discredited

One sign of the fictional nature of this line of thinking is the way prophecies of the end of the world are routinely, in Kermode’s words, “disconfirmed without being discredited.”

That hasn’t stopped Health and Human Services from recently appointing a discredited vaccine skeptic to investigate this link.

The discredited idea that childhood vaccines are linked to autism first gained mainstream attention after a paper published in 1998 in the medical journal The Lancet by British doctor Andrew Wakefield.

He has said vitamin A can treat a measles outbreak in Texas, and has named vaccine skeptic David Geier to help study whether vaccines are connected to autism — a theory that has been discredited.

Congress doesn’t have to rely on the last surviving relic of a package of laws that were reviled by Jefferson and Madison and discredited.