As a father of an autistic child, I can totally understand an emotional and illogical response to the suggestion of a Thimerosal/autism link. Believe me, at first it had me somewhat enraged as well. In light of some other drugs that have come under fire in past years for either under-delivering on promises or outright harming people that take them, it only makes sense that some people are going to look at a statement like that and say "Oh, look, something *else* the FDA missed!"

The problem is most people nowadays seem to either 1) lack the capacity to think for themselves (either mentally or as a result of time constraints, etc.) 2) lack the desire to think for themselves. After all, why bother doing that when someone else has already done it for me?

I also think that both sides are sitting too much in the area of absolutes. It seems that most scientists insist that *every* vaccine is safe for *every* child, and the inverse is true for those who think Thimerosal causes autism. Obviously, just the mere presence of Thimerosal doesn't cause autism, because if it did we'd all be autistic. But at the same time, I don't think it's unreasonable to believe that the large number of vaccines that are administered at once nowadays, along with other possible factors, are at the source.

Autism can be very difficult to work with as a parent, and I hope they find out the cause/cure soon. But flying off the handle, on either side, isn't going to get it done.

Don't get me wrong -- it's still a pain in the butt and it's wrong and probably an abuse of the legal system. But her freedom of speech isn't at risk. She could respond by just giving the documents requested. She shouldn't have to do so, but her speech is in no way at risk.

It's called a chilling effect [wikipedia.org]. If this is upheld, it will send the message that if you criticise pseudo-science, you are in danger of being dragged before a court and having all your personal details examined for no good reason. It's an undue burden on speech that many people will not be willing to take just to speak out against some kooks.

This does put her free speech at risk. That is not necessarily through a process that would order her to stop. Instead, this is a case of harassment and invasion of privacy as a result of her having exercised her free speech rights. It may well be an attempt by Mr. Shoemaker to discourage her from speaking. She, or someone else considering speaking on these matters, may be discouraged from doing so for fear of the costs and invasion of privacy due to such a subpoena.

If Mr. Shoemaker had believed she had information relevant to the case, he could have simply asked for that. Instead, what he is asking for goes beyond what this case is about. We need to have legal procedures that mandate all subpoenas, even for discovery not carried out in the courtroom, be reviewed by the judge for relevance.

I see that this is really the media's fault, to a large degree.

We got really flimsy evidence of this link, which they trumpeted (because it was "sexy" and brought in eyeballs). When these studies were basically proven false, they got very little mention.

So now what you see is every once in a while a story is done about these things. They show some doctor saying "that's nonsense, you should be more afraid of scarlet fever." Then you see 4 crying mothers talking about how doctors ruined her kid's life. They are given equal weight.

So people don't get the right picture. They get a skewed one. They glamorize the "poor mothers" who get outpourings of grief. They play on people's fears. They don't deal with the elephant in the room.

The people who do these kinds of suits are either really stupid, or not finished grieving. The people that take it this far (make sites devoted to it, sue everyone involved, etc) are quite probably just in the "anger" stage of grief. They are looking for anyone or anything to blame so that it's not their fault, it's not random, etc. People prefer concrete incorrect answers (it's the mercury) to abstract correct answers (some kids just develop that way).

They don't talk about how these kind of things could be because of grief. They don't talk about how there is basically no evidence. They try to get viewers. The lawyers go for the long shot cash and the good publicity. Both are taking advantage of people operating out of grief.

What do financial records have to do with free speech? She needs to get a lawyer and get this jerk disbarred.

Since she is not party to the case, he has no right to her personal records.

Her right to free speech is not being interfered with

The hell it isn't. [wikipedia.org]

• Blogger: Blah blah something inconventient blah
  
• Lawyer: I don't want you to say that
  
• Blogger: Sorry. It's protected speech.
  
• Lawyer: I'll give you something else to do then. Bring out all records since the second you were born, package them up, and come all the way out to me so that I can verbally harass you. That should keep you so busy that you don't have time to say stuff I find inconvenient. It should also keep you so busy that you can't actually do anything else with your life (like work, take care of your kids, etc) either.
  

It's not about denying someone their rights.

It's about exerting social influence on them to distract/prevent them from exercising those rights.

And, failing that, it's about creating pain points when one decides to exercise those rights. Like electroshock therapy. Sure, nothing's STOPPING you from doing "Activity A", but if you get a painful jolt every time you do "Activity A", you'll soon find that you either reduce or completely stop doing "Activity A".

religion: While the news probably didn't reach your mom's basement, the antagonism between "science" and "religion" only started in earnest in the last two hundred years. For the thousand years before that, science and its precursors were thoroughly entwined with religion, both supported by and supporting in exchange the dominant religion of their land. Any stores you have to the contrary are, sadly, more properly called "Atheist Mythology" than anything else.

Tell that to Galileo Galilei [crystalinks.com] who died forget 200 years ago, more than 300 years ago.

Reading between the lines, in issuing the subpoena, Shoemaker seems to be trying to determine whether Seidl is, in fact, being compensated by Bayer to act as an agent for their propaganda.

If she's just an innocent blogger then yeah, this sounds like gigantic invasion of privacy. But if she's really just a shill for Big Pharma...well, then it's a little harder to muster up sympathy.

I decided, years ago, that I would let society suffer the consequences of its actions without lifting a finger to help.

A rather unwise decision, since any significant social problems will also affect you, and a catastrophic failures will most likely kill you.

More like as long as the latter doesn't waltz into the former's territory.

Your [family's] rights end where my [family's metaphorical] nose begins. Yes, obviously some laws and mandates that limit personal "liberties" are necessary to a healthy and functioning society; without any such laws we would be living in a literal anarchy.

