Junk science has a new cover girl

[Guest guest]

I like this description. It has always amazed me how so many will take as gospel the least of the things a celebrity says over the word of an expert who has studied something for decades.

12 studies say there is no link between autism and vaccines and more and more genetic research shows that it is a natural occurrence and not the result of some post-natal poisoning. But sure, let's stop all vaccines including tetanus. When I was a kid, an elderly family member talked about a friend how got tetanus, probably in the 1910's, and how bad it was for his friend. The kid survived but had a very rough time of it.

Add Jim Carrey and Oprah Winfrey to the list of those to be sued if someone's child dies because they get infected by another person's kid who's parents refused to have vaccinated.

In a message dated 5/12/2009 1:58:06 P.M. Eastern Daylight Time, no_reply writes:

Chastising a celebrity is an exercise in futility. You feel like a kitten being held by the scruff of its neck, scrabbling wildly in the air without drawing blood. Pointless as this may be, though, I will try to talk some sense into Oprah Winfrey, who has decided to go into business with vaccine skeptic McCarthy. A Good Credit Score is 700 or Above. See yours in just 2 easy steps!

[Guest guest]

http://www.nationalpost.com/news/world/story.html?id=1586402

Junk science has a new cover girl

Arthur , Slate.com

Published: Tuesday, May 12, 2009

Chastising a celebrity is an exercise in futility. You feel like a kitten being

held by the scruff of its neck, scrabbling wildly in the air without drawing

blood. Pointless as this may be, though, I will try to talk some sense into

Oprah Winfrey, who has decided to go into business with vaccine skeptic

McCarthy.

There is abundant evidence that vaccines don't cause autism. More than a dozen

studies, as well as trend data from California and other states, show that

neither the mercury-containing preservative thimerosal nor the

measles-mumps-rubella vaccine causes autism. In March, a federal court dismissed

both of these theories in a most definitive way after hearing weeks of testimony

and gathering thousands of pages of evidence.

McCarthy begs to differ. McCarthy dropped out of nursing school in 1993 to

become a Playboy bunny and later starred in an MTV show that focused on her

bodily functions. She believes that vaccines made her seven-year-old son

autistic--and that she " recovered " him with alternative therapies, as she

details in her parenting books. McCarthy has appeared regularly on Larry King

Live and Oprah to blast the medical establishment, and last year she led a march

on Washington to demand that children get fewer vaccines.

Last Wednesday it was announced that Oprah signed McCarthy to a deal, starting

with a blog on the Oprah Web site. Though neither woman's people will confirm

details of the deal, it will presumably lead to a talk show, as it did for

Ray and Dr. Phil, two other Oprah proteges. Perhaps not every episode of

a McCarthy show will address vaccines and autism, but some surely will.

Celebrities take on all kinds of causes. They campaign for presidents, and they

rally to save the women of Darfur and the hungry masses of Bangladesh and

Africa. Some of these appearances may do some good, while others are merely

benign grandstanding. But wealthy, toothsome, vivacious and sexy

McCarthy's impassioned campaign is actually harmful. Why? Because she is

spreading dangerous misinformation-- and that could bring some once-controlled

diseases back into play.

Her boyfriend, actor Jim Carrey, is even more clueless. At the rally last year,

I asked Carrey to give an example of a childhood vaccine we could dispense with.

Tetanus, he said. That answer did not reflect a strong -- or any, really --

grasp of infectious diseases. Children who get tetanus -- fortunately, it has

been extremely rare in the United States since tetanus vaccination began in the

1920s -- suffer horrendous pain, arch their backs and go into terrible spasms

before dying. It's a very natural disease, to be sure, because the germ causing

tetanus lives in dirt. It's a germ that will be with us forever, and the only

way to prevent it is through vaccination.

For some reason, Oprah and the rest of the entertainment world treat McCarthy as

if she were Mother kissing lepers or Mandela denouncing apartheid.

She's been proven wrong about vaccines, yet she persists in claiming that they

are so dangerous that it's better to get vaccine-preventable diseases than get

the shots. Oprah's spokesman told me that 's views were more " nuanced " than

I presented them. Yet here she is a month ago, in an exchange with Time:

" I do believe sadly it's going to take some diseases coming back to realize that

we need to change and develop vaccines that are safe. If the vaccine companies

are not listening to us, it's their f---ing fault that the diseases are coming

back. They're making a product that's s---. If you give us a safe vaccine, we'll

use it. It shouldn't be polio versus autism. "

McCarthy's popularity has created a lot of anger and disbelief in that tiny

sliver of society that believes in evidence-based medicine. One person who's

feeling particularly frustrated is T. Tayloe, president of the

60,000-member American Academy of Pediatricians.

" I think show business crosses the line when they give contracts to people like

Mc-Carthy, " Tayloe says. " If you give her a bully pulpit, McCarthy is

going to make people hesitate to vaccinate their children. She has no medical or

scientific credentials. It disturbs us that she's given all these opportunities

to make her pitch about vaccines on Oprah or Larry King or U. S. News or

whatever. We have to scramble to get equal time -- and who wants to see a

gray-haired pediatrician talking about a serious topic like childhood vaccines

when she's out there blasting the academy and blasting the federal government? "

Still, others involved in the effort to refute the vaccine/ autism myth aren't

as worried about McCarthy. " McCarthy doesn't bother me that much because I

don't think most people take her as a serious commenter on medicine, " said Dr.

Offit, a vaccine inventor and author of Autism's False Prophets. " I'd be

more concerned if it was someone like Meryl Streep, someone seen as person of

gravity and good sense. "

What's a little sad about this episode is the fact that once upon a time, big

stars like Humphrey Bogart, Louis Armstrong and Elvis Presley stood up for

vaccination campaigns to protect the lives of children. (Actress Peet

recently stepped up to counter McCarthy's message, saying that people should get

their advice on autism and vaccines from doctors, not actresses. But Peet seems

to lack McCarthy's entrepreneurial verve and hasn't drawn the same level of

attention.) In those days, parents and children clamoured for vaccination.

Especially children in places like the South Side of Chicago or rural

Mississippi (where Oprah was born in 1954), who suffered higher rates of polio

in the late-1950s because their parents couldn't afford the new vaccine.

Over the past year, new outbreaks of measles, whooping cough and other

vaccine-preventable diseases have occurred in communities with parents who

choose not to vaccinate their kids.

Oprah, think of the children.