There are quite a few things in our political discourse which are frustrating because we have to fight like hell, and, when it’s all said and done, we end up right back where we started. And the price we pay is that we can’t tackle real problems. The vaccination-leads-to-autism idiocy is one of those issues. While the worst thing about the anti-vaccinationists are the sick and dead children, they also, as Michael John Carley notes, distract us from helping people:

Even the National Institutes of Health (NIH) allowed this loud minority of new-McCarthyism to bully its way into a $30 million dollar study on Chelation Therapy, when every spineless scientist awarding them so much of our money knew perfectly well that they were pissing it away (and if you understand how Chelation works, you’ll get that joke) on a treatment for autism that they knew didn’t work….

Because we still talk about this, we don’t talk more about how many people with autism need housing, how many people with autism are unemployed, or how unfunded autism services are, when compared with other disabilities that have one-tenth our prevalence numbers.

Go read the whole thing.