(Updated) Yikes!

Published



McCain goes a little crackpot himself:

At a town hall meeting Friday 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.

That’s the report from Jake Tapper, and as Tapper notes, there is no such evidence. The idea that Thimerosal was the cause of autism was of a piece with the larger environmental push to show that progress (in this case inoculation) was, in fact, poison. Proof of how ridiculous, and pernicious, the claim is: the most prominent anti-Thimerosal agitator is Robert F. Kennedy Jr., who suggests not only that Thimerosal is the culprit, but also a conspiracy by the government, and on behalf of Big Pharma, to cover up the connection. Does McCain also believe there is a cover-up then? One would hope not, but given his previous insistence that the drug companies really are the “bad guys“–McCain ought to set the record straight. Update: A medical doctor, and a regular reader, sends in some additional info: As two experts from the California Department of Health, have recently shown in the medical journal Archives of General Psychiatry [also noted by Tapper –ed.] despite the fact that thiomerisal has been removed from childhood vaccines since 2001, the incidence of autism continues to rise in California as of 2008. As noted in the same journal by Dr. Eric Fambronne, a noted Canadian psychiatrist (whose research has never been funded by a pharmaceutical company),

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