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+--- Thread: New Dark Age: EU Court Issues Insane Ruling on Vaccines (How Did Europe Get Here?) (/thread-3844.html)
New Dark Age: EU Court Issues Insane Ruling on Vaccines (How Did Europe Get Here?) - C C - Jun 23, 2017
http://www.acsh.org/news/2017/06/21/new-dark-age-eu-court-issues-insane-ruling-vaccines-11468
EXCERPT: It reads like a headline from The Onion. Alas, it is real: “EU court: Vaccines can be blamed for illness without scientific evidence,” writes CNN. The EU court’s ruling was based on the case of a Frenchman who accused a hepatitis B vaccine manufacturer for causing his multiple sclerosis. (Vaccines do not cause multiple sclerosis.) The court’s decision is Kafkaesque:
“The EU's highest court said that if the development of a disease is timely to the person's receiving a vaccine, if the person was previously health [sic] with a lack of history of the disease in their family and if a significant number of disease cases are reported among people receiving a certain vaccine, this may serve as enough proof.”
Apparently, rigorous epidemiological evidence is no longer necessary to prove anything in a European courtroom. If a plaintiff can demonstrate that he received a vaccine before he contracted an illness, the EU considers that to be potentially sufficient evidence to prove causation.
In other words, if A precedes B, then the EU believes that we can safely conclude that A caused B. Post hoc ergo propter hoc – a logical fallacy taught to scientists and lawyers – apparently is now the law of the land in Europe....
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RE: New Dark Age: EU Court Issues Insane Ruling on Vaccines (How Did Europe Get Here?) - Magical Realist - Jun 25, 2017
The legal definition of causation seems to me rather tenuous. The mere concurrence of two events defining the transmission of causal agency? Seems they'd want to back that up with some good science. Or maybe a few cogent passages from Hume.