March 6, 2008 1:41PM # The Crazy Talk Express By [Jerry Taylor](https://www.cato.org/people/jerry-taylor) --- SHARE … just keeps rolling along. The other day, the topic of conversation turned to autism and vaccines. “There is strong evidence,” [John McCain said](http://blogs.abcnews.com/politicalpunch/2008/02/john-mccain-ent.html), “that indicates that it’s got to do with a preservative in vaccines.” Strong evidence, eh? If so, that evidence has escaped the attention of the Institute of Medicine of the National Academy of Sciences, which recently published a thorough review of the data available on this matter and, well, [shot John McCain’s opinion to pieces](http://www.iom.edu/?id=20155&redirect=0). But what do they know? John McCain has been studying this issue for ***years*** — in between [his investigation of human growth hormones in baseball](http://www.usatoday.com/sports/baseball/2004-12-06-government-intervention_x.htm), of course, and a panoply of other pressing medical and scientific matters. Seriously, what the …? Is John McCain the political equivalent of [Cliff Clavin](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cliff_Clavin)? Or will he say just about anything to get a vote? It’s one thing when Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. [peddles](http://www.huffingtonpost.com/robert-f-kennedy-jr/thimerosal-coverup-let-_b_4561.html) this nonsense. He’s a Deep (very deep)-Green-Environmentalist, and environmentalists like him are at eternal war with the Periodic Table. This narrative of mercury-killing-kids-for-drug-company-profit comes naturally to him, so one makes allowances in his case. (Fun aside: the next time RFK Jr. talks about the moral and intellectual imperative to defer to the consensus of science when it comes to global warming, ask him \[or his image on television\] to square that instinct with the dangerous nonsense he’s spouting about vaccines. But I digress.) But for John McCain to offer the same tripe is something else entirely. [How many kids have to die in Boulder, Colorado](http://www.waldorfcritics.org/active/articles/AtlanticMonthlyVaccines.html), to deliver John McCain to the White House? Okay, perhaps that’s a little unfair (emphasis on “perhaps” and “little”), but the question remains. John McCain: cynical panderer or dangerous crackpot? We report, you decide. ##### Related Tags [General](https://www.cato.org/general), [Regulation](https://www.cato.org/regulatory-studies) [![Creative Commons License](/build/cato_2020/images/creative-commons.svg)](http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/4.0/) This work is licensed under a [Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License](https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/4.0/).