Confirmed: Anti-Vaxxers are Morons

Children who receive the measles, mumps and rubella (MMR) vaccine are not at increased risk for autism, and that includes children who are sometimes considered to be in "high risk" groups for the neurodevelopmental disorder, a massive new study finds.

Even their children are recognizing that their anti-vaccine parents are imbeciles.

No matter how many times one can point out that correlation is not causation, it won't sink in. A professor I once knew used to use the example of there being almost a perfect correlation between the number of cancer cases and the number of telephone poles in one state. You'd have to be a complete idiot to then conclude that telephone poles cause cancer, but that's what the anti-vaxxers live.

Sometimes, bad shit happens. The anti-vaxxer cause is built on a lie by a charlatan. The old saying that "a lie travels around the world before the truth can pull on its boots" is appropriate.

Add to that the people who believe in conspiracies, such as chemtrails or, for example, the lunatics who think that the Navy's hospital ships trigger earthquakes, and the flat-earthers, and you have cohorts who are somewhat unhinged. Not helping are industries such as the oil companies (tetraethyl lead, climate change) and the tobacco companies (yes, that shit causes cancer) who pump hundreds of millions of dollars into propaganda campaigns that feed on conspiracy theories.

Then there are the states who are willing to accept the "religious exception" bullshit without requiring any level of evidence that the claimants are following any religious tenets, and we have kids who are unvaccinated because their parents, arguably, are nuts.

Their kids know they are nuts. We should listen to them.