Here's an interesting post from an interesting blogger, arguing that the choice of a chancellor on the part of the Jewish Theological Seminary (the flagship institution of the Conservative movement) is very important...for Orthodoxy.

Without trying to narrow the very wide theological and Halakhic gaps between CM and MO/RZ Judaism, it is clear that a more self-confident leadership of both groups, even if it moves them further apart, is needed if contemporary world Jewry is to come to terms with some of the major issues that we will face over the next 50 or so years.

And our children and grandchildren will suffer the consequences.

I'm not sure I buy it, but it's worth thinking about.

In case you weren't depressed enough today, check out this cheerful profile in the Telegraph about a Palestinian female would-be suicide bomber.

Wafa had been sent on her mission by the Abu Rish Brigade, the small militant faction with links to Fatah. She did not, she said later, regret it, though she stressed that her decision had had nothing to do with her scarring. "My dream was to be a martyr. I believe in death," she said. "Today I wanted to blow myself up in a hospital, maybe even in the one in which I was treated. But since lots of Arabs come to be treated there, I decided I would go to another, maybe the Tel Hashomer, near Tel Aviv. I wanted to kill 20, 50 Jews …''

And what about babies? Would you have killed babies and children? she was asked. "Yes, even babies and children. You, too, kill our babies. Do you remember the Doura child?"

A fellow female prisoner, convicted of aiding a suicide attack, was also featured:

Her fellow prisoner, Kahira Saadi, from Jenin, is one of the jail celebrities. A mother of four, aged 27, she was held responsible for an attack in which three people died and 80 were injured. Zipi Shemesh, five months' pregnant, and her husband, Gad, were among the dead. They had gone to an ultrasound appointment and had left their two daughters, Shoval, seven, and Shahar, three, with a babysitter. They never came back.

When? "I don't remember the exact date, only that it was Mother's Day. That's why I prepared him some flowers."

Keep reading for the punchline.

(Via Andrew Sullivan.)

Check out the latest post from Orac for more well-done fillet of RFK, Jr. Follow the links to some devastating reviews of David Kirby's book, especially this one. (Click here for a response by Kirby to some of the criticisms.)

UPDATE: Flattery will get you everywhere, Derek Lowe (except for getting your experiments to work better - you need to appeal to a higher authority for that).

Reading about Lowe's struggles with drug development reminded me of another point that needs to be made with respect to this thimerosal/autism theme. The RFK/David Kirby crowd assumes that the vaccine industry is synonymous with "Big Pharma," possessing limitless power to bend scientists and government regulators to its heartless, rapacious will. But the truth is a little more complicated. Big pharmaceutical companies certainly are part of the vaccine industry, but as we found out in last winter's flu-vaccine debacle, there isn't enough money in the U.S. vaccine industry for "Big Pharma" to produce adequate stocks of many vaccines. In that respect, the problem isn't too much involvement on the part of "Big Pharma" or the vaccine industry being a big-money enterprise - in each case, there's too little of the supposed evil. (Dare I say that the assumption of the pro-thimerosal-link crowd is analogous to a trial lawyer's point of view, in looking for a "deep pocket" that may only have been tangentially involved in the supposed harm?)

I have a number of friends who are pediatricians, who have to deal with questions regarding vaccinations, thimerosal, autism etc. on a regular basis.

When trhis topic was in the news in late 2002, one of my pediatrician friends told me that he had numerous parents ask him about the supposed vaccination-autism link, being very skeptical of the evidence against such a link.

And very often, those parents would immediately ask him about whether they could get a smallpox vaccine for their children (the debate over which was also in the news at the time).

Of course - as was well publicized at the time - the documented proof of adverse reactions from the smallpox vaccine far exceeded any proof as to the adverse effects generally of regularly administered vaccines, or of any thimerosal-autism link.

One last thing before knocking off for the evening.

My original interest in the subject matter was related to the waiver passed as a late-night rider to the Homeland Security bill in late 2002 (and repealed in early 2003 due to the outcry over the sleazy circumstances related to its passage) shielding vaccine makers (most notably Eli Lilly) from thimerosal-related lawsuits (i.e., such claims would have to go through the no-fault Vaccine Industry Compensation Program).

