As usual with articles from the anti-vaxxers, the headline is not justified by the detail. Simply put, the courts did NOT confirm mmr vaccine causes autism. I have personally checked the findings related to the Ryan Mojab case ( http://www.uscfc.uscourts.gov/sites/default/files/opinions/CAMPBELL-SMITH.MOJABI.4.3.13.pdf ) and it is clear that there is no finding that the mmr vaccine caused autism. He did suffer an adverse reaction to the mmr vaccine and the judge awarded him compensation under the National Vaccine Injury Compensation Program, which was set up to cover cases where someone received injuries due to having being vaccinated. As anti-vaxxers are well aware, some people may suffer adverse reactions to Vaccines, but the risk is monumentally less that the consequences of not taking the vaccine. To cater for such cases, the National Vaccine Injury Compensation Program was set up. But, like this example, the anti-vaxxers have been delving through the cases of those who have received compensation under this program and then claiming, ERROREOUSLY IN EVERY CASE, that the reason for the compensation was that the court had found there was a link between vaccines and autism.
This post from another forum better sums it up than I can.
I don't think it's a case of bad law, though the linked article is certainly atrocious science and enthusiastically misrepresents the actual legal situation.
The US government has set up a program called the National Vaccine Injury Compensation Program, or "vaccine court", which serves to compensate people who sustain medical problems resulting from vaccines. Like just about any medicine, there are rare cases where people have serious adverse reactions, and the two kids in question appear to have gotten some form of brain injury from a vaccination. It makes sense to have a system like the NVIC program, since vaccination is in the public interest but at the same time you want to do what you can to mitigate the burden that will be created by those instances of adverse reactions to vaccines.
Now, the way the vaccine court works is on the preponderance of the evidence basis (as opposed to beyond-a-reasonable-doubt used in criminal court). Because its purpose is to (ideally) cover all families who have a medical problem resulting from vaccines, the goal of the court is to determine if compensation is appropriate, rather than to exhaustively prove that a specific medical problem resulted from a specific vaccine. Here's the court ruling for Ryan Mojabi, though I can't find the ones for Emily Moller's case yet (feel free to search the federal claims court site for it. Most of the proceedings aren't published, and as a result an outside observer can't really draw many conclusions from the ruling. It's a settlement system, so providing compensation doesn't mean that fault has been found by the court.
The two kids both suffered serious medical problems shortly after being vaccinated, including very severe fevers, epilepsy, vomiting, rashes and other symptoms. It should be patently obvious even to anti-vaxxers that this isn't how most autism cases develop. If every autism case started this way, autism would be a hell of a lot easier to diagnose in young children. These kids were diagnosed with autism spectrum disorders as part of a broader set of health problems resulting from their reaction to the vaccine.
The article's title, "Courts quietly confirm MMR Vaccine causes Autism" is complete bullshit because the court confirmed no such thing. The court confirmed that the preponderance of the evidence indicated that two kids suffered brain damage from an adverse reaction to a vaccine. It's nearly impossible to prove what happened in such a situation (since a certain proportion of kids are going to develop random medical problems shortly after receiving a vaccine), which is why the court's job is not in any way, shape, or form to prove cause. I guarantee you that the judge in the case was dreading exactly that sort of twisted misrepresentation of the facts from the antivaxxer media.
In short, it's a good law, but it's a law that antivaxxers find quite easy to lie about. http://www.sciencebasedmedicine.org/mmr-and-autism-rises-from-the-dead/ http://skeptics.stackexchange.com/q...court-rule-that-the-mmr-vaccine-causes-autism
and lastly, a rather acerbic but informative blog post taking down this Huffington Post blog, the latter of which has a lot of information but presents it in a biased manner.
