Science, values, consensus, denial: The absence of nuance

Too often our debates become polarized, with each side needing to be 100 percent right and the other 100 percent wrong. We have big financial motives for making our cases stick.

That is the situation in seemingly every debate we have. But there are two sides to everything. Some people do cheat welfare. Some teachers are inept. Some officers are inept. Some "Christians" do commit atrocities. So do some "Jews" and some "Muslims." Some people will die because of the availability of a gun. Some will be saved. There is no clear moral dividing line for abortion. American planes firebombed innocent German civilians in World War II. Petroleum pollution is causing some of our global warming. There are other cost-effective ways to solve our transportation crisis.

So now that I've said those things, no one is left listening. I've alienated everyone who had wanted to hear the 100 percent correct view of their world. But I'll continue anyway.

Our policies would be better informed if we all could accept a simple approach. Instead of "either-or," let's plan for "both-and."

In the case of the vaccine debate, children's lives have been lost on both sides. This should seem clear. Why isn't it?

The first problem is that the large-group medical research model is woefully unable to prove what happened in individual cases. This is a particular problem with autism. Autism isn't one thing. Genetic research continues to find that autism is incredibly diverse. It is many different kinds of genetic disorders. And it is many different kinds of environmental disorders. There are probably 200 kinds of autism.

So when you construct a study of the effect of one intervention on 100,000 kids, you won't find out that a single kind of injury caused or didn't cause all of their autisms. The rare causes will completely slip through the study.

So what about vaccines? We vaccinated 100,000 kids and only one kid caught autism that day. So vaccines don't cause autism. Yet a mother in Orono saw her vibrant child get vaccinated and pass out, and took him home to a lifetime of empty gazes.

What's hard to understand — to cite one recent facet of the vaccination debate — is that the community readily accepts that author Roald Dahl's daughter caught encephalitis from her measles. But that was only one child in 10,000. Why not also accept that one child in 100,000 caught autism from the vaccine?

Because you can't sue the vaccine.

But you can sue the drugmaker.

It's good that we do have a vaccine court in place to feebly try to compensate mothers for their losses. But mothers have both a financial and a loving motive for making their cases stick.