[AnthonyMouse]

So there are two separate issues here.

One is the "do vaccines cause autism" sort of thing, which, basically, they don't, but there are a lot of wrong people who think they do for bad reasons. That's the thing where if you try to censor things you're screwing yourself by creating the breeding ground for bad conspiracy theories. And how you get enough people refusing vaccines for bad reasons to cause problems etc.

Then there's the policy debate on whether vaccines should be mandatory, where people can make some pretty non-crazy arguments that they shouldn't be. Or the question of whether a specific person in a specific circumstance should get a specific vaccine, to which a reasonable answer could occasionally be no. But the people making those arguments aren't even necessarily wrong and having them push back on something when they have a reason to push back on it is perfectly legitimate and the people wanting to stop them are the baddies.

[ourmandave]

In the "do vaccines cause autism" sort of thing, they don't.

But then frauds like Wakefield somehow got a bullshit paper published saying they do and it's off to the toon races.

The paper wasn't censored, it was disproven by multiple studies and discredited by investigation. The Wakefield paper studied 12 children (multiple who had siblings with autism) and was funded by lawyers suing the vaccine companies at the time.

Today Wakefield is on the anti-vax circuit giving talks and continuing to lie.

Measles is a Solved Problem. Polio is a Solved Problem.

But the toons are running the Fed now, canceling science and telling lies. So we'll have to wait until 2028 to get a final death count, assuming anyone is still tracking it.

[AnthonyMouse]

Let's not pretend that nothing was being censored during COVID or that no one remembers it. The backlash is the primary reason we ended up with RFK.

There are also multiple ways to solve problems. If the Wakefield theory is that vaccines using mercury as a preservative can cause autism then you don't even need to challenge it to make it irrelevant. It has memetic power because having mercury in medicine seems intuitively bad and conjures images of 19th century quacks. So all you have to do is use a different preservative. Then you have a one-line killshot any time anyone brings it up -- there's no mercury anymore -- and you don't have to try to explain statistical sample sizes to people who failed high school math.

[Braxton1980]

The reason we ended with RFK is because of the massive number of lies Trump and his allies told compared to the Democrats, the majority of people are not sufficiently intelligent to overcome this, and the economy.