Autism and the Madness of Crowds

Tish Durkin writes for The Week about people who believe that vaccines cause autism:

As the mother of a child with autism, I have a message for Dr. Andrew Wakefield, the tireless prophet of the theory that vaccines cause autism: please go away.
...

What really fascinates me here is not the mad doctor, but his mad followers. They’re new to my world, and yet I feel I know them. Over so many years in so many contexts, I have marveled at the power of blind faith to survive the most compelling assaults of clear-eyed reason.  In the Middle East, I remember how almost child-like Islamic fanatics would explain, elaborately and emphatically, how George W. Bush is a secret Jew and it was on the order of about six other secret Jews -- the ones who, you know, run the world -- that he invaded Iraq. In South Africa, at the time of Nelson Mandela’s presidential election, I listened to a small, sad clump of defeated white extremists outline how it was actually the blacks who had stolen their land.

Click here to read more.