As set forth in the recent NYT front-page story, the lawsuit-fueling furor over the "link" isn't going away, regardless of the lack of sceintific evidence for it.

In my opinion, the enduring disconnect between the scientific evidence and popular belief (to be expressedin lawsuits) make this case an ideal one for legislative action along the lines of what was proposed in 2002 (though not what was passed, as the haste led to all kinds of foul-ups). If you're going to have such legislatively-created alternatives to the tort system, you may as well have them where there is a clear disconnect between the scientific evidence and the mass of claims being pressed in court.

Please click here for my disclosure statements relating to the subject matter of this post.

I am not a scientist, so I'm open to one telling me that the following question is bunk for some reason. But I've got the following question about the supposed thimerosal-autism link anyway:

A common refrain among the exponents of a potential thimerosal-autism link is that, in the words of David Kirby, thimerosal may "trigger adverse reactions in a subset of children with a genetic predisposition to mercury sensitivity." This assertion is often used as a response as to why the large-scale epidemeological studies do not pick up on the thimerosal-autism link (i.e., that susceptible subset may be underepresented in the population studied). But as I understand it, those large-scale studies do in fact pick up on the increase itself of autism diagnoses; it's just the connection between such increases and thimerosal that fails to stand up.

If all those are true, then in order to be the, or a, major cause of the increase in autism diagnoses, thimerosal must "trigger adverse reactions in a subset of children with a genetic predisposition to mercury sensitivity:" with such subset simultaneously being

a) small enough to evade detection in the large-scale studies that have been conducted so far (i.e., without being fleshed out as a group disproportionally susceptible to autism by virtue of thimerosal exposure); and

b) big enough to account for the increase in estimated incidence from 1 in 10,000 to 1 in 166 or thereabouts.

How can both of those things be true? If a particular subset of children is particularly susceptible to mercury exposure, large enough to account for the increases in diagnoses and not being picked up in the studies previously conducted, then those studies also shouldn't reflect an increase in autism cases generally - but they do, as far as I know. And if the subset is big enough to at least be a main factor in accounting for the increase, shouldn't it be detectable in the large-scale studies that have been conducted? And if it isn't big enough...then the point has been conceded; even if there is a small subset of children particularly susceptible to mercury exposure, we must look elsewhere to find the main cause of increased diagnoses.

(If only all pharmaceutical targeted interventions worked as well as thimerosal is argued to do, then perhaps Big Pharma would deserve the dark, satanic power ascribed to it by the thimerosal-link activists.)

I welcome comments from people who have greater knowledge of scientific study methods, statistics or the subject matter generally.

Please click here for my disclosure statements relating to the subject matter of this post.

More than you think.

I have not yet read David Kirby's book Evidence of Harm. But his presentation of the case for the thimerosal-autism link, based on what I've seen from his website, press appearances and other writings seems to be a perfect encapsulation of some of the worst features of contemporary mainstream journalism:

1) "How William Goldman Ruined Journalism" - This hasn't gotten enough attention in light of the Deep Throat revelation, but William Goldman's line "Follow the money," uttered by Hal Holbrook in the movie (it didn't come from the book itself) has led to almost 30 years of lazy Marxist journalism that follows the exact same script:

A) Policymaker does something objectionable doesn't do something virtuous (fill in your own blank);

B) Policymaker received moeny (a campaign contribution for a politician, some other connection for a non-elected official) from eeeeevil entity with an interest in the matter (pharmaceutical industry, Halliburton, etc.)

C) Ergo, policymaker is a wholly bought tool of Satan, and no other explanation for action/inaction is necessary. QED.

This pattern is especially egregious when it "follows the money" on one side only, ignoring equally interesting financial ties on the favored side. For example: assuming the pervasive links between the pharmaceutical/vaccine industry and the medical establishment who have dismissed the link means it is safe to discredit their views, while somehow not drawing similar conclusions regarding the equally pervasive conflicts affecting many of the players on the pro-link side. (I don't think Kirby actually ignores those conflicts in his book, like the RFK piece does, but doesn't it go without saying that the vaccine industry is part of the evil conspiracy that got us into war in Iraq (sorry, was that Halliburton or the Likud party? I can't keep my conspiracies straight), while trial lawyers are the good guys and thus there's no conflict of interest?)

