Bad journalism department. The Warrington Guardian reports on a guy who thinks his son’s autism was caused by the MMR vaccination.
A STOCKTON Heath father, who believes his son became autistic after being given the MMR vaccination, has welcomed a landmark Italian court ruling.
Judges in Rimini awarded the Bocca family £140,000 after the Italian health ministry conceded the measles, mumps and rubella vaccine caused autism in their nine-year-old son.
The result has given fresh hope for many parents with similar cases who feel the British legal process has failed them…
Oy. How to inspire new flocks of people to refuse to let their children be vaccinated.
Oliver’s family said he ‘markedly regressed’ within weeks of the jab from a bright boy who could point to every letter on a bedroom alphabet freeze to someone who lost all his skills and language and was in a ‘world of his own’.
Therefore…
sigh
I’m putting my bet on changelings.
But no, seriously. It’s the same as always, people looking for something to blame – it can’t be genetic, it has to be [insert scapegoat here.]
That’s probably a "a bedroom alphabet frieze".
@Katherine: and also probably guilt. The father probably blames himself for letting his son get vaccinated. If there was no vaccine, he’d blame himself for something else.
This vaccine-causes-autism business is really quite awful in how it exploits grieving parents.
@synfandel:
20 points for a fantastic pun!
James Cole at Stuff and Nonsense has a post here documenting the email exchange he had with a Daily Mail “journalist” who reported the Italian legal judgment. Worth a read I reckon as James manages to remain reasonable while laying out very clearly and in detail how the DM piece failed. The reporter’s reactions are…well, they’re about as clear and logical as her original piece.
Also, for anyone unfamiliar with UK geography, Warrington is about 15 miles from Liverpool. Liverpool is currently at the center of an ongoing measles outbreak on Merseyside with nearly 350 confirmed cases to date (and about 150 more not yet confirmed). More than 50 people hit by the outbreak have been hospitalised so far.
The sun may have risen, but given the rooster crowed each and every day before and during each sunrise, it follows that the rooster caused the sun to rise. And given that the child showed symptoms of autism as the sun rose and set, and the rooster caused the sun to rise, and indirectly to set (for how could it set without having risen.), it follows that the rooster caused the child’s autism. Now given that the rooster was given to calling in the morning, preceding and during, and causing, the sunrise, which caused the autism, and the is an evolved response, we can only blame the child’s illness on evolution. This shows clearly that it is ‘natural’, and anti-vaccine types love natural, so the conclusion is autism by natural selection is a good thing for anti-vaccers. Mmmmm
Post hoc, ergo propter hoc my bum.
Silly Brian! Everyone knows that a giant dung beetle rolls the sun across the sky.
Roosters indeed, haha!