From the article:
quote:
Significantly, the government's decision says nothing about whether vaccines cause autism. Instead, government lawyers concluded only that vaccines aggravated a pre-existing cellular disorder in the child, causing brain damage that included features of autism. Nonetheless, anti-vaccination campaigners are claiming vindication. "It's official," wrote one autism blogger. "The sky has fallen. The fat lady has sung. Pigs are flying."
The government's position is that the vaccines aggrivated a
seperate, already existing condition, and the results included symptoms akin to autism. This is
not the same as saying "autism is casued by vaccines."
That's not what the "holistic-medicine" idiot crowd is going to say, though - regardless of any scientific inquiry, this will be used in arguments to say "see, even the government admits vaccines casue autism!" when the government is saying nothing of the sort here. It's identical to when Creationists hear "humans evolved from an apelike common ancestor" an start saying "see, evolutionist beleive chimpanzees up and turned into men!"
I once knew a girl who developed epilepsy as a child. The epilepsy was the result of brain damage caused by an extremely high fever, which was brought on by an infected cat scratch. Does this mean that cat scratches cause epilepsy? Of course not! And it's identical to what happened here - the vaccines caused this girl's metabolism to respond irregularly due to a
genetic mitochondial disorder, which in turn casued brain damage that caused symptoms akin to autism.
People who either don't know the difference or fail to investigate this for five minutes are going to continue to spout their idiotic "vaccines cause teh autism, vaccines r bad!" stupidity, and believe that this court case somehow contitutes
evidence in their favor.