Corporate greed is.
When you get to test your own product, the product
that makes you billions of dollars, you aren't going to
tell everyone that it is worthless at best and possibly
it's going to kill you or cause long-term health issues.
Depending on the company, they will either spin the
findings or change them altogether in order to make
the product seem safe and effective.
B) Apples and oranges.
You're comparing a single product to hundreds, if not
thousands of drug variants labelled 'vaccine'. Some of
these have a long track record, but more are introduced
each year and have been minimally tested, if at all.
This kind of sloppy 'science' is why so many FDA assured
drugs and other products are recalled after causing
irreparable harm to who knows how many people.
Aspartame, for one, should have been banned long ago.