McCain and wingnut science = "good politics"

The NYT, to its credit, picks up on McCain's bizarre foray into anti-immunization conspiracy theories, but comes to an odd conclusion.

“It’s indisputable that autism is on the rise among children,” Senator John McCain said while campaigning recently in Texas. “The question is, What’s causing it? And we go back and forth, and there’s strong evidence that indicates that it’s got to do with a preservative in vaccines.”

With that comment, Mr. McCain marked his entry into one of the most politicized scientific issues in a generation.

Mr. McCain is correct that autism diagnoses have increased in recent decades; no one disputes that. He is on much shakier ground when talking about the preservative as a cause.

While some parents’ groups and lawmakers assert that the preservative, which contains mercury and is called thimerosal, has caused an epidemic of new autism cases, most mainstream researchers strongly disagree.

Several large-scale studies have found no evidence of a link between thimerosal and autism, and medical groups including the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, the Institute of Medicine and the American Academy of Pediatrics have publicly stated as much. In January, California reported an increase in autism cases, despite the removal of thimerosal from most vaccines.

In February, an international team of researchers, analyzing blood samples from vaccinated children, found that blood levels of ethyl mercury “fell rapidly and had largely returned to baseline levels by Day 11 after vaccination.” Those levels fell much more rapidly, for instance, than levels of the mercury people absorb by eating fish — suggesting that the injected thimerosal is less likely to build up in the blood, the researchers concluded.

Still, the parent groups raising concerns about the dangers of vaccines have not wavered in their conviction, and if anything have become more skeptical of government pronouncements on the issue. Radio hosts, journalists and a new television drama have also taken up the issue. So if Mr. McCain’s goal was bucking the establishment — and turning a weather eye on the government — his remarks made good politics.

"Bucking the establishment?" Established science?

But yeah, I suppose, good politics. Trouble is, out of ignorance and pandering to the home school set, I guess, he seems to be encouraging bad medicine.

As relayed in the Aug. 3 issue of the New England Journal of Medicine, an American girl visiting Romania who wasn't inoculated against measles brought the disease home to Indiana and spread it to 36 others at a religious gathering, nearly all of whom were also not inoculated. The parents had chosen not to inoculate their children for religious reasons and a perceived fear of the dangers of vaccines.

Fortunately, although several patients were hospitalized, no one died.

Not so elsewhere in the world, where measles infects 30 million people each year, mostly children, and kills about 500,000 and sometimes as much as 10 percent of the infected in poorer regions, according to the World Health Organization (WHO).

McCain -- just as anti-science as George W. Bush. Whee.