"Now go away, or I will be forced to taunt you a second time!"--Monty Python and the Holy Grail

So I was sitting around last night wondering what I was going to write today when the ingrown hair that is the MMR (measles-mumps-rubella) vaccine-autism link reared its querulous head on the nightly news. Only this time, it wasn't some New Age fuzzhead talking vast medical community conspiracy. Instead, it was a story about how The Lancet, the British medical journal which in 1998 produced the keystone study over the arch that is the argument against the MMR vaccine, had issued a retraction of said study.

To quote Surendra Kumar of Britain's General Medical Council in reference to Dr. Andrew Wakefield, who headed the study back in 1998, he was "dishonest," "irresponsible," and "contrary to the clinical interests" of children.

Through the mist and shade of long term memory came a conversation I had with an uncommonly intellectually malleable friend of mine a few years back. He had recently had a son, and at 18 months old his boy was nearing the requisite age for reception of the MMR vaccine. Apparently, however, his mother (a woman of such staggering intellectual accomplishments such as becoming a follower of Maharishi Mahesh Yogi because The Beatles told her to, as well as achieving the vertigo inducing pinnacle of medical training known as a dental hygenist's certification) insisted that the MMR caused autism. Despite my best efforts, I had neither the expertise nor the familiarity with the research to change his mind. Suffice to say the conversation ended with me saying simply, 'Well, good luck getting him into public schools.'

In the ensuing years since, I have had the good fortune to read such elucidating works as Michael Shermer's Why People Believe Wierd Things. Therein Shermer discusses a study oft cited, but never detailed, by the anti-MMR vaccine donkies in which the sagely researchers basically asked parents of autistic children when their progeny first displayed symptoms and when they received the MMR vaccine. And then, you guessed it, passed this off as a causal relationship due to the chronological proximity of the two events. It all sounded to myself and Mikey S. like a post hoc ergo propter hoc logical fallacy of the highest order, and we'd be right, and that's all without saying anything of the unscientific monkeyshines being played with the lives of innocents.

Frankly, yesterday's news had me wondering what then could possibly convince these yahoos that there was no link between the MMR vaccine and autism. I'd love to believe that the story would be the final nail in the coffin of this debate, but a casual look around will reveal the scads of stubborn lemmings willing to believe in everything from ghosts to the God the Huckster explanation for the fossil record to the lost continent of Atlantis.

Why is it so hard to believe that it's a gumbo addiction or effed up genes which caused their kids' predicaments? Probably because it would mean that on some psycho-emotional level they would have to accept that the Western medicine isn't the boogeyman these people think it is and culpability for their children's problems is alot closer to home. In other words, they'd have to blame themselves.

Oh well. Won't stop me from saying, 'Boo-yah! In your face you Birkenstock shod rubes!'