Do you realize that you just spent three long paragraphs defending the use of vaccines to someone who just stated that these people should not even have the right to refuse vaccines because of the need for the common good?

Did you read the that I agreed that yes, there were people on both sides creating spin and making things up?

I was speaking plainly and not using any analogy whatsoever.

I made a direct comparison of in one thread of discussion, people suggesting that anyone who denied that vaccines were causing problems were in the pocket of the big drug companies and another where anyone who disagreed with the AGW proponents were in the pockets of big oil.

The point I made was this:

Just dismissing someone altogether with the argumentative fallacy of guilt by association is not valid. It is somewhere between covering your ears and yelling “La, La, La, I can’t hear you!!” and invoking Godwin’s Law.

It is just ridiculous on both sides to try to shout down any disagreement by dismissing someone’s argument on the unfounded accusation of being in someone’s pocket. This is supposed to be a discussion of facts, yes, and even opinions, and their merits and not a shouting match.

The people who politicized climate science and indulged in smears are the denialists. And their information is mostly sourced to paid denialism from the fossil fuel industry, and from the tobacco industry, because that industry is mostly run by right-wing ideologues.

Your analogy fails because vaccines work, they don’t cause autism, and hence, there’s an enormous pool – almost the whole of medical science – to support it, and they can’t possibly all be paid shills, and moreover, they have so many sources, that those source can’t possibly all be written for hire. Moveover, attempts to link them to work for hire have fallen on their face because they were factually wrong, and the evidence showed that.

The climate science denialism sources are few and contradictory, nearly all have provable ties to fossil fuels (or tobacco or mining or pesticides). That people choose to believe only paid sources instead of independent researchers, that they choose to reject centuries of value in peer reviewed journals, that they choose to call data gathering scientific profiteering, and that they won’t accept that “the scientific consensus is” and “science says” mean the same thing means something is going wrong – for most of them, it’s ideological, but for many – the Marc Moranos or Jennifer Marohasys or Frank Luntzes – it’s mostly that they’re paid to say X in the most believable way, and if you paid them enough to say Y – and they didn’t have a history that would be hard to overcome of saying X – they’d say Y with equal enthusiasm.

Neither the vaccine science deniers – including the autism subset – nor the people who understand the science of epidemiology as it reflects itself in illnesses caused by vaccines, who agree that autism is not one of those – are partisan. Wakefield was clearly partly profit-motivated – the pharmaceuticals might like the security of vaccine orders, but the history is that they are very grudging and reluctant – letting the free market produce our vaccines has led to overages and shortages that more socialized vaccine production never has.

You have Republicans and Democrats who are vaccine and autism science deniers. You have both that are science affirmers. You find Greens and Libertarians in either camp.

WE are not the ones that politicized climate science. WE are not the ones smearing scientists. WE are the ones with the facts and history on our side – just as the people who said smoking causes cancer did. The OTHER side is the side trying to prove things that are simply not true, and using every filthy trick in the book to create DOUBT.

David, if you won’t acknowledge that there is a “create doubt” industry, then you’re a history denialist. They’ve gone seamlessly from tobacco to climate, in some cases stopping off to lie and say that agricultural use of DDT prevented malaria and that amoebas don’t evolve.

Also: isn’t the woman who does Neurodiversity autistic?

Are the people who do Age of Autism autistic?

How dare they borrow their oppression!! – or whatever strident phrase of outrage is appropriate here.

And people who work on the science of autism, apparently, are out of that community.

AREN’T there actually a lot of signs that even for family of autistic children and adults, the soi-disant voices of the autistic community aren’t representing them??

they should be challenged more on that single point, IMO.

Didn’t you know that the Apollo moon landing on the Sea of Tranquility was actually photographed at Shepperton Studios, near London? How many times must I remind you of that?

Seriously if we had to rely on public referendums to decide what is – and isn’t – valid science, we would see a swift return to the “Good Old Days”. And by that I mean of course the Dark Ages and the Spanish Inquisition.

I thought many creos and New Atheist militant zealots were certifiably insane, but this vaccine denialist has just earned my “Fruitcake of the Year” award. He probably needs to read Arthur Caplan’s work as well as yours, since Caplan is highly regarded as a prominent thinker on bioethics.

Didn’t realize you were in the pay of Pfizer and GlaxoSmithKline, but I’ll be sure to make a note of that, next time I look at their stock prices.

John

P. S. Heard that the Huffington Post has become infested with vaccine denialists, so that’s one website you ought to avoid, along with, of course, Pharyngula.