Vaccinations

Non-Sequiturs: 02.15.12

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You are so beautiful, I just want to take you to the airport and x-ray you.

* Nothing beats a calm, collected, religion-based benchslap of religious hypocrisy. [Tex Parte Blog]

* If our parents hadn’t gotten us vaccinated, we’d fire them, too. Jenny McCarthy should jump into a freakin’ volcano. [Volokh Conspiracy]

* It must be so hard to write fake news when it all starts coming true. [The Onion]

* Guys at Staci’s high school shot fireworks out of their butts all the time. It wasn’t… quite this big of a deal. [Legal Juice]

* TSA employees are taking advantage of their power to look at semi-naked x-ray pictures of pretty girls? I’m shocked. Just shocked. [Wired Threat Level]

* An optimistic look at how unemployment can help your career. Frankly, we’re both skeptical. But we also have paychecks, so there’s that. [Ms. JD]

* You should be our next intern! (We will even give you some money.) Applications are due on Monday, February 20. [Above the Law]

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“Special Courts,” Vaccines, and Autism

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The government acknowledged that a link exists between autism and the routine vaccines which one girl from Georgia was given as a child:

The cases are before a special “vaccine court” that doles out cash from a fund Congress set up to pay people injured by vaccines and to protect makers from damages as a way to help ensure an adequate vaccine supply. The burden of proof is lighter than in a traditional court, and is based on a preponderance of evidence. Since the fund started in 1988, it has paid roughly 950 claims _ none for autism.

Although the government didn’t say that the vaccines cause autism, they did concede that, in this single case, the vaccines worsened the girl’s existing condition and caused her to develop symptoms of autism.

We’re wondering about this “special ‘vaccine court.’ To our readers: what are some other interesting cases in which “special courts” were set up for a specific type of claim (not military tribunals; that’s too obvious)?

UPDATE: We’re asking about interesting cases when “special courts” set up for strange or unorthodox reasons.

Government Concedes Vaccine Injury Case [WaPo]

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