A Christian Liberal is NOT an oxymoron.

Posted by XT on February 12th, 2009 in US News

The government has officially ruled that autism is not caused by vaccinations:

A special vaccine court ruled against parents with autistic children Thursday, saying that vaccines are not to blame for their children’s neurological disorder.

The judges in the cases said the evidence was overwhelmingly contrary to the parents’ claims — and backed years of science that found no risk.

“It was abundantly clear that petitioners’ theories of causation were speculative and unpersuasive,” the court concluded in one of a trio of cases ruled on Thursday.

I’m sure this won’t be the end of it. After all, if my kid was autistic and I was convinced that it was because of a vaccination, I wouldn’t be satisfied.

The problem really is that the “autism epidemic” is much more closely tied to better awareness and to the expansion of autism as a spectrum disorder. A generation ago, kids couldn’t be “a little autistic.” Either they met the diagnostic criterion and were or they weren’t. Now doctors realize that a child might sometimes have stereotypical repetitive behaviors, like hand-flapping, at some times but not at others.

This is not to say that I believe all vaccines are harmless. In fact, there is no such thing as a harmless medication. But the causal mechanisms of autism are just not well understood. It may well turn out that vaccines are part of the problem – or that additives such as thimerosal are linked. But such a broad spectrum problem is unlikely to have any single cause. That means that research should continue, but it is has to be understood that results are going to be complicated and are going to take a while to get.

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