This post by Orac is rather fun in the way that he excoriates the stupidity of some of those claiming that vaccines cause autism. Jenny McCarthy comes under quite serious attack.

No real comment to make about it other than the fact that it shows quite how strongly some people can be mislead, how they can believe in things almost beyond all reason.

This is from Anthony Cox and it’s another example of quite how barmy people have become over the issue.

Question
I have a 7 week old baby boy who has “the jitters” on and off in his legs. I am told by the hospital and health visitor that this is normal and due to his immature CNS still developing. I was initially worried it might be related to epilepsy as the paed doctor who examined him after birth hinted at this. Anyone know if vaccines can be more dangerous for a 2 month old with “jitters”?

Answer
Not sure, but vaccines can be dangerous for babies without jitters. My advice would be to not to vaccinate at all, or at the very least wait to until the baby is much older. 8 weeks is just far too soon to start injecting toxic cocktails directly into an infant’s blood.

Given that we’ve not found out how to cure any viral disease (no, seriously, not one, ever. We can treat the symptoms of some of them, but that’s it.) as yet, vaccination is one of the glories of modern medicine. We wiped out smallpox entirely with them, polio is now not known in the Western Hemisphere and the other diseases, at least until the recent scares, were all on a continuous downward slope of incidence.

How did we get to this point where people simply don’t believe in science any more? Don’t people understand that measles still causes up to 900,000 deaths a year globally?