“It sounds like if the authors of the Bernard paper were comparing two animals, they would say, “Two eyes? Present in both! Hair? Present in both! Four legs? Present in both! These are obviously the same animal!” When they were actually looking at a gerbil and a yak.”

except one was a gerbil an the other was a fish. Some of the comparisons were just that bad.

A real comparison shows that they are not the same.

It was pretty clear that Dr. Rodier has been eager to debunk this since she first read it.

It also sounds like Dr. Rodier did a magnificent job debunking this POS “study.”

In preparing this, I called up the paper again. As I read it, there were some strange abbreviations and phrasings.

As an example, “HgP” for mercury poisoning google hgp mercury poisoning and you get almost 12,000 hits. Add -autism and 11,000 of the hits disappear. Almost all of the hits are based on this paper.

It struck me that someone was trying to shave the paper down. So, I scrolled to the end of the paper and, lo and behold, it ends at exactly the page break. If correct (and I would welcome a hypothesis breaking test) this means that the authors likely got the proofs and saw that they had only a little bit of text on what would have been the 11th published page. By shaving it down, they saved 10% on the page charges.

Just an untestable hypothesis. But, it was an honest observation on my part as I read the paper.

When you have a single person like Dr. Rodier who has experience in both autism and mercury poisoning who can bring that expertise to the question, those arguments fail.

The Omnibus has demonstrated very clearly that it is the mercury crowd that has not only the shallow background expertise, but is also doing the minimal effort needed to gather data to support the hypothesis.

Dr. Rodier echoed the sentiments of Dr. Johnson who stated that the first step in testing a new hypothesis is to try to disprove it. If there is a simple test that can disprove a hypothesis, it can save many years of fruitless effort. Dr. Rodier suggested that the simple test that discredits the thimerosal/autism theory is exactly on of Dr. Aposhian’s (toxicologist for the petitioner) favorite stories: the story of the family that ate the tainted pork in New Mexico. The symptoms of ethyl mercury poisoning went away as the ethyl mercury was removed from the system. People who regress with autism after thimerosal containing vaccines do not improve as the ethyl mercury is converted to inorganic mercury. Therefore, those with regressive autism after TCV’s are not suffering from ethyl-mercury poisoning.

Dr. Mumper exemplified this trait as well. She relied heavily on the Hornig study to form her view of vaccine injury autism. However, even in preparing for the Omnibus, she hadn’t read the Berman paper which demonstrated that Hornig’s results can not be replicated (even with 10x the mercury exposure).

The arm-chair epidemiologists David Kirby and the Geiers are also very guilty of this. They used the CDDS data to support the idea of an epidemic, but didn’t look deep enough into the data to test if the hypothesis was valid. They didn’t check how the data compared by region or by ethnicity (to name only a couple of ‘sanity’ checks).

It is beyond sad that parents and would be autism-medical-practitioners go to conventions and listen to supposed experts without rebuttal. In a real scientific conference, these ‘experts’ would be subject to tough questions by the scientific ‘peers’. Instead, 50 year old data on duck brains is passed off as profound and relevant to autism.

The best and the brightest of the scientists promoting vaccine-injury-autism are being tested and they are failing.

I think it’s odd that the “Bernard” paper was written by Albert Enayati. In the book, “Evidence of Harm,” it says that he offered to paper to anyone who would pay to get it in to Medical Hyp, and whoever paid for it would get to put his or her name as lead author….

hmmmm.