Friday, February 13, 2009

A special court rejects autism-vaccine theories

The three federal judges who convincingly rejected the theory that vaccines cause autism delivered a devastating blow to crank science today. The battle will go on in the blogs and in the courts. But the most important arena has always been the space between the ears of parents who are deciding whether it's safe to vaccinate their kids. This decision could do a heap of good by stemming the tide of vaccine-shunning that has led to outbreaks of preventable disease.

The rulings cap 10 years of divisive legal, scientific, and rhetorical battles. In reality, the science looked pretty settled by the end of 2002, as the first of 5,000 parents of autistic children began lodging claims in the Federal Court of Appeals' special vaccine injury compensation program. Hundreds of millions of dollars later, the court concluded as most other observers have for years. This was a slam dunk. "Petitioners' theories of causation were speculative and unpersuasive," wrote Special Master Denise Vowell in the case of Colten Snyder v. HHS. "To conclude that Colten's condition was the result of his MMR vaccine, an objective observer would have to emulate Lewis Carroll's White Queen and be able to believe six impossible (or at least highly improbable) things before breakfast."

The vaccine court, which began operating in 1990, assigns special masters to weigh claims of vaccine injury brought by parents or guardians. In their ruling in the Autism Omnibus, the special masters considered three test cases in which the parents of autistic children alleged damage by two "toxic" vaccine mechanisms acting in concert. Traces of ethyl mercury in several vaccines had weakened their children's immune systems as infants, went the plaintiffs' theory, which allowed the measles-mumps-rubella vaccine to damage their brains when it was administered after their first birthdays.

More ...

http://www.slate.com/id/2211156?wpisrc=newsletter