It's Spreading

I was talking politics with a couple of coworkers when I arrived at work tonight with the Pennsylvania primary as a backdrop. As a guy who definitely favors Barack Obama but will certainly vote for Hillary Clinton to keep John "Hundred-Years-War" McCain out of office (France and England already had one of those, Johnny boy; ask them how well it turned out), I voiced my dismay that both of them have (admittedly somewhat tepidly) jumped onto the Mercury Militia's bandwagon.

I was met with indifference from one person and an "I don't know; I think there's something to it..." from the other.

The problem is that this coworker isn't dumb. This person is far from unintelligent and has a pretty decent educational background. But somehow the Kool-Ade had been drunk.

I asked for a defense of such a preposterous belief, and it was, of course, the same old arguments we've all heard time and time again. The difference was it was obvious my coworker isn't as well-versed in vaccination denialism as the hardcore Mercury Militia types (and so I don't think it's fair to even use the "denialist" label); I was told about "Some preservative they used to use."

"Thimerosal?" I replied, and received in response a blank stare. "Sure, it has mercury in it, but it's part of the overall chemical compound. Saying thimerosal causes mercury poisoning is like saying that water is explosive."

"Well, obviously there's research that goes both ways."

And this one floored me a little. Who is saying this? Where's the information coming from? I highly doubt that my coworker reads John Best's blog or is following the lawsuit that recently roped in Neurodiversity (that was quashed, by the way; yay!), and I've seen almost nothing in most of the semi-reputable popular news media (Oprah isn't a semi-reputable news medium). RFK Jr. has written some Mercury Militia bullshit on the Huffington Post, so maybe that's it, but I can't be sure if that's the source or not.

Incidentally, I fucking hate the Huffington Post.

After recovering from my momentary flooring, I said "There is no reliable, well-designed, and reputable research that shows a link between autism and vaccines. Besides that, thimerosal was taken out of vaccines a decade ago and the autism rates have continued to rise."

"Well, but what if a parent had it in their system when she gave birth?"

Huh?

This kind of shit is just wild speculation. There's no evidence to back it up, there's no reason whatsoever to suppose that it is true or even give it more than a moment's consideration, but it's put out there like it's some type of reputable hypothesis. The original "hypothesis" was suitably falsified, so rather than bite the bullet and admit an error, they just make a secondary hypothesis that relies for its veracity on the truth of the original, debunked hypothesis. For us to even consider the "mother passing toxins to her baby" idea, we have to first accept the falsified claim that it was advanced to replace!

There's zero evidence linking thimerosal and autism, so why go out on a limb and say "Maybe a mother's vaccine caused autism in her baby?"

Why, especially, when you have no ties to the general anti-vaxxer movement, would you baselessly speculate on their behalf? Why wouldn't you critically evaluate their claims instead of taking them at face value? All of science is against them.

All of medicine is against them.

These aren't Galilean rebels. These are Ben Steinian liars and frauds with a barely-disguised agenda against vaccines in specific and medical science in general and no data whatsoever to support them. They're ideologues, so of course they don't need data to support them.

But what possesses someone who isn't a Mercury Militia ideologue to forego proper evidentiary concerns and buy their line of data-free faulty reasoning?

"It's the anecdotes from mothers!" is what I heard.

"The plural of 'anecdote' is not 'data.'" I'm sick of saying that.

"Well, yeah, but they tell these stories of kids who are progressing prefectly normally along their developmental pathways and then they hit eighteen months after a major injection and they just stop!"

What to say? "Post hoc ergo propter hoc fallacy?" Most people don't know what the hell that means. So what I said was "Autism is a very broad spectrum, and the spectrum and diagnostic criteria have only broadened in recent decades. It stands to reason that, firstly, more people will be diagnosed, and secondly, that a seemingly normal child will reach a certain developmental stage and just stop there, and that it'll be different for different kids."

It was conceded that the broadened diagnostic criteria could account for some of the rise in diagnoses.

But why only some?

With no evidence to back up the claim that mercury, thimerosal, or vaccines cause autism, wouldn't you tend toward the idea that broadened diagnostic criteria probably accounts for all of the increase?

"But all the anecdotes. But mothers know their children."

"But they don't. Not in the face of overwhelming contradictory data. It's like eyewitness testimony in court; it's the worst kind you can ask for because people are fallible."

A brief "Well..." and an angry glare. I had scored a point, I knew; this coworker has a background in juvenile justice and understands the unreliability of eyewitness testimony.

Unfortunately, just then, the subject was changed and we stopped talking about it. I'm not sure how to interpret that. I know I didn't convince anyone of anything, but I at least hope I came off as a guy who knows what he's talking about.

I, on the other hand, got the feeling that my coworker really didn't have a clue. It was all weak, rehashed arguments that were finally broken down to an admitted reliance on anecdotal testimony and a reluctance to admit to the poverty of anecdotal evidence, especially when it is stacked against a fairly large body of scientific studies refuting the anecdotes.

But why do laypeople buy this? A basic understanding of high school chemistry is adequate to demonstrate prima facie that there's hardly a ghost of a chance that the Mercury Milita's claims are right. They, like so much denialism and pseudomedicine, fail miserably a basic plausibility test.

I can understand why parents of autistic children might fall for it; their children have a troublesome disorder about which very little is known. They feel helpless to do anything about it, they're emotionally distraught, and they're grasping at straws. Perhaps they even want someone to blame. Perhaps they're even rebelling against the thought that they might, through something in their genes or an epigenetic error in the womb perhaps influenced by their lifestyles while pregnant, be somehow responsible for their child's troubles and want desperately to lose that feeling.

I understand why they might reach out to the anti-vaxxers in their moment of need. It's still fucking stupid, though.

But what stake does the everyman have in the anti-vaxxer movement? They aren't ideologues and they aren't desperate parents of autistics. If anything, they should recognize that from a practical standpoint the anti-vaxxers would destroy their comfortable, relatively disease-free lifestyle, opening their bodies up to measles, mumps, and polio, just to name a few. You'd think that on that simple basis the everyman would say "Fuck these assholes," and move on.

And perhaps a lot of them do.

But some of them don't, in increasing numbers, for no good reason, against all evidence and against their own amply demonstrated self-interest, and it's completely ridiculous and entirely infuriating.

The mercury/autism "link" has been shown, time after time, to be nothing but an empty faulty association made by people with more emotional energy than sense. We might as well say "Well, every baby is born, and some small percentage of them are diagnosed somewhere on the autistic spectrum; birth must cause autism! All of those babies that weren't born didn't get autism, did they?"

It's a completely silly argument, but it's pretty much an analogue for everything the antivaxxers have been saying all along.

That average people would buy crap like that, even mildly, even for a second, is incomprehensible to me.

*****

In other news, My Mother the Woo told me yesterday morning that science does not work empirically, that its conclusions are not drawn on an evidentiary basis, and that she knows this because she has a minor in biology.

I told her her mind was so open that her brain had fallen out, and she called me mean. Well, I suppose the shoe does fit. Just in time, too. My old boots are starting to fall apart.