Ahhh. Taking a few days away from it all to visit with family and friends is always good. Even better is when you get to do all that and return to find a wee bit o' the hilarious sitting in your inbox. Liz Ditz brought to my attention a relatively new group on Facebook: Provax Quacks. This group is described thusly:

Pointing out the duplicity and idiocy of the vaccine enthusiasts since 2012! Content irrelevant to the pages [sic] theme will be removed. {Edited to add: It looks like the ones running the group removed that second sentence sometime June 13, 2012 (curse my lack of foresight to get a screen grab), but looking at the comments on some of their wall posts, they have clearly been deleting comments, as predicted.}

Right off the bat, they conveniently let you know that any fact-based comments that contradict their ideological line will be censored. That saves me a lot of time. I won't waste any effort trying to comment on this new echo chamber of anti-vaccine inanity. I will, however, share with my readers a rather hilarious wall post put up by this group. If you had any doubts that the members of this group have little to no understanding of science or logic, what you are about to see will make it all perfectly, readily clear. In fact, I probably don't even need to offer my own commentary, but I just can't resist.

Without further ado, then, I present Vaccinology 10 Commandments, as seen by anti-vaccinationists:

1. Correlation doth not equal Causation (unless it defends the Sacred and Holy Vaccine).

The phrase "correlation does not equal causation" is frequently used by supporters of vaccines, but not because it is some mantra or dogma. Rather, those opposed to vaccines very frequently confuse correlation and causation. The phrase therefore serves as a reminder, not that they ever actually listen. And even if there is some correlation that supports vaccines, that does not mean that vaccine supporters automatically assume that the vaccine caused the beneficial effect. I could very easily claim that as vaccine use increased, computer literacy synchronously increased, but it would be ridiculous to think that this correlation means that vaccines caused people to become more computer literate. The first of a lovely list of straw man arguments by this Facebook group.