Anti-vaxxers: Is This The Best You Can Produce?

Whoa... 2011 so far is really all about vaccines. First, there was a whole series of excellent articles in the British Medical Journal on how the whole MMR/vaccines/autism scare was really a big, elaborate fraud by A. Wakefield and a bunch of lawyers, all to make some money (but that was not really a news for most of the educated world).

There are also two outstanding books on the topic that came out in January:
















and:
















and now, the "debate" is heating up... sort of. There is really nothing credible and intelligent that the anti-vax loonies can come up with at this time. After numerous studies, all around the world, tons of research, thousands of scientists looking into this, and finally more and more data coming in that autism is mostly genetic, the issue is settled. Yet, the wacos are still at it, spreading misinformation, scaring parents, and possibly causing more pain, suffering, and possibly even death. This time, they created another "list", signed mostly by people who have no expertise in immunology, or even medical sciences (take some chiropractors and homeopaths), who say "no" to vaccines. I'm sure this will spread somehow in the Web, going from one mailbox to another, from one mom/dad to the next, causing more confusion.

That's why it is so important to squish this concoction of garbage and stupidity as soon as possible.
There is nobody better to perform this task than Orac:

Upon reading the statement, I was actually surprised by it. No, I wasn't surprised by what it said. Rather, I was surprised at how transparently pathetic it was. The claims made on it were either really easily refuted or trivially true but meaningless.

The whole dissection: The clueless cite the ignorant to argue against vaccines