Jenny McCarthy: Deaths New Buddy
The most horrifying news of the year for me, so for, was Oprahs decision to give Jenny McCarthy her own television show. McCarthy is the voice of the anti-vaccination movement. Its a movement based on lies and rumor, bereft of scientific evidence and extremely dangerous. Giving McCarthy a daily platform to spew her unrelenting nonsense will eventually lead to the deaths of many children. They are already dying, just not yet in numbers large enough to call for McCarthys head. But that day is coming. As of now, the the body count stands at one hundred and ninety one children.
The anti-vaccine stupidity began back in February 1998, when Andrew Wakefield published the results of a research study in The Lancet medical journal. He concluded that vaccinations caused autism. The massive study consisted of 12 kids. Oh, and it turned out to be a lie.
The doctor who sparked the scare over the safety of the MMR vaccine for children changed and misreported results in his research, creating the appearance of a possible link with autism, a Sunday Times investigation has found.
Confidential medical documents and interviews with witnesses have established that Andrew Wakefield manipulated patients data, which triggered fears that the MMR triple vaccine to protect against measles, mumps and rubella was linked to the condition
Thankfully, this information was not revealed until 2009, so the McCarthys of the world had 11 years to blame vaccinations for autism because of a study that wasnt true. The true cause of autism is still not known. Some studies have found genetic and environmental links, but nothing certain. To date, it is a medical mystery and thats just not something that can be. In todays world, there must be a reason and the anti-vaccination kids have got some fantastic evidence. Its called something happens when something else happens."
Causation and correlation are two different things. The McCarthys of the world believe they are the same thing. An action or occurrence can cause another (such as smoking causes lung cancer), or it can correlate with another (such as smoking is correlated with alcoholism). If an action causes another, they are probably correlated, but just because two things occur at the same time, it does not mean one caused the other. That is what Jenny wants the world to believe.
In her world, where she is a former Playmate and failed actor taking on scientists, autism is caused by vaccinations because the number of vaccination shots have increased at the same time the number of autism cases increased. Can you find any holes in that brilliant theory? Have more toxins been introduced to our environment? Have our children been exposed to more plastic? What about pesticides? There are millions of possibilities, but we shall focus on vaccinations. Just because. Oh, and in a related causation theory, highway fatalities are directly related to how many lemons we import. Crazy, right? Its true. Look, heres a graph!
There is no proven causation between vaccines and autism. You know what is proven causation? Getting polio and not being able to walk.
Some people seem to believe its a personal choice. They are not vaccinating their kid and that has nothing to do with your kid. Er, no. Vaccines work only if the entire herd is vaccinated. Thats why its called "Herd immunity."
Herd immunity (or community immunity) describes a type of immunity that occurs when the vaccination of a portion of the population (or herd) provides protection to unprotected individuals. Herd immunity theory proposes that, in diseases passed from person-to-person, it is more difficult to maintain a chain of infection when large numbers of a population are immune. The higher the proportion of individuals who are immune, the lower the likelihood that a susceptible person will come into contact with an infected individual.
The more unvaccinated children there are, the more likely vaccinations become ineffective and EVERYONE in the herd become susceptible. No vaccine is 100% effective. Herd immunity requires that approximately 90% of the population be vaccinated, the specific percentage depending upon the disease and the vaccine. We are currently dropping below those levels in many areas of the US. California and Colorado are areas where the percentages have dropped way below 90%.
From 1985 through 1992, exemptors in all states were 35 times more likely to contract measles than nonexempt children. In Colorado, exemptors were 22 times more likely to have had measles and 5.9 times more likely to have had pertussis than vaccinated children.
Upper middle class idiots are the usual suspects because they have Google. Google is the new doctor. Because of vaccinations, people have forgotten how horrible a disease like pertussis can be. My pediatrician just treated a 9-week-old infant for pertussis. He spent 11 days in the hospital near death because a neighborhood kid wasnt vaccinated. Nice parenting, your child is Typhoid Mary.
Before vaccinations, thousands of children died or got sick every year from measles, mumps and rubella. Why not go back to those good old days? How about a preventable death in Minnesota?
