The Times They Are a Changin’
A big welcome to all our new visitors. We have been so gratified by how many of you have signed up to the newsletter in the past month and have hopefully been passing details of our website on to friends and family.
We know how busy everyone is and we hope our newsletter, which from this edition goes out every two weeks, is a good way to keep in touch with updates and new stories.
The past week in particular has brought a huge influx of new visitors to site interested in two small stories which the mainstream media seems to have pretty much ignored. An Italian court has ruled that the MMR vaccine did cause autism in one child, and ordered compensation to be paid. One swallow does not a summer make, as they say, but equally ignored by the media was a similar ruling made in the US.
The12-year battle over whether or not there is a link between MMR and autism has been fierce, angry, dirty and deeply frustrating. For many of us it has become a sad metaphor for what happens to anyone who dares to ask a different question or challenge the prevailing orthodoxy (see also our homoeopathy and GM stories, right). If you haven’t read the news story yet, you can find it, and a bit of background, here.
The longer-term implications of these two rulings are not yet clear. But it may be that concerned parents are witnessing a real time example of what Mahatma Gandhi famously said about how change happens:
“First they ignore you, then they laugh at you, then they fight you, then you win.”
Watch this space…
- This article first appeared in the NYR Natural News e-newsletter.
