TangleBones

Better autism blog­gers have already cov­ered the stu­pid­ity of the Chicago Tribune’s Painful ques­tions of blame (reg. required), but a couple things leapt off the page at me, so I have to get in my two cents.

For those who haven’t been fol­low­ing the Katie McCar­ron story, her mother, a doctor, broke down, killed 3-year-old Katie, and then tried unsuc­cess­fully to kill her­self. The press, and mem­bers of the “Mer­cury Epidemic” crowd have been plac­ing some, if not all, of the blame on Katie and her autism.

Which, of course, makes me sick.

But back to the article:

Indeed, few med­ical bat­tles are more charged than that between par­ents who believe mer­cury in their children’s vac­cines brought on autism and the med­ical estab­lish­ment that has found no evi­dence to sup­port that claim…

Others sug­gest that per­haps work­ing among other doc­tors skep­ti­cal of the vac­cine con­nec­tion cre­ated an emo­tional tug of war for McCarron.

My ques­tion is, what would these “others” that the author has been talk­ing to have had McCarron’s co-​workers do? Sup­port a theory with no evi­dence? Pre­tend that there was some­thing to the mer­cury hypoth­e­sis to make her feel better?

Seri­ously, are these “others” trying to blame the doc­tors who told Karen the truth for Katie’s murder? Huh? Let’s leave aside the point that if Katie was 3 years old, there was no mer­cury in any of her vaccines.

If blame is to be laid at anyone’s feet other than Karen McCar­ron, it should be those who per­pet­u­ated the vac­cine hys­te­ria and con­vinced her that there was a cure for Katie’s autism – and that the med­ical com­mu­nity was trying to keep it away from her. If those same liti­gious anti-​science idiots hadn’t ded­i­cated their time to making autis­tic chil­dren into bogey­men in order to get fund­ing for their idi­otic treat­ments, maybe Karen wouldn’t have thought that her daughter’s life would be a mis­er­able ordeal. Jared’s life cer­tainly isn’t.