Michael Fumento

Grant the anti-childhood vaccine fanatics this; they are dogged. As I write in The American Spectator Online, "Absolutely no amount of data and no number of studies from any array of sources will sway them from their beliefs - or claimed beliefs - that thimerosal, a mercury-containing vaccine preservative once used in many such injections, is causing the so-called "autism epidemic."

Therefore a California Department of Public Health study in the current Archives of General Psychiatry hasn't either. It shows absolutely no decrease in the rate of increased autism diagnoses, notwithstanding that thimerosal was discontinued in childhood vaccines in 2001. (I include a graph that makes the point abundantly clear.) Yet not only did the nut cases claim the California data would eventually prove their case, they even claimed it already had.

For the rest of us there are two valuable lessons. First, the lack of a thimerosal connection to the developmental disorder has once again been reaffirmed. And second, those fanatics really and truly are fanatical - as a British Medical Journal book reviewer put it, an "angry and paranoid universe."

I've already gotten a barge-load of nasty e-mail from this paranoid universe. See what's made them so incredibly angry.