Scientific Evidence and the EU Court
A controversial European Union court decision about vaccines raises two interesting scientific questions: How do scientists decide whether vaccines can cause conditions such as autism or multiple sclerosis? And how certain can they be when they make their conclusions?
Recently news outlets ran headlines saying that the highest court of the European Union ruled, “Vaccines can be blamed for illnesses without proof” or “without scientific evidence.”
The June 21 ruling, which was more complicated than the headlines suggest, concerned a case of a Frenchman who was diagnosed with multiple sclerosis after being immunized against hepatitis B.
The EU court ruled that the courts of EU countries, including France, “may consider” circumstantial evidence when deciding whether a vaccine caused a disease when “medical research neither establishes nor rules out” a link.
According to a statement released by the EU court, circumstantial evidence could include “temporal proximity” between receiving the “vaccine and the occurrence of a disease” and a lack of family history of the disease.
To be clear, the EU court didn’t rule on the specific French case. It only clarified whether French law conflicted with EU law and ruled that it didn’t.
Law experts told us that the outcome of the
