Arthur = Asshat

[Guest guest]

Maybe someone should tell this asshat that the person he's referring

to from Pittsburgh is MARY Wildman, not LAURA Wildman as he reports.

I know this family well.

What a jackass.

http://www.slate.com/id/2169459/

True Believers

Why there's no dispelling the myth that vaccines cause autism.

By Arthur

Posted Friday, June 29, 2007, at 3:35 PM ET

At the recent 12-day hearing into theories that vaccines cause autism,

the link between the disorder and the measles-mumps-rubella vaccine

came across as shaky at best. As for the mercury-containing

preservative thimerosal, which was used in other vaccines, witnesses

showed that in all known cases of actual mercury poisoning (none of

which caused autism), the dose was hundreds or thousands of times

higher than what kids got during the 1990s. Powerful population

studies showed no link to either MMR or thimerosal-containing shots.

None of that moves Wildman, 47, whose son's case is before the

court and who drove from her home near Pittsburgh to watch the

hearing, which ended this week. " I know what happened to my son after

he got his MMR shot, " she told me. " I have no doubt. There's no way

they'll convince me that all these kids were not damaged by vaccines. "

It is difficult to challenge a mother's knowledge of her own child.

And also to fight off the staying power of the vaccines-cause-autism

theory and other such notions that verge on the irrational.

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People who study irrational beliefs have a variety of ways of

explaining why we cling to them. In rational choice theory, what

appear to be crazy choices are actually rational, in that they

maximize an individual's benefit—or at least make him or her feel good.

Blaming vaccines can promise benefits. Victory in a lawsuit is an

obvious one, especially for middle-class parents struggling to care

for and educate their unruly and unresponsive kids. Another apparent

benefit is the notion, espoused by a network of alternative-medical

practitioners and supplement pushers, that if vaccines are the cause,

the damage can be repaired, the child made whole. In the homes of

autistic children it is not unusual to find cabinets filled with 40

different vitamins and supplements, along with casein-free,

gluten-free foods, antibiotics, and other drugs and potions. Each is

designed to fix an aspect of the " damage " that vaccines or other

" toxins " caused.

" Hope is a powerful drug, " says Jim Laidler, a Portland scientist and

father of two autistic boys who jumped ship from the vaccine

conspiracy a few years ago. In reality, autism has no cure, nor even a

clearly defined cause. Science takes its time and often provides no

definitive answers. That isn't medicine that's easy to swallow.

Another explanation for the refusal to face facts is what cognitive

scientists call confirmation bias. Years ago, when writing an article

for the Washington Post Magazine about the Tailwind affair, a screwy

piece of journalism about a nonexistent attack on American POWs with

sarin gas, I concluded that the story's CNN producers had become

wedded to the thesis after interviewing a few unreliable sources.

After that, they unconsciously discounted any facts that interfered

with their juicy story. They weren't lying—except, perhaps, to

themselves. They had brain blindness—confirmation bias.

The same might be said of crusading journalists like Kirby,

author of Evidence of Harm, a book that seemed to corroborate the

beliefs of hundreds of parents of autistic children, and UPI reporters

Dan Olmsted and Mark (the latter now with Salon).

Systems of belief such as religion and even scientific paradigms can

lock their adherents into confirmation biases. And then tidbits of

fact or gossip appear over the Internet to shore them up. There's a

point of no return beyond which it's very hard to change one's views

about an important subject.

Then, too, the material in discussion is highly technical and

specialized, and most parents aren't truly able to determine which

conclusions are reasonable. So they go with their gut, or the

zeitgeist message that it makes more sense to trust the " little

guy " —the maverick scientist, the alt-med practitioner—than established

medicine and public health. " History tells us that a lot of

ground-breaking discoveries are made by mavericks who don't follow the

mainstream, " says Laidler. " What is often left out is that most of the

mavericks are just plain wrong. They laughed at Galileo and Edison,

but they also laughed at Bozo the Clown and Don Knotts. "