Vaccine Hearings in the US….
ABC News reports on the start of a trial pitting parents of autistic children who believe vaccines caused the autism against the state. Orac has a thoroughly laid out, well supported post on the matter. I don’t understand how busy people like him can have the time to write such well-crafted and well-supported essays!! But I’m incredibly thankful for it…
The Omnibus proceeding is the culmination of the legal cases brought to the Vaccine Injury Compensation Program by nearly 5,000 families who “feel” that their children’s autism was in fact caused by vaccines. Most, but not all, of the plaintiffs blame the mercury in the thimerosal in childhood vaccines, despite there being no good evidence to support such a link…
Meanwhile, even the most diehard of the mercury militia, a man who used to say routinely that autism is a “misdiagnosis” for mercury poisoning, our old “friend” J. B. Handley, is racing Kirby away from the thimerosal hypothesis, now obfuscating his former clarity of vision with fuzzy combinations of heavy metals, live viruses, antibiotics, and “toxic loads” as “causes” of autism. In essence, the mercury militia, realizing that it’s backed a scientific loser, is quickly shifting the goalposts in order to make their ideas about the environmental “causes” of autism into conveniently unfalsifiable hypotheses.
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