Odd that Wakefield's co-author, accused of the same things, had his indictment reversed on appeal. Wakefield did not have malpractice insurance, and his appeal was denied.

And, of course, the oft-quoted Danish study was conducted by a researcher now under indictment for fraud: Paul Thorsen.

Ummm... no, he didn't. There were a couple of issues with the study, the primary one being that a temporal association between the administration of the vaccine and the onset of autistic enterocolitis should never have implied causality. The study was important because it identified the colon symptoms present in a subset of patients with ASD as a distinct disorder. But it was misinterpreted in the press, especially for a study where the primary findings involved only 12 patients.

The main author never signed on to the minor retraction. There was nothing close to a confession of "making the whole thing up", but some (questionable) researchers from other institutions have made that accusation.

Well that's a pretty useless statistic without also knowing how many iOS users switched to Android - isn't it? And I was not able to find any surveys that provided those numbers.

Damn you, Trident!

How so? It seems, instead, to present a counter-argument. I would refer you to the comments of Richard Horton, of the Lancet. To wit:

"But there are fair questions to be asked about the style of government and expert response to claims about the safety of MMR. Three reactions have been discernable. First, there has been an appeal to evidence. The Department of Health's www.mmrthefacts.nhs.uk website contains a superb collection of materials designed to help parents make the “decision in your own time and on your own terms”. The difficulty is that in a post-BSE era, where government advice is no longer immediately taken on trust, the weight of accumulated evidence carries less force if it comes from government than it once did.

Second, public-health officials have disparaged as “poor science” evidence that appears to contradict their official message. This approach has a cost. The reason that today's retraction is partial and not total is that the discovery of a possible link between bowel disease and autism is a serious scientific idea, as recognised by the MRC,8 and one that deserves further investigation. Although dismissing the entire 1998 Lancet paper as poor science gives a clear and correct message to the public about the status of any claim regarding the safety of MMR, in scientific and clinical terms it is both wrong and damaging. The autism-bowel disease link was considered part of a series of physiological observations judged by the MRC to be “interesting and in principle worth investigating”. Subsequent research has yielded conflicting findings.13, 14 This work should be supported.

Third, there has been an effort to starve critics of legitimacy by refusing to engage them face-to-face."

There were no "lies", only misunderstandings, misinterpretations, and misrepresentations OUTSIDE of the scientific community, and a failure to disclose associations and funding on the part of ONE of the many researchers, which turned out to be irrelevant to any of the research conducted or findings reported.

Further, I think you would be as hard-pressed to show a direct causal link between any specific refusal of the MMR vaccine and any specific death as researchers have been to show a causal link between any specific vaccine and autistic enterocolitis.

Bullshit, bullshit

Huh. Apparently, you're right. You can be a 50-something politician and have an affair with the 17-year-old daughter of one of your law clients, get a plea deal to misdemeanors instead of a felony, and it's okay as long as you come out with it a couple of years later, present your new baby, and talk about your ambitions to be a leader in the state senate. Truth is stranger than fiction.

Oh, sorry, should I have found some garbage rag dedicated to excusing and covering up the left's mistakes? There are certainly a LOT more of those to choose from.

Actually, you are an ignorant douchebag with no clue about anything, and a shill for the vastly harmful pharmaceutical industry.

Clearly if you try to compare one libertarian's ideas with another, you may view them as inconsistent - but you can say the same about "progressive" or "liberal" or "conservative" or any other. However, the core principles of libertarianism itself is the most consistent of any other philosophy I know of. It's really simple too. You seem ignorant of what it's about.

Yes, Rand Paul is a politician. And "pure" libertarians have grown to distrust him, too, since he tries to express his views in a way that doesn't scare people. Even if he believes there should be no laws against possession of heroin, cocaine, and that the state should repeal any law that defines a "marriage", expressing such an idea would marginalize him to such an extent that he'd be unable to influence ANYTHING in Washington.

I can't be "gleeful" about people that are harmed by pharmaceutical companies. But for your information, it happens often enough (and since these multinational corporations are IMMUNE from liability for ANY harm, the government has a compensation program to assist people injured by them.

There are vaccines and there are vaccines. I see no problem with the proven ones for really tragic illnesses, such as polio, for instance. But when states start mandating things like Gardisil, which has caused some neurological problems in some patients and with very questionable benefits, it goes too far.

False. Rather, you cannot see past sound bites fed to you and fail to distinguish between subtle positions. "Non-interventionism" is not the same as "isolationism".

That's pretty disingenuous, without merit, and without relevance. Paul has opposed these types of government intrusion and civil rights violations for a long time, long before he even entered politics. A passionate dislike for excessive government surveillance is just as likely a motivation for this as your biased viewpoint of him.

You are a victim of media manipulation. Here's your sign.

Why? Do you think he lied? Because I have heard of them, too. I've even heard of ones that didn't even survive. Why do you focus on that out-of-context quote instead of his entire point? Are there no issues with vaccines? Should the government be mandating 200 vaccine shots for every citizen, regardless of outcome, and regardless of the pharmaceutical company immunity from any liability, but retaining all the profits from government-supported funding? Do you distrust Rand Paul more than pharmaceutical companies? Because that's an easy choice for me.

“There’s 400 headlines now that say ‘Paul says vaccines cause mental disorders,'” he continued. “That’s not what I said. I said I’ve heard of people who’ve had vaccines and they see a temporal association and they believe that.”