Thimerosol-Autism link was a legal theory in search of science
Source: blogs.forbes.com Author: Daniel Fisher What has been obvious to skeptics for years has finally become obvious to all: The supposed link between vaccines and autism is a sham perpetrated in the name of litigation. In a scathing series of articles and editorial in the British Medical Journal, researcher Andrew Wakefield, who wrote an influential Lancet article in 1998 suggesting vaccines cause autism, has been exposed as a fraud. What’s worse, he was paid by lawyers to perpetrate his fraud, more than $675,000 over two years. Wakefield’s theories and the shoddy research performed by a British lab helped fuel a similar wave of litigation in the U.S. With total disregard for the risk of needless injury and death they were helping to cause, trial lawyers and cheerleaders like Robert Kennedy peddled the story that the preservative thimerosol, containing minute traces of mercury, was the cause of an explosion in autism diagnoses. What they never said was this was a theory tailor-made for litigation. Science designed to serve the courtroom. The lawyers had a problem, you see. Congress, recognizing that vaccines will injure and kill a predictable number of people each year while saving many more, passed a law in 1986 taking away the right to sue vaccine manufacturers in standard courts. The cases were funneled to a special vaccine court where damages would be paid out according to a schedule. Lawyers didn’t like that, preferring the potentially much larger verdicts they could get from a jury. So they began looking [...]