For all kinds of hideous malpractice charges, including charges for the 'tests' that established the link the first place. The journal even officially redacted the claim.

Oh yeah, I should find the infographic that shows how much he has cost medicine in studies and tests just to disprove his fraudulent statements. It's unbelievable.

This isn't the exact one I was thinking of, but it gets the point across.

http://assets.goodstatic.com/s3/magazine/assets/540285/origina l/WKSUnRF.jpg

remove space in "original"

Hey IZ, which doctor who first linked vaccinations to autism in the first place?
The original doctor who first linked vaccinations to autism in the first place, or the first one?

If you mean Andrew Wakefield (Jenny McCarthy's guru), yes, he was quite publicly smacked down by the British government for his heavily flawed and outright falsified study that attempted to link vaccines to autism. Even if he hadn't committed any sort of ethics issues, the study would have never passed any sort of scientific peer review as it was terribly conducted.

Yet, oddly, as hard as the British government has come down hard on anti-vaxxers, they seem to be a weird position now of coddling homeopathy.

Oh another thing...

People seem to have forgotten (or at least, the media at large) how before McCarthy started on her crusade against vaccines she was all over the place telling people how her son was an "indigo child" because, she too, was an indigo child as well. This all changed I guess at some point and her son went from being a majickyal mystikal being of new age light and peace to having been horrifically damaged by common medicine.

Some of Dr. Jenny's original blog posts in regards to her son's status as an INDIGO CHILD (seriously) fortunately still exist via the Internet Wayback Machine. For example:

https://web.archive.org/web/20060618200418/http://www.children ofthenewearth.com/free.php?page=articles_free/mccarthy_jenny/artic le1

Where did that whole "indigo" or "blue" child thing come from? I know there's a subset of autistics and their adherents who go so far as to almost claim some kind of racial status for autistics. I even recall seeing an article on POEred about one guy's tale of a sort of ancient Atlantis full of autistic people.

I ask because there's a sci-fi novel I rather enjoyed called "Manifold: Time" by Stephen Baxter. Due to one thing and another, a bunch of kids became autstic-like savants to build a macguffin for the story's climax. It was written in 1999, so did he borrow the concept from the autism crowd or did they latch onto his concept to self-identify, I wonder?

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Manifold:_Time

I like to think someone called Jenny's kid a "Dago child" and she misunderstood.

The Indigo Child thing is a new-age creation linking people with an "indigo" aura. It gained popularity mostly by way of a fraudster "psychic" named Lee Carrol who claimed an alien named Kyron told him (telepathically I guess?) that Indigo children were the next phase of humanities evolution and these children are smarter and more special than everyone else because....uh..they just are.
Naturally, in keeping with the bullshit woo-origins of the idea, the actual criteria that determines who is an indigo child is ludicrously non-specific and sounds like any random, generic personality test. "You like to be alone, but also work well in groups sometimes. You are an introvert, but also sometimes extroverted.." that sort of thing.

Why would their ubermensch spawn need any vaccinations, fancy or otherwise? You might as well give superman a bulletproof vest.

Sadly, diseases don't just stop at those who might deserve them.

POSSIBLY when the rich start living in domed cities with robot servants, such a plan might only affect those who are asking for it.

When the parents make bad choices, it shouldn't be the kids who pay the price. That applies whether the parents are poor or rich.

It's like being a vegan and owning a cat, forcing your own principles and on the cat. And I've known some who do. Then they cry because their kitty died.

it's usually not principles (outside of the religious nutters)

it's a combination of aggressive stupidity and American selfishness.

the selfishness is refusing to protect everyone because they think the tiny chance of complications is too great a risk for their unique and only child on the planet. The stupidity is thinking that the risks from vaccines is much greater than the actual disease and that their kid will never catch said disease anyhow, so why risk the vaccine.

But SolRo, vaccinating yourself doesn't protect *everyone*. It protects yourself. If you're not vaccinated, then you're a danger to both yourself and to other people who have chosen, of their own free will, not to get vaccinated. You're not going to give measles to people who have been vaccinated against measles; you're not going to turn into a Typhoid Mary and kill half the people on the Eastern Seaboard.

Some people are not able to be vaccinated for certain things, babies too young to get the MMR, for example. They are put at risk when someone voluntarily decides to not be vaccinated because they think a vaccine causes autism.

yeah, there was just a story on TV about a kid who survived lymphoma, but his compromised immune system prevents him from getting vaccinated yet. His parents were trying to get his school to make sure the other kids were.

"You're not going to give measles to people who have been vaccinated against measles"

Well, vaccines fail sometimes, though not often. I happened to get measles when I was 22, just graduating from college; there was no known outbreak at the university nor did anyone around me get measles (as far as I know). Probably there was just somebody else in the close quarters of campus with the virus, I happened to bump into him or her, and I was just unlucky enough to be susceptible. But then it didn't blow up into an epidemic, because virtually everyone else was immune.

(I'm pleased to report no long term impact to the measles: no deafness, no mental retardation.)

That's a brilliant idea. "GET YOUR HANDS OFF MY VACCINES!"

Captain Trips likes this.

There's no vaccine for Captain Trips to start with.

I wish King had come up with a better ending for that story. Otherwise, it's one of my favorite post-apoc novels.