In many ways, the anti-vaccine movement is highly mutable. However, this mutability is firmly based around keeping one thing utterly constant, and that one thing is vaccines. No matter what the evidence, no matter what the science, no matter how much observational, scientific, and epidemiological evidence is arrayed against them, to the relentlessly self-confident members of the anti-vaccine movement, it’s always about the vaccines. Always. Vaccines are always the root many human health problems, be they asthma, autoimmune diseases, autism, and chronic diseases of all types. Everything else is negotiable. For instance, back when Andrew Wakefield ignited a scare about the MMR vaccine by publishing a fraudulent case series linking the MMR to a new syndrome consisting of regressive autism and enterocolitis, it was the measles vaccine that caused this syndrome. Here in the U.S., it was the mercury in the thimerosal preservative that used to be used in many childhood vaccines until 2001 that was the cause of all evil. However, as scientists did more and more studies, testing vaccines to see if they were associated with an increased risk of autism and found zero, nada, zip association with either vaccines or the thimerosal preservative in vaccines, the anti-vaccine movement was nothing if not mutable. Before long, Jenny McCarthy was declaring that it was the “toxins” in vaccines that were causing autism, and Generation Rescue was asserting that children were getting “too many too soon.” Of course, as far as the anti-vaccine movement was concerned, the beauty of these ideas was (and is) that they are much harder to falsify scientifically because they are so much more vague...
For the anti-vaccinationists out there: The results of a real “vaxed versus unvaxed” study – Respectful Insolence
