More Stupidity from the "Vaccines cause Autism" folks

You may have already heard about the landmark ruling by a special court, where judges given the quaint title "Special Master", ruled that vaccines indeed, do NOT cause autism. This is something that we knew for a while in the scientific community, but we have had respectable scientists have their lives turned into a living nightmare by a small but vociferous group that somehow tapped into public sentiment and insisted that vaccination indeed caused autism. For those of you who don't know, THIS ENTIRE CONTROVERSY WAS KICK-STARTED ALMOST SINGLE HANDEDLY BY A NOW THOROUGHLY DISCREDITED SCIENTIFIC PAPER BY ONE MAN - ANDREW WAKEFIELD. (Seriously, follow the link for a thorough debunking of the paper).

Now, I understand why parents of autistic kids would want to know what causes their child's symptoms - I understand that they may want to search for something to pin blame on. But this was more than just calling into question the efficacy of vaccines. This campaign by the anti-vaccine group has immunologists and epidemiologists genuinely concerned. Why? Because it makes a whole generation now susceptible to diseases that we should have eradicated long back. The crucial concept to understand here is "herd immunity"; basically, when a significant fraction of a population (herd) is vaccinated, it is more difficult for a bug to be transmitted from one individual to the next, and it eventually runs out of people it can infect, leading to its eradication. And when the crazies convince people not to vaccinate their kids, shit like this happens (yep. Measles - endemic again). Or this.

And then there was a gem from the spokeswoman of this group (and I can't find the link now for the life of me), AFTER the ruling - I'm paraphrasing: "... until we know what causes autism we cannot definitively say what cannot cause autism."

So while we don't know what caused the plane crash at Buffalo, we can't say that my peanut butter jelly sandwich lunch yesterday didn't cause it?