There used to be a preservative called thimersol in vaccinations. The body breaks down thimersol into a form of mercury called ethyl mercury. But here is the deal. First, ethyl mercury is much more easily broken down and metabolized by the body than methyl mercury. Methyl mercury is the really bad form of mercury you get from eating contaminated seafood. Second, the amount of thimerosal that was in vaccinations was miniscule. You easily get way more of the bad methyl mercury from eating some seafood than you would have gotten from a vaccination containing thimerosal. And finally, because of the fear that people wouldn't get their kids vaccinated due to the irrational panic over thimerosal it was dropped as a preservative in childhood vaccinations in 2001 I think. So, if it was causing autism then I guess we had a huge drop in autism rates after 2001 huh? Nope. No drop at all. Thimerosal had nothing to with autism it turns out. Now the anti vaccination nuts have just forgot all about thimerosal and moved on to blaming some other compound in vaccinations. And with no more real evidence to back them up than they had about thimerosal. Every time one of their claims is disproven they just move the goal posts to another area and keep playing the game.

The problem with people in this country is that vaccinations have worked so well that they have lost their fear of what these vaccinations protect against. No one my age or younger knows a family whose child died of whooping cough or was crippled by polio. Thanks to living their whole lives in the vaccination age they have never had reason to fear such things. But you can bet your ass that people my grandparents age lived through that fear and would snatch a knot in these young anti-vaccine dumbasses.