Bexar County District Attorney Nico La Hood made waves recently when he stated unequivocally in a promo interview for the film Vaxxed that “vaccines cause autism,” saying it to the camera while apparently sitting in his taxpayer-funded county office. They don’t, as the evidence overwhelmingly indicates, but that didn’t stop La Hood from claiming anyway that he’s an “empirical data guy.” Not sure what that is, but it isn’t a fellow who’s done the heavy lifting of the data in this case, as his original comments and his follow-up show.
He asks in the interview, for example, repeating a favorite from the vaccines-cause-autism playbook, where the autistic people his age or his wife’s age are and answers himself: “They’re not there.” But they are there. They’ve been labeled different things, struggled against a world that didn’t understand them, walked among us, and been institutionalized, but they were there. And they still are. In case the empirical data guy wants to look.
This attorney also seems to buy into the “CDC Whistle blower” conspiracy, which makes no sense whatsoever and relies on claims that data were hidden when they weren’t. There’s a lot of “ where’s Waldo” involved in the vaccines-cause-autism argument checklist, from unseen data that everyone could always see to unseen autistic adults, ditto. He even confirms in the video that his conviction about a link between autism and vaccines is based on “strong circumstantial evidence.” As an attorney, has he no experience with how dramatically humans can erroneously connect cause and effect because of circumstance rather than a genuine connection?
Because that has been explained again and again in this context: Children are going to show autism symptoms coincidentally with having received vaccines because both occur together during early childhood. That doesn’t mean one causes the other.
La Hood has responded to the controversy around his comments about autism and vaccines in a Facebook post. He asserts four points in the post, and I’ve given each of them below (all sic), followed by an analysis:
1. Parents educate yourselves for the sake of your precious children. Stay away from rhetoric and look at hard facts.
Linking yourself to a film that doesn’t even mention that the rotten core of this entire argument is a retracted paper is not exactly exemplifying how to stay away from rhetoric and stick with the facts. La Hood seems to think that facts will speak for themselves. They don’t. They form a narrative, one that either builds and progresses over time or falters and stalls. In the case of “vaccines cause autism,” the people who have chosen to support that narrative have failed time and again to move it forward.