Tip for politicians: before you repeat a story you might want to find out, from a credible source, whether it’s actually true.
It all started when some woman came up to Michele Bachman after the Republican presidential debate in which Bachman had criticized Rick Perry over a failed attempt to make the HPV vaccine mandatory for girls in the sixth grade. The woman is crying and tells Bachman that her (the woman’s) daughter got the HPV vaccine and “suffered mental retardation as a result of that vaccine,” Bachman said.
Yahoo News, among other sources, reported yesterday that, “pressed by Fox News' Sean Hannity on his radio program about the story, Bachman said she had ‘no idea’ if it were true.”
Another Yahoo! story quoted Dr. Evan Siegfried, spokesman for the Global and Regional Asperger Syndrome Partnership, as telling Politico, “There is zero credible scientific evidence that vaccines cause mental retardation or autism,” and "She should cease trying to foment fear in order to advance her political agenda.”
Bioethics professor Steven Miles offered $1k for proof that the vaccine caused the woman’s condition and his former boss, Art Kaplan, director of the University of Pennsylvania Center for Bioethics saw his $1k and raised it to $10k.
“These types of messages in this climate have the capacity to do enormous public health harm,” Miles said.
We have absolutely no proof of this but you know what’s may well be another cause of mental retardation, for both viewer and participant? Political campaigning.
It all started when some woman came up to Michele Bachman after the Republican presidential debate in which Bachman had criticized Rick Perry over a failed attempt to make the HPV vaccine mandatory for girls in the sixth grade. The woman is crying and tells Bachman that her (the woman’s) daughter got the HPV vaccine and “suffered mental retardation as a result of that vaccine,” Bachman said.
Yahoo News, among other sources, reported yesterday that, “pressed by Fox News' Sean Hannity on his radio program about the story, Bachman said she had ‘no idea’ if it were true.”
Another Yahoo! story quoted Dr. Evan Siegfried, spokesman for the Global and Regional Asperger Syndrome Partnership, as telling Politico, “There is zero credible scientific evidence that vaccines cause mental retardation or autism,” and "She should cease trying to foment fear in order to advance her political agenda.”
Bioethics professor Steven Miles offered $1k for proof that the vaccine caused the woman’s condition and his former boss, Art Kaplan, director of the University of Pennsylvania Center for Bioethics saw his $1k and raised it to $10k.
“These types of messages in this climate have the capacity to do enormous public health harm,” Miles said.
We have absolutely no proof of this but you know what’s may well be another cause of mental retardation, for both viewer and participant? Political campaigning.
The problem is that there is LEGALLY zero proof of a causal relationship in this exact instance. There are thousands and thousands of claims of children of various ages becoming suddenly and extremely developmentally challenged immediately after receiving vaccines. There are many documentaries about this going both ways. Ted Kennedy made a big stink about it for years. It was "proven wrong" by a group of doctors who, eventually as it turned out, all had vested interests in the drugs in question.
The facts are that there have been 2 major court cases now where the drug companies went so far as to say their drugs may have triggered a genetic predisposition to autism. For a drug company to say something like that, that is BIG. And they payed out massively. The fact is that while many diseases can be traced back hundreds and even thousands of years, autism did NOT EXIST on this planet until US drug companies started putting preservatives containing mercury in their drugs. Autism DID NOT EXIST in other countries until the US started shipping those drugs to those countries in, I believe it was the 30s. I'm not trying to make it sound like Autism is a disease or a virus, so much as a medical side effect of mercury poisoning of the brain.
Of course there are blowhard Dr.s saying they'll offer money for medical proof. That takes court cases that end in admission of direct causality. There are thousands of 9/11 first responders that are sick, dead and dying of mesothelioma right now who are being denied coverage because the government denies causal relationship between their lung cancer and the asbestos packed twin towers. Offering money for "proof" is a dirty politics, low blow.
Finally, I can't believe I'm defending Michele Bachmann here, but all the "News" media was reporting that she was personally making a claim that the vaccine caused mental retardation. All she did was relay what some lady told her. The only claim she made was that a lady told her this. She was clearly just trying to illustrate how the government rashly shove things down peoples throats before the ramifications are made clear. Was this woman in question really a mother at all? Was her child even mentally retarded? Did she even receive the vaccine? What would be motives to lie about any of this? Not only that, but the way Bachmann worded herself, she didn't even say the woman necessarily claimed direct causality between the drug and her daughter's condition. She stated that her daughter was vaccinated, and then she became mentally retarded. That is a very implicating but legally non claiming statement. But everybody likes to put words in other peoples mouths, right?