McCain goes a little crackpot himself:

At a town hall meeting Friday in Texas, Sen. John McCain, R-Ariz., declared that "there’s strong evidence" that thimerosal, a mercury-based preservative that was once in many childhood vaccines, is responsible for the increased diagnoses of autism in the U.S. -- a position in stark contrast with the view of the medical establishment.

That's the report from Jake Tapper, and as Tapper notes, there is no such evidence. The idea that Thimerosal was the cause of autism was of a piece with the larger environmental push to show that progress (in this case inoculation) was, in fact, poison. Proof of how ridiculous, and pernicious, the claim is: the most prominent anti-Thimerosal agitator is Robert F. Kennedy Jr., who suggests not only that Thimerosal is the culprit, but also a conspiracy by the government, and on behalf of Big Pharma, to cover up the connection.

Does McCain also believe there is a cover-up then? One would hope not, but given his previous insistence that the drug companies really are the "bad guys"--McCain ought to set the record straight.

Update: A medical doctor, and a regular reader, sends in some additional info:

As two experts from the California Department of Health, have recently shown in the medical journal Archives of General Psychiatry [also noted by Tapper --ed.] despite the fact that thiomerisal has been removed from childhood vaccines since 2001, the incidence of autism continues to rise in California as of 2008.

As noted in the same journal by Dr. Eric Fambronne, a noted Canadian psychiatrist (whose research has never been funded by a pharmaceutical company),

in 2004, the Institute of Medicine Immunization Safety Review Committee reviewed all evidence available from epidemiologic, biological, molecular, and animal model studies and concluded that the evidence favored the rejection of the thiomerisal with respect to the risk of autism. Since then, more studies have accumulated that have reinforced this conclusion, one independently reached by scientific and professional committees around the world...

...outside academic circles, powerful advocacy groups developed and started to lobby decision makers to influence decisions about which autism research to fund and even how to conduct it. Unaware of scientific studies, or worse, doubtful of their results, bestselling writers, journalists, and politicians were drawn to embrace conspiracy theories that portrayed vaccine manufacturers and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention as public enemies. Law firms saw an opportunity to obtain large financial compensations from the US Vaccine Injury Compensation Court or before local federal courts, the viscous US legal process allowing for fermentation of misconceptions. Exploiting further families' beliefs and their understandable desire to try everything possible to help their children, charlatans developed alternative (and lucrative) "treatments" for autism, which included chelation therapy, use of a hyperbaric oxygen chamber, and testosterone suppression. All are of unproven efficacy, and many are dangerous.

The recent study that shows that the incidence of autism is rising despite the absolute absence of thiomerisal in the vaccines is complete proof of the fallacy and even danger of the thiomerisal hypothesis as a cause of autism. Autistic children, and their siblings, should be normally vaccinated, and as there is no evidence of mercury poisoning in autism, they should avoid ineffective and dangerous "treatments" such as chelation therapy for their children.