Whereas I think that anyone who drags Thimerosal into this debate -- roughly a decade after it was removed from vaccines in response to mass hysteria -- deserves to have a bucket of water poured over their head and sent home.
Just because an argument isn't made out of unsupported hand-waving doesn't mean that it isn't recycled garbage. Citations and glib technical language can be copied and pasted just as easily as mindless rants.
It is not enough to hold debates. One must also have the guts to draw conclusions.
Meanwhile, what's conspicuously missing from this particular cloud of chaff is a concise summary of the most recent epidemiological data. Should we not have plenty of that by now? Thanks to Wakefield, we have conducted an "experiment" over the last decade or so: Hysteria is up, and the vaccination rate is down. As a result, the incidence of preventable disease is measurably higher. Surely, if there is a correlation between autism and vaccination, the autism rate must now be significantly lower in these new unvaccinated populations? Or can we at least try to establish how many more kids have to suffer or die before we can draw that conclusion?
Read the inserts to the vaccine. "Thimerosal, a mercury derivative, is not used in the manufacturing process for the single
dose presentations; therefore these products contain no preservative. The multi-dose
presentation contains thimerosal, added as a preservative; each 0.5 mL dose contains
24.5 mcg of mercury. "
From: http://www.fda.gov/downloads/BiologicsBloodVaccines/Vaccines...
Just because an argument isn't made out of unsupported hand-waving doesn't mean that it isn't recycled garbage. Citations and glib technical language can be copied and pasted just as easily as mindless rants.
It is not enough to hold debates. One must also have the guts to draw conclusions.
Meanwhile, what's conspicuously missing from this particular cloud of chaff is a concise summary of the most recent epidemiological data. Should we not have plenty of that by now? Thanks to Wakefield, we have conducted an "experiment" over the last decade or so: Hysteria is up, and the vaccination rate is down. As a result, the incidence of preventable disease is measurably higher. Surely, if there is a correlation between autism and vaccination, the autism rate must now be significantly lower in these new unvaccinated populations? Or can we at least try to establish how many more kids have to suffer or die before we can draw that conclusion?