In 2008, five children aged 5 years were reported to the Minnesota Department of Health with invasive Haemophilus influenzae type b (Hib) disease; one died. Only one of the children had completed the primary Hib immunization series; three had received no doses of Hib-containing vaccine.
Hey, at least that dead kid doesnt have autism from the vaccine that doesnt give people autism.
I live in the epicenter of the anti-vaccination stupidity: Los Angeles.
A rising number of California parents are choosing to send their children to kindergarten without routine vaccinations, putting hundreds of elementary schools in the state at risk for outbreaks of childhood diseases eradicated in the U.S. years ago.
At Ocean Charter School in Del Rey, near Marina del Rey, 40% of kindergartners entering school last fall and 58% entering the previous year were exempted from vaccines, the highest rates in the Los Angeles Unified School District.
The parents are actually searching out schools that have the highest numbers of un-vaccinated children. Hay + Match = Fire. Should work out well. And Northern California is not better.
The North Bay, and Sonoma County in particular, is a hot bed of anti-vaccine sentiment. Of the 13 schools in the state with the highest percentage of kindergartners with exemptions from vaccination requirements, three are in Sebastopol. Of the 50 schools with the highest rates of exemptions, six are in Sonoma County and two in Marin.
There is not much drop-off after that: of the 255 schools with the highest exemption rates, 34 -- 13.3 percent -- are in Sonoma and its neighboring counties.
Can these people be dumber? Oh, shit yes. They are now going medieval.
Pox parties are popping up in neighborhoods in several U.S. cities. On Internet bulletin boards and blogs, rumors spread that the chickenpox vaccine is somehow unsafe or ineffective. Parents worried by these rumors join email rings. When one of these parents' children gets chickenpox, the parents invite others in the community to a pox party...
A "natural mothering" web site gives a recipe for spreading varicella zoster virus -- the chickenpox germ. It advises parents to pass a whistle from the infected child to other children.
Wow, thats the best idea Ive ever heard. Measles is like the cold, except that it can cause severe pneumonia or encephalitis and brain damage. Oh, and now that an anti-biotic resistant strain of A streptococcus is rampant, you might was well give your child the gift of itchy, open sores.
"It is absolute lunacy," UCLA infectious disease specialist Peter Katona, MD, tells WebMD.
Chickenpox isn't a walk in the park. And every once in a while, a child gets a very serious form of the disease. One in 50,000 kids gets a brain infection that causes retardation or death.
Hey, better than autism.
"Imagine losing a child because you were dumb enough to bring him to a pox party," Gershon says.
Imagine being the child.
The anti-vaccine movement has been criticized quite a bit from sensible humans and these crazy people called scientists. Amanda Peete took McCarthy on with facts, but the media turned it into an episode of Cat Fight. Sadly, people like Larry King and Oprah have Jenny McCarthy on because she is more fun than Mr. Boring Armed With Facts Scientist. Usually, the scientist is not as nice looking either. Plus, who wouldnt want to take their medical advice from ex-playmates and failed sitcom stars? It just seems reasonable. Later I'm getting a cancer screening from a former mime.
Because of the criticism and the revelation that the original study was a complete lie, McCarthy and her henchmen have become more evasive and re-branded themselves as "pro-safe vaccine, not anti-vaccine." They are using the slogans, "Green Our Vaccines" and "Too Many Too Soon." Suddenly, they are no longer against vaccines, just for "safe vaccines." You know, not like the ones they falsely correlate as unsafe. Got it? Its a no win battle against idiots. But, when questioned, McCarthy goes right back to the old stand by it's the vaccines.
Q - Most people who blame autism on vaccines point to the mercury in the shots, yet mercury has been removed from most vaccines and autism rates continue to climb.
MCCARTHY: We don't believe it's only the mercury. Aluminum and other toxins also play a role. The viruses in the vaccines themselves can be causing it, too.
Wait. Hold on. She wants safe vaccines. Vaccines without mercury and aluminum and other toxins. BUT, IT COULD ALSO BE THE VACCINES THEMSELVES. Seriously, fuck off. She does not care if other peoples children die. Is that a crazy accusation? Not after you read her words.
Q: Your collaborator recommends that parents accept only the haemophilus influenza type B (HIB) and tetanus vaccine for newborns and then think about the rest. Not polio? What about the polio clusters in unvaccinated communities like the Amish in the U.S.? What about the 2004 outbreak that swept across Africa and Southeast Asia after a single province in northern Nigeria banned vaccines?
