Not that it should come as any surprise to anyone who is not a shivering denizen of King Denial, but a new study confirms what we already knew. Namely, that there is no link between the MMR link and autism. Links and commentary below the fold:
To recap what we know:
In 1998, Andrew Wakefield published a study in the British medical journal The Lancet, it which he claimed to have found evidence of a link between the MMR vaccine and autism. Of course, as we now know, the so-called study was fraudulent, and Wakefield had links with attorneys who were trying to make "hay" out of these claims. For well over a decade, this fear dominated much of the family and charitable community, damaging lives and wasting millions of dollars.
I have been watching this so-called debate all along, as the father of a boy who was diagnosed in 2001. I read every medical paper and study, and long before Wakefield was exposed as a fraud, concluded that the weight of evidence overwhelmingly demonstrated that his study was, at best, an anomaly.
But the anti-vaxxers, much like the creationists, just won't give up. And whenever one avenue of assertion was shut down, they quickly moved to another. One of the latest moves was claim that children who were at higher risk (e.g. had an older autistic sibling), would be prone to autism after taking the MMR regime.
As it turns out, that just ain't so.
To quote from the link:
Therefore, in the seemingly never-ending quest to assure parents of the vaccine’s safety, researchers studied more than 95,000 children to find out if those at higher risk for developing autism were any more likely to develop the disability if they had received the MMR vaccine.
They weren’t.
Waiting for those portable goalposts to move yet again. In 3, 2, 1...
Note: poll included for sh*t and giggles.