If you only focus on the financial conflicts of one side and ignore those of the other, you're not "following the money," merely your own preconceptions.

2) The reliance on standard templates for telling stories, and shoehorning messy facts into those predetermined templates:

"Plucky parents of horribly ill children taking on unfeeling, big-money establishment" is one story to tell, and that's the one Kirby tells. Another story that could be told is "Anti-vaccine activists and trial lawyers prey on the desperation of parents of autistic children, and help bring about outbreaks of previously eradicated diseases leading to many preventable severe illnesses and deaths, based on 'junk science' and outright distortions." That story is at least as accurate, and probably more so, than the Kirby template. But it doesn't sound as good, for a variety of reasons. I have faith that it will be told, eventually.

3) Focusing on the buzz around a topic, rather than the topic itself. Kirby has a few posts at the "Huffington Post" cheerleading the attention paid to the RFK article and related activism as a good in and of itself. Sorry, but the fact that Don Imus won't shut up about the topic on his radio show does not make the underlying science any better.

4) Disingenuousness as to the author's beliefs and biases, which is worse than actually having them. ("It's not the crime, it's the cover-up.") I've spoken to Kirby and he seems like a really nice guy, and he is clearly motivated by sympathy for the activist parents of autistic children who are his protagonists. Hard to object to that sentiment. But when I've spoken to him and in much of his supporting commentary to the book, he strikes a really disingenuous tone: professing agnosticism as to the thimerosal-autism link on the one hand (which makes a handy defense against scientifically-based critiques) while his presentation buys into the pro-link side (as well as the poor-parents-versus-Goliath/Satan template; see #2 above) in every respect. Read this post and see if Kirby really is undecided about the matter:

Of course, it’s possible that this army of congressional investigators will determine that injecting organic mercury directly into newborn babies was a perfectly harmless thing to do, and did not trigger adverse reactions in a subset of children with a genetic predisposition to mercury sensitivity. They may declare that the synchronization of the autism epidemic and rising thimerosal exposures in the 1990s was merely an uncanny coincidence. They may find that a thorough review of a federal vaccine database, currently under lock-and-key, reveals zero evidence of an association. They may discover that removing mercury from autistic children yields absolutely no clinical benefits whatsoever. And, contrary to Mr. Kennedy’s assertions, they may conclude that everyone in the government and drug industry acted with nothing but the utmost forthrightness, untainted by malfeasance and conflicts of interest, openly sharing all that they knew about thimerosal’s toxicity with the American public.

(To take one of about 25 possible examples from the above paragraph, of course there are financial ties between the vaccine industry and the government agencies that could give rise to conflicts of interest. But it doesn't pass any test of rationality to say those ties necessarily discredit everything they've said against the thimerosal-autism link, while simultaneously asserting the Geiers' extensive work as expert witnesses arguing for such a link is no conflict at all.)

Please click here for my disclosure statements relating to the subject matter of this post.

Prompted by the RFK article and Kirby book, the NYT has entered the thimerosal-autism fray with an article titled "On Autism's Cause, It's Parents vs. Research." Some highlights:

But scientists and public health officials say they are alarmed by the surge of attention to an idea without scientific merit. The anti-thimerosal campaign, they say, is causing some parents to stay away from vaccines, placing their children at risk for illnesses like measles and polio.

...In recent months, the fight over thimerosal has become even more bitter. In response to a barrage of threatening letters and phone calls, the centers for disease control has increased security and instructed employees on safety issues, including how to respond if pies are thrown in their faces. One vaccine expert at the centers wrote in an internal e-mail message that she felt safer working at a malaria field station in Kenya than she did at the agency's offices in Atlanta.