For instance, you are not "free" to walk into my house and stab me. You are also not free to send your kid into a public school with my kid, where he or she may wind up infecting other students with otherwise preventable diseases such as TB or worse, without first being administered certain vaccines. These vaccines do not all work 100% of the time, so the only way to minimize the chances of disease outbreaks is to maintain a fully-vaccinated population [wikipedia.org].

As for Thiomersal, there has never been a shred of solid evidence linking it (or modern vaccination in general) to increased risks of Autism. Removing Thiomersal from certain vaccines' formulation was a concession made not because the preservative posed any danger itself, but because of the imminent threat to children who would otherwise remain unvaccinated due to their parents' unfounded fears. In the long run, I believe that removing Thiomersal was a mistake, as it only served to bolster such unscientific claims about the dangers of vaccination.

That gets modded informative? A note to the wise moderator: "Informative" presupposes the contribution of information. Whereas what we have here amounts to an authoritative-sounding chin-jutting, "Is Not!" with nothing of any material to back it up. Children argue like this, and it should be pointed out that an adult who argues like this is likely to maintain other over-simplified thought patterns which will naturally extend to their belief systems.

No it's the wrong kind of mercury. It is NOT the same stuff that comes in thermometers.

Metallic Mercury doesn't dissolve in water and is not useful in pharmaceuticals, so it is bonded into an organic molecule, C9H9HgNaO2S, (Thiomersal), which metabolizes in the human body into C2H5ClHg (Ethyl Mercury). Ethyl Mercury, however, is indeed toxic. [deakin.edu.au]

# Very toxic by inhalation, in contact with skin and if swallowed.
# Danger of cumulative effects.
# Very toxic to aquatic organisms, may cause long-term adverse effects in the aquatic environment.

-FL

Homes collapsed under the weight of hornets' nests that died and hardened from the DDT

That's not logical in the slightest, hardened hornet's nests should dry out and get lighter, not heavier. Even if DDT somehow manage to double the weight of a hornet nest, if a house had almost enough hornets nests to collapse the roof by weight, the house would be uninhabitable anyway.

The houses really collapsed because DDT killed the parasitic wasps that kept certain thatch eating caterpillars under control. I read about that here. [cdra.org.za]

while larger animals such as cats ended up with toxic levels of DDT from consumption of smaller creatures

Firstly, I find it unlikely that the rat population was controlled by domestic housepets, these "cats" do not refer to an indigenous species in the island but Felis Catus which were kept in houses. Secondly DDT isn't like mercury, it doesn't just accumulate in a predator's body and work its way up the food chain, it leaves the body. DDT just isn't all that toxic to mammals, it would take a hell of a lot to kill a cat. Sure, longterm exposure to DDT has effects, like an increase in cancer but nothing that could cause the local extinction of a whole cat population. Anyway, if DDT were killing the cat population, why not other species that eat small lizards and bugs, like rats for example? Finally, DDT stays around in the environment for a long time (one of its main controversial traits) why would these new cats simply not die?

Ecosystems are complex things and killing all the insects is such a huge thing that it's going to have some complex repercussions. Luckily Silent Spring came out a couple of years later and since it is now commonly accepted that DDT kills absolutely everything, they can just pin it on nasty DDT killing the cute fluffy kittens (because it's evil) and be done with it.

I have little to no sympathy with Seidel. Thiomerisol, a mercury(!) compound, deals enormous damage to a child's (and an adult's) brain. Basically it boils down to a needle full of lobotomy. If she is defending Thiomerisol then either she hasn't done her homework or knowing the facts she is on their payroll.

What the fuck hyperbole train did you just ride in on?

The amount of ethyl mercury in a dose of vaccine is tiny, and ethylmercury [wikipedia.org] is eliminated so quickly (half-life 18 days or less) that it does not bioaccumulate. You're putting your kid in more danger by feeding them a tuna sandwich once a week than you are by giving them the standard childhood vaccinations, even if you go back in time to 1998 before the US started phasing out thiomersal. Unlike ethylmercury, methylmercury does build up in the body (half-life 44 days), and methylmercury is found in tuna and other large, long-lived ocean fish. (It's also found in large, long-lived land mammals like humans, and babies receive noteworthy amounts of mercury through breast milk.)

The reality is that toxicity depends on dose. Oxygen is a deadly poison [wikipedia.org] at a high enough concentrations: divers at 600m generally use breathing gas that's 98% He and 2% O2, because 21% O2 would kill them more-or-less instantly. Iron, an essential nutrient, is acutely toxic [wikipedia.org] at a dose that's not much larger than a healthy amount: iron overdose is a leading cause of poisoning deaths in young children [emedicine.com], and it used to be even worse thanks to the iron in Flintstone's chewables. (I myself had my stomach pumped when I was 4.) Methyl salicylate [wikipedia.org], better known as Ben-Gay and closely related to aspirin, killed a cross-country runner last year [wikipedia.org] because she didn't know that it's poisonous in large doses.

On top of that, thiomersal has been phased out of the routine childhood vaccines for years now. There was no resulting drop in autism rates; there was no resulting drop in mercury poisonings; there was no resulting increase in cognitive function, or test scores, or any measurable thing whatsoever. All the available evidence shows that removing thiomersal did absolutely nothing.

On top of that, thanks in large part to the autism-vaccine controversy, mumps is making a comeback [wikipedia.org], and pertussis [wikipedia.org] is now endemic in the area around Boulder, CO [theatlantic.com], thanks explicitly to unvaccinated children and a failure to reach herd immunity [wikipedia.org] (which for pertussis is 92-94% vaccination).

I mean, hell, at least autism won't kill you.