No ifs, ands or buts from a special three-judge federal court set up to handle all those lawsuits claiming that vaccines cause childhood autism.

They said it doesn’t, and no federal compensation is necessary.One judge even said some parents “had been misled by physicians who are guilty, in my view, of gross medical misjudgment,” according to the Washington Post story. This is important, because many in the medical community had been worried about this panel because the necessary level of evidence was set so low - it seemed almost stacked in favor of the vaccines-are-bad crowd.

(Here’s the AP story, with a predictable reaction from the head of a group that believes in the link:”(She) said the court’s ruling will do little to change the minds of most parents who suspect a link between vaccines and autism. She said more studies are needed.”) (Here’s a next-day story at Slate, which has this fine comment regarding the original, apparently flawed, paper that started the whole thing: It’s hard to overestimate the impact of Wakefield’s paper in terms of disease, unfounded worry, and the expenditure of hundreds of millions of legal dollars. In Britain, which has no compulsory vaccination, rates of MMR vaccination fell from 92 percent to as low as 80 percent. Herd immunity slipped away; as a result, last year there were 1,348 British measles cases, including two deaths and hundreds of hospitalizations, compared with 56 cases in 1998.”)

I have blogged before about the false belief that vaccines cause various diseases - a belief that is contributing to a small but disturbing resurrection of diseases like measles and mumps -and particularly about Kathleen Seidel of Peterborough, whose excellent  blog www.neurodiversity.com about the issue has drawn lawsuits. I wrote about her in my Telegraph column and got some harsh criticism from true believers; one guy who said he was from Texas screamed “why do you hate children?” over the phone.

I bet if my kids were autistic I wouldn’t be calm about the topic, but I hope I wouldn’t clutch at false straws like “it’s vaccine’s fault”

Tags: vaccine; autism