Dismissed! [Respectful Insolence]

Well, that didn’t take long.

Remember when the grande dame of the anti-vaccine movement, Barbara Loe Fisher, decided that she would try to harass, intimidate, and silence Paul Offit through the filing of a frivolous libel suit against Dr. Offit, Amy Wallace (the journalist who interviewed Offit for an excellent article last year), and Condé Nast, the publisher of WIRED, which ran the article? Well, the judge has ruled, and that ruling is…dismissed!

The text of the ruling can be found here.

There are some awesomely awesome passages in this ruling, which is a slapdown that, while not as epic as, for instance, the slapdown that Judge John E. Jones III delivered to creationists in Kitzmiller v. Dover, is nonetheless very satisfying to read–with one exception. The judge in this case makes some truly annoying statements like:

Moreover, in the context of the Wired article, the statement “she lies” lacks the provably false content that is required to support a defamation action.=

So far, so good. Then, not so good:

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