I’d say that the antivax crew are tilting at windmills thinking they’re giants a la Don Quixote, but they can’t possibly have even correctly identified what they’re tilting at, for all the damage they’re doing to themselves in the process. It’s more like they’re tilting at the Great Wall of China that is reality, dashing themselves repeatedly against it and leaving themselves ever more broken and bloodied for each attempt.
Via my buddy Pickles, Reuters reports US courts have rejected another claim that vaccines are responsible for autism in a lawsuit brought by the Mead family seeking a fat payday restitution for their son William’s condition.
“The Meads believe that thimerosal-containing vaccines caused William’s regressive autism. As explained below, the undersigned finds that the Meads have not presented a scientifically sound theory,” Special Master George Hastings, a former tax claims expert at the Department of Justice, wrote in his ruling.
In February 2009, the court ruled against three families who claimed vaccines caused their children’s autism, saying they had been “misled by physicians who are guilty, in my view, of gross medical misjudgment”.
[…]
Supporters of the scientific community welcomed the ruling.“It’s time to move forward and look for the real causes of autism,” said Alison Singer, president of the Autism Science Foundation. “There is not a bottomless pit of money with which to fund autism science. We have to use our scarce resources wisely.”
But advocates for the idea that vaccines are dangerous said they would not give up. “We hope that Congress will intervene in what is clearly a miscarriage of justice to vaccine-injured children,” said Jim Moody of the Coalition for Vaccine Safety.
“Damn the evidence, we have a pet theory and we’ll squander every cent of our scarce resources fighting this bogeyman instead of finding the actual cause of, and an actual treatment for, autism. Every time someone tells us we’re wrong and the evidence shows that we’re wrong and logic itself proves that we’re wrong, every time any of those things happen, is actually a miscarriage of justice! We just need to scream louder and get more powerful people on our side to get our way!”
And somehow parents of autistic children think these idiots — these anti-reality fearmongering crusaders — are on their side and bravely taking on an evil establishment. Why is it when the evidence is in, there are always people that cling to their beliefs despite said evidence totally decimating their positions? You know this ruling is *not* going to stop groups like Autism Speaks and the rest of the crew that have latched onto Wakefield’s moneymaking scheme. And this certainly won’t shut Jenny McCarthy up, despite her kid having probably never had autism to begin with. No matter how many times they dash themselves against the harsh cold stone that makes up reality, they’ll just keep on getting back up, getting back on their donkey and charging headlong.
It’s like this in every field of study, scientific or otherwise: theology and religion, evolution, the origin of the universe, climate change, vaccines, GM foods, politics, economics, et cetera, et cetera. Hell, there are still flat-earthers. I sometimes feel as though these people are declaring, outright, that all of us must intentionally ignore and/or destroy the evidence, because they have too much invested in their positions to admit they were wrong all along. I kind of wish they were saying it outright, because maybe then we might hear the end of such unscientific nonsense once and for all, once their unsound methodology is laid bare for the masses to see.