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In an op-ed in the Chicago Sun-Times, Jenny McCarthy claims she is not anti-vaccine. "I believe in the importance of a vaccine program and I believe parents have the right to choose one poke per visit. I've never told anyone to not vaccinate. Should a child with the flu receive six vaccines in one doctor visit? Should a child with a compromised immune system be treated the same way as a robust, healthy child? Shouldn't a child with a family history of vaccine reactions have a different plan? Or at least the right to ask questions?"
However Jeffrey Kluger, who interviewed McCarthy in 2009, responds in Time Magazine that McCarthy believes vaccines cause autism, that they are related to OCD, ADHD and other physical and behavioral ills, that they are overprescribed, teeming with toxins, poorly regulated and that the only reason we keep forcing them into the sweet, pristine immune systems of children is because doctors, big pharma and who-knows what-all sinister forces want it that way. "Jenny, as outbreaks of measles, mumps and whooping cough continue to appear in the U.S.-most the result of parents refusing to vaccinate their children because of the scare stories passed around by anti-vaxxers like you-it's just too late to play cute with the things you've said. You are either floridly, loudly, uninformedly antivaccine or you are the most grievously misunderstood celebrity of the modern era. Science almost always prefers the simple answer, because that's the one that's usually correct. Your quote trail is far too long-and you have been far too wrong-for the truth not to be obvious."
(Score: 3, Interesting) by wantkitteh on Tuesday April 15 2014, @09:30AM
This woman has no qualifications or professional experience in medicine. Why did anyone ever listen to her opinion on this subject in the first place? There is a reason you ignore people who aren't medical professionals - if what a doctor says is wrong and taking his advice causes harm, they are removed from practice and their professional reputation destroyed, while wingnuts like Jenny can continue to talk bollocks and no-one has any legal recourse against her.
Which is fine by me - maybe all the wingnuts will keep spreading their horsecrap around the wingnut community and they'll be wiped out by natural selection, improving the genetic stock of the human race. *shrugs*
(Score: 4, Insightful) by moo kuh on Tuesday April 15 2014, @09:53AM
Except that the wingnuts can infect infants that are too young for mmr. Children don't get vaccinationed for all deadly and debilitating diseases the second they are out of the vagina. They won't just be killing off themselves. They have the potential to harm the most vulnerable.
(Score: 2) by wantkitteh on Tuesday April 15 2014, @12:00PM
Very good point, I propose that anyone displaying Wingnut-like tendencies be physically isolated from the rest of the population in areas to be designated by governmental health agencies following public suggestions.
For the English isolation zone, I nominate Milton Keynes.
(Score: 3, Insightful) by WizardFusion on Tuesday April 15 2014, @09:53AM
Exactly. I wish the media would stop making stupid people famous.
(Score: 2) by wantkitteh on Tuesday April 15 2014, @12:06PM
They can't do that, they wouldn't get the audiences, the advertising dollars would stop flowing and profits would fall! Oh, and it would start a truth inertia that would end with an awful lot of people working for news agencies being lynched. I'm all for that personally but it's their call.
(Score: 2) by hamsterdan on Tuesday April 15 2014, @12:12PM
For the same reasons people watch reality TV? listen to Celine Dion?
The only way people will start fighting back is when TV is cut off...
(Score: 3, Insightful) by VLM on Tuesday April 15 2014, @01:15PM
"if what a doctor says is wrong and taking his advice causes harm, they are removed from practice and their professional reputation destroyed"
LOL wake me when that happens to anything other than "making an example of" anecdotes.
The problem with responding to ridiculous extremism with ridiculous extremism is it does nothing to convince anyone.
A better answer is along the lines of you don't ask your plumber for car repair advice, or ask your car mechanic for interior decorating advice, so asking a soft-core-ish pr0n actress for medical advice is equally dumb. Asking her for medical advice would be as dumb as asking me for advice on looking hot and modeling.
This also applies to the "vaccines are safe" dumbness. No, they're pretty dangerous compared to most anything kids do or are involved in (assuming you don't take your kids skydiving with you or give them working chainsaws as toys), but on average they are waaaay hugely safer than the diseases they prevent. Better off with 1 in a thousand having a severe fever and a day in the hospital like my son (full recovery, all good), than maybe 1 in 10 dead from a smallpox outbreak or whatever. Oh its pretty darn dangerous, riskier (wrt combat) than joining the .mil in fact, but it IS safer than not getting vaccinated.
(Score: 2) by wantkitteh on Tuesday April 15 2014, @07:41PM
Hehe, I love doing this, it already happened in this case:
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/8700611.stm [bbc.co.uk]
I don't know how often this soft of thing happens in the US but there is concern over the fact two-thirds of doctors forced off the medical register in the UK were trained in India.
