Anti-Vaccination Shills Score A Big One; Rare Outburst of Rationality at the Huffington Post

Update: My pal Naomi sent me this link to the discussion at Opinionator (NYT), with over 100 comments -- many supporting the autism-vaccine delusion.

Jake Tapper  has this to say about John McCain's position on the relationship between autism and thimerasol:

At a town hall meeting Friday [February 28, 2008]  in Texas, Sen. John McCain, R-Ariz., declared that "there’s strong evidence" that thimerosal, a mercury-based preservative that was once in many childhood vaccines, is responsible for the increased diagnoses of autism in the U.S. -- a position in stark contrast with the view of the medical establishment.

and (again quoting Tapper)

McCain said, per ABC News' Bret Hovell, that "It’s indisputable that (autism) is on the rise amongst children, the question is what’s causing it. And we go back and forth and there’s strong evidence that indicates that it’s got to do with a preservative in vaccines."

McCain said there’s "divided scientific opinion" on the matter, with "many on the other side that are credible scientists that are saying that’s not the cause of it."

Divided scientific opinion?  On what planet?  The only people who believe that there's a connection between autism and "preservatives in vaccines" are the anti-vaccination hysterics and conspiracy theorists. 

Orac wrote:

McCain needs to replace his medical and scientific advisors forthwith and find some who understand science and clinical trials. I suppose I should have seen it coming when he agreed to give the keynote address for the Discovery Institute last year. Credulity towards one form of pseudoscience is, sadly, often accompanied by credulity towards other forms of pseudoscience. This is worse, though, than pandering to creationists. Presidents don't have much power to determine how evolution is taught at the local school lever, but he does have enormous power over the public health apparatus of the nation in the form of the CDC, FDA, and NIH. Encouraging antivaccinationists can lead to a public health disaster in the form of the resurgence of vaccine-preventable diseases.

On February 29, 2008,  at the usually anti-vax redoubt The Huffington Post, Harold Pollack published  No, vaccines aren't behind the rise in autism, rebuking ABC for  airing the  Eli Stone episode:

ABC got good ratings. Some unknown and unknowable number of people will surely avoid useful vaccines. It is depressing how low the penalties are for unethical corporate behavior. John Grisham, I have an idea for your next book.

Pollock also mentioned Elaine Showalter's  Hystories: Hysterical Epidemics and Modern Culture (ISBN-13: 978-0231104593), regretting that Showalter's book appeared to early to cover the issue, because:

the vaccine-autism controversy provides a great illustration of how hysterical epidemics are spread through an interaction of families in pain, underlying cultural anxieties, issue advocates, and the modern media.

Earlier this year, Kristina Chew wrote about the great urban myth (that vaccines are implicated in autism) and

Perhaps if more stories of how “a vaccine didn’t cause my child’s autism” were heard, we could start to tease apart the vaccine-autism link and show what strange bedfellows these two have been all along.

That would be a start.

Previous Posts Here on Vaccines and Autism, and Vaccines and Public Health Benefits

• April 2004: Vaccination
• August 2004: Autism Rates in Scotland
• October 2004: Vaccines in the Developing World
• November 2004: Fear Leads to Fraud (Fake Vaccination Scandal in the UK)
• November 2004: Autism and MMR--No Link at All: How the World Was Hoodwinked by Wakefield
• November 2004: Why to Vaccinate Against the Flu
• August 2005: Homeopathy: It Just Doesn't Work
• November 2005: Reprehensible Cyber-Squatting
• January 2006: Pertussis Outbreak: Vaccinate Teens
• March 2006: Neurodiversity Weblog and the "Hidden Horde"
• March 2006: How Bad Ideas Get Propigated
• April 2006: Vaccinate Your Children
• April 2006: Vaccinated, and Got the Disease
• July 2006: Mercury Autism Smackdown
• January 2007: Don't Fall for Anti-Vax Shills
• June 2007: Rational Coverage of the Autism Omnibus Hearing
• August 2007: Language Does Matter
• September 2007: The "celebritization" of Expertise
• December 2007: Vaccines, Mercury, and Autism: "Experts" Who Claim A Connection Found to Be Not Qualified
• January 2008: NO Link causative or correlational between Thimerosal and Autism
• January 2008: ABC Engages in Shameful, Outright Anti-vaccination Propaganda
• February 2008: Stepping Up: Combatting AntiVaccination Misinformation
• February 2008: An Open Letter to Parents Who Don't Vaccinate

Comments

[Karoli]

And today, news that measles is making a resurgence. Measles is a horrible disease, easily prevented. John McCain is just doing what Republican candidates do -- repeating something often enough in the hopes that it becomes truth. Guess he doesn't understand science any more than he understands the economy.

http://abcnews.go.com/Health/Germs/story?id=4362362&page=1