Earnest Idiocy

Vaccinations do not cause autism:

So The Lancet, a British medical journal named after a really sharp object, retracted a horrible study linking the measles vaccine to autism.

Now this would really be great news if the study had not come out, oh, 12 years ago. It's really scary that it took a medical journal over a decade to admit what nearly everyone else with a working brain knew:

It's been an issue around here.

Measles Outbreak

Fatal Exemption

Let's lay this one to rest. So that we're not burying more children.

More:

When criticism of the paper intensified in the days after publication, Lancet editor-in-chief Dr. Richard Horton defended his decision to publish what he acknowledged as an inferior study by claiming it would generate debate on the autism/vaccine issue. Even when 10 of the original 13 authors withdrew their names from the article, Horton still refused to withdraw the study.

Nor did he take such action when multiple studies subsequently appeared showing no link between vaccines and autism. Nor even in 2004 -- when it was revealed that the lead author, Dr. Andrew Wakefield, had been paid, in part, by lawyers for parents seeking to sue vaccine makers, claiming adverse health consequences.

All the publicity led many parents to forgo these vital infant immunizations: Vaccination rates in Britain, especially, plummeted. And since then, hundreds of unvaccinated children have been hospitalized in Britain with the measles. Some died of the illness.

Here in America, more than 1,000 children have died from H1N1 flu over the last year -- numbers that would surely be smaller had not so many parents been frightened away from getting flu shots by the general Wakefield-induced paranoia over vaccines.