Anyone saying vaccinations don't work obviously isn't paying attention to how effectively they've suppressed those diseases and increased our life expectancies. Until now, of course. Glad to hear your son was okay though!
(Score: 2) by VLM on Tuesday April 15 2014, @08:13PM
Like I said it takes being in the paper to have an example made of them, but the average incompetent would never gain any such attention. And in typical British fashion the real debate is Deer claiming Wakefield made everything up as a financial scam because Wakefield had a financial interest in a competing vaccine formulation but instead of a simple financial scam the whole story went all exponential, and the typical British response is rather than commenting on the conflicting stories about the financial scam, at least on paper, Wakefield was only busted for:
"And the panel hearing the case took exception with the way he gathered blood samples. Dr Wakefield paid children £5 for the samples at his son's birthday party."
Its probably safer for them from a legal standpoint to bust him for that, rather than what they really wanted to bust him for.
The whole story would probably make a heck of a techno thriller book or movie, if the truth can ever be determined.
(Score: 2) by wantkitteh on Tuesday April 15 2014, @09:01PM
It's not sexy but it's got teeth - the journalist who dug it all up destroyed the credibility of the evidence the paper was based on, not to mention the doctor who wrote the paper. That's enough for anyone with two brain cells to run together to dismiss the whole idea, you'd have to be stark raving mad or paranoid as a goat who spent Halloween night in a marijuana plantation to continue to give any scientific credence to the idea.
Oh wait....
Agreed, good material for a techno thriller.
(Score: 1, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday April 15 2014, @01:15PM
I think the wingnuts are a *good* thing.
The force us to up our game. To make things better. To make what they say so wrong that no one will listen to them.
To say things like 'the science is settled' is lazy. What if there is something wrong in the numbers? What if the schedule could be better? What if the dose is too low/high? These are precisely the sorts of questions our doctors should be asking before they give the stuff to a few hundred people. That is part of science questioning the norm. Is it really the norm? Is it working or are there side effects we need to work on?
For example recently a lady who was fully vaccinated in NY picked up the measles and gave it to 5 people (2 of whom were also vaccinated, 3 partials). Something broke, they are looking into it. Exactly what should happen. To just say 'dont worry about it' is lazy and backwards.
I celebrate the wing nuts because they ask the stupid questions. Sometimes you need to go back and check that yeah those facts *are* true and someone didnt just make it up to get a paper published. Which happens more than you would like to know.
I trust my doctor to use the knowledge he has at this time to make sure I, my family, and friends are vaccinated properly.
Yes it is tiresome to deal with them. Yes it takes energy away from other goals. But if you dismiss them they will harden their lines and scream even more. If you show them what you did and why they are wrong you can get a better response. They are scared and we dismiss them.
(Score: 2) by wantkitteh on Tuesday April 15 2014, @08:06PM
If the Wingnuts read these and checked the sources, they'd realize how stupid they were being:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MMR_vaccine_controve rsy [wikipedia.org]
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Andrew_Wakefield [wikipedia.org]
So let's see, some crooked lawyers wanted to make a fast buck sewing the vaccine manufacturers, so they asked a doc to cook up some evidence for them. The science was never in genuine doubt. Idiots who can't accept that the sky isn't falling don't keep anyone on their toes, they drag the entire human race down to their idiotic level. It's been SIXTEEN YEARS since these blatant lies were first published and kids are still dying today. I'll say it loud so everyone can hear me: FUCK THE WINGNUTS!
(Score: 1) by compro01 on Tuesday April 15 2014, @02:35PM
But the problem is that fitness function sucks. You end up hitting unvaccinatible persons, random failures (2% or so of the population for 2-dose MMR) and not-yet-vaccinated persons (infants under 12 or 15 months of age) along with the nuts.
(Score: 2) by cmn32480 on Tuesday April 15 2014, @05:14PM
The problem is that the wingnuts interact with the rest of us.
My brother's kids came to visit their 6-day-old newborn cousin, and found out 2 days later that they had whooping cough.
When my brother told me, I WISH I could have reached through the phone and killed him. All because he and his wife believed this crap about vaccines causing autism. I later found out that his kids were literally YEARS behind on vaccinations, MMR, whooping cough, and a whole bunch of others. In the end they had to get current or they would not have been allowed in the public school system.
Thankfully my son didn't get whooping cough which can be deadly to infants.
"It's a dog eat dog world, and I'm wearing Milkbone underwear" - Norm Peterson