This is reassuring

I've heard through the years that there were claims that vaccines were the root cause for the uptick in autism in recent decades, I believe that the claim was it had to do with a small amount of mercury required to preserve it, or something of that sort. I've not been quick to embrace the claim, and besides I figured that I'd rather risk that then leave any of my children unvaccinated against virulent diseases, which could hurt others as well as themselves. I'm not sure why the numbers are increasing. Some are working to show that we're just better at diagnosing it, when in the past we would have just considered these children retarded or something else. Some have correlated autism with TV viewing during infancy (i.e. when the brain is still programming itself), but correlation is far from causation. But the one that got the most press was that vaccines were causing it. The problem is that the "breakthrough" study on the topic was faked. The researcher cooked the books. While I wasn't worried about this in the first place, it's good to know the truth. I just hope others who were duped, and campaigned so hard based on the claim (like Jenny McCarthy) will believe the truth and work with it, although they were done a terrible disservice (putting it lightly) by Andrew Wakefield.

As an aside, I can't figure out what it is that is driving so many people to make up the science. Well, actually I know that its the insane pressure to publish and fame - I can't imagine there's much fortune, though. Disproving something is just as valuable as proving something, in my opinion. The whole point of science is to test, observe, report, and explain. Maybe not everyone agrees with your explanation, maybe they think your method was flawed, but this is what I did, this is what happened, here's why I believe this is the case. Yet time after time after time after time they get caught and that's it, career's over. Idiots.