DWIGHT MEREDITH has another post on Thimerosal. Ross at The Bloviator has a response. Both of these links go to their main pages because of the usual Blogger problems.

I don’t really have much to add to what I said before, really. The Thimerosal/autism connection is, perhaps, not ruled out, but it’s certainly not ruled in. As Dwight says:

The best scientific evidence to date neither proves nor disproves that thimerosal included in childhood vaccines causes autism. The causal relationship, if any, between thimerosal and autism remains an open question. It is a question we should answer though science and not through politics.

I certainly have no argument with that. But that being the case, it seems, ahem, premature for some people (not Dwight, who explicitly disclaims it) to claim that Eli Lilly caused autism and then paid off the GOP to protect it — given that neither part of this statement is supported by, well, any actual evidence.

And TomPaine.Com’s rather slippery efforts to blow this up into a scandal reflect poorly on it, and on the left, which seems nowadays to be recycling black-helicopter theories from the nutty right willy-nilly. Next we’ll be hearing that Bush has millions of Chinese troops stationed just across the border in Mexico, ready to support a coup in which he’ll be installed as dictator.