Money never stays silent

The wall begins to crack:

The federal government continues to deny a link between vaccines and autism, but the U.S. Court of Federal Claims has ruled in favor of a child alleged to have regressed into autism as a result of vaccinations. Several of the vaccinations included the controversial mercury-based preservative thimerosal, points out the National Autism Association, which sees the ruling as confirmation of the claims of many parents.

“This case echoes the stories of thousands of children across the country,” said NAA President Wendy Fournier. “With almost 5,000 similar cases pending in vaccine court, we are confident that this is just the first of many that will confirm what we have believed for so long – vaccines can and do cause children to regress into autism.”

Now cue all of the science fetishists and herd statists squawking about how a court ruling isn’t science. That’s true, and neither are statistical meta-studies. Notice that it’s always the vaccine sellers and the see-no-evil “vaccines are an unmitigated good” crowd that is staunchly opposed to any proper double-blind empirical studies of the matter.

Vaccines aren’t inherently bad. But even generally pro-vaccine European pediatricians think that the U.S. vaccination schedule is insane. If the federal government didn’t know that vaccines caused harm, they wouldn’t have made the vaccine makers and administrators immune to civil lawsuits from the families of the children harmed. And that’s despite the applied standard of harm that if applied to handgun homicide would conclude that about 50 percent of gunshot victims died of unknown causes wholly unrelated to the bullet-sized holes that happened to exist in the bodies.