The article's authors have put themselves firmly against the side espousing the thimerosal-autism link. While I agree with that judgment, I must admit that the article could be taught as a primary text in the Columbia School of Journalism, if the school has a class in "How to Get Your Viewpoint Across When You Can't Just Come Out and Say It." If the above excerpts weren't enough, check out the descriptions of the favored "experts" of the thimerosal-autism link exponents, the Geiers. The authors introduce the father-son team (with only the former being a doctor) as witnesses in hearings called by Rep. Dan Burton (previously famous for his lurid conspiracy theories, espoused on the House floor, about the death of Vince Foster) which also featured the following cast of characters:

In a series of House hearings held from 2000 through 2004, Mr. Burton called the leading experts who assert that vaccines cause autism to testify. They included a chemistry professor at the University of Kentucky who says that dental fillings cause or exacerbate autism and other diseases and a doctor from Baton Rouge, La., who says that God spoke to her through an 87-year-old priest and told her that vaccines caused autism.

Describing the Geiers' working conditions:

He and his son live and work in a two-story house in suburban Maryland. Past the kitchen and down the stairs is a room with cast-off, unplugged laboratory equipment, wall-to-wall carpeting and faux wood paneling that Dr. Geier calls "a world-class lab - every bit as good as anything at N.I.H."

(The article does not comment on what N.I.H. labs look like, but one can assume they do not feature "cast-off, unplugged laboratory equipment." I hope.)

Dr. Geier's credentials:

He has also testified in more than 90 vaccine cases, he said, although a judge in a vaccine case in 2003 ruled that Dr. Geier was "a professional witness in areas for which he has no training, expertise and experience."

In other cases, judges have called Dr. Geier's testimony "intellectually dishonest," "not reliable" and "wholly unqualified."

Any questions about what we're supposed to think of the Geiers?

Mind you, I think the description is wholly justified. But isn't there some degree of disingenuousness in laying it on that thick, without the writer having to put his/her own name behind an explicit judgment?

Actually, it's probably only fitting, given the phony agnosticism that pervades much of the favorable press coverage given to the pro-link forces. More on that in the next post.

For now, the NYT has earned an amnesty from my complaints. A temporary one, at least.

Please click here for my disclosure statements relating to the subject matter of this post.

After the Institute of Medicine published a comprehensive report rejecting the suggestions of a link between thimerosal and autism, one might have thought that the question had been put to rest. But the combination of parents of autistic children desparately seeking answers and trial lawyers sensing a potential jackpot has kept the question alive as a discussion topic, if not a scientific inquiry. The publication of David Kirby's book Evidence of Harm has given new life to the old story, and Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. recently entered the fray with a sensationalistic piece in Salon and Rolling Stone (which you can read for free here), arguing that "government health agencies colluded with Big Pharma to hide the risks of thimerosal from the public."

Writing in the "Huffington Post," David Kirby wrote a post titled "Bring it On" that RFK Jr.'s allegations "cry out for a response."

Consider it brought, courtesy of the blogosphere.

Anyone interested in such a response may consult, among others: Lindsay Beyerstein here ("As far as I can tell, the thimerosal/autism connection is totally unsupported by evidence."), here ("The 286-page transcript [ED: click here for the entire thing] doesn't come close to vindicating Kennedy's grandiose claims") and especially here ("Nothing said at Simpsonwood suggests an attempt to whitewash or cover up anything.") Or, you can consult the academic surgeon "Orac," who took the arguments on here , here, here and here. Also see Skeptico (hereand here) and "Autism Diva," who points out an area where RFK, Jr. and one of his chief sources really need to coordinate their talking points. More pointed commentary on the link, or lack thereof, can be found here. Finally, if you feel like watching an ad, you can access Salon itself and see some letter exchanges between readers and RFK, Jr. (for some key examples, click here and here) as well as the numerous corrections Salon has made since the article's publication.

In December of 2002, I wrote a number of posts expressing skepticism about a link between thimerosal and autism and supporting the concept of a bill madating that any such claims be pursued through the Vaccine Industry Compensation Program. Those posts can be found here, here and here.

In June of 2003, David Kirby briefly interviewed me for what became his recently published book Evidence of Harm. I understand that I am not mentioned or quoted in the book. (No offense taken - I didn't say anything particularly original or worthwhile.)

In the fall and winter of 2003, around the time of my son's second birthday, we became aware of certain regressions and developmental delays. Our son was subsequently diagnosed with autism. We were not aware of our son manifesting any symptoms at the time I wrote the posts linked above.

As of this writing, I have not yet read Evidence of Harm, though I have followed closely the coverage of the issues raised therein and am familiar with the book's general arguments.