MCCARTHY: 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.
Wow. So, to prevent the mythical connection to autism, you want a bunch of children to perish horribly, or be paralyzed, or suffer brain damage. Quite the Mother Theresa, you are.
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.
You are a fantastic spokeswoman. Thoughtful, logical and batshit crazy. But why should we expect anything less from the Indigo Mother of a Crystal Child.
The day I found out I was an adult Indigo will stay with me forever. I was walking hand in hand with my son down a Los Angeles street when this woman approached me and said, Youre an Indigo and your son is a Crystal. I immediately replied, Yes! and the woman smiled at me and walked away. I stood there for a moment, because I had no idea what the heck an Indigo and Crystal was, but I seemed so sure of it when I had blurted out Yes! After doing some of my own research on the word Indigo, I realized not only was I an early Indigo but my son was in fact a Crystal child.
Hell, yeah. Take medical advice from her. That wonderful comment came out of McCarthy on the Larry King Show. She had many other delightful things to say.
And isnt it ironic, in 1983 there was 10 shots and now theres 36 and the rise of autism happened at the same time?
No, it isnt ironic. Its coincidental. Those are different things.
I believe that parents anecdotal information is science-based information
I believe rabbits shit chocolate. An older kid told me that when I was five. It's science.
Environmental toxins play a role. Viruses play a role. Those are all triggers. But vaccines play the largest role right now.
Lemons. Highway accidents. Look it up, youll be frightened.
The anti-vaccination crowd will continue to make unproven claims and before those claims are scientifically proven to be false, they will have created more. First it was mercury in the vaccines, which was proven to be false.
The scientific data, taken in totality, does not support a link between mercury in vaccines and autism. Today yet another important study by Robert Schechter and Judith Grether was released, published in the Archives of General Psychiatry entitled Continuing Increases in Autism Reported to Californias Developmental Services System: Mercury in Retrograde1, that utterly failed to support the hypothesis that mercury in vaccines is an etiological factor in autism. It is yet another nail in the coffin of the medical myth that mercury in vaccines causes autism.
They have since moved on to toxins. They also think they won a court case proving vaccinations cause autism.
Its the Hannah Poling case. The government awarded compensation to Hannahs family for vaccine injury through the Vaccine Injury Compensation Program. It was heralded as their proof. But it was later determined that Hannah suffers from a highly unusual mitochondrial disorder, which rendered her susceptible to neurological injury from high fevers. High fevers can result from vaccinations. So, was it the result of her vaccination? Sort of. It was a combination of genetic factors and a fever brought on by the vaccination. She also probably would have had a high fever at some point in her life. The case has nothing to do with autism.
But they keep on chugging along. Oprahs gift to the world will be death via the daily ramblings of Jenny McCarthy.
McCarthy is certain that her son contracted autism from the measles, mumps and rubella (MMR) vaccination he received as a baby. She told Oprah that the morning he went in for his checkup, her instincts told her not to allow the doctor to give him the vaccine. "I said to the doctor, I have a very bad feeling about this shot. This is the autism shot, isn't it? And he said no, that is ridiculous; it is a mother's desperate attempt to blame something on autism. And he swore at me." The nurse gave Evan the shot. "And not soon thereafter," McCarthy said, "boom, soul gone from his eyes."
Yeah, I totally believe a doctor swore at you. By the way, tremendous parenting. If a doctor swears at me, I will always let him do whatever he wants to my kid because hes obviously very professional.
On the Oprah show, McCarthy's charges went virtually unchallenged. Oprah praised McCarthy's bravery and plugged her book, but did not invite a physician or scientist to explain to her audience the many studies that contradict the vaccines-autism link. Instead, Oprah read a brief statement from the Centers for Disease Control saying there was no science to prove a connection and that the government was continuing to study the problem. But McCarthy got the last word. "My science is named Evan, and he's at home. That's my science."
Um, yeah. Thats not science. Do you actually call him Science around the house? Your science is actually being provided to you by scientists. Its the stuff you are ignoring.
A mother wrote in to say that she had decided not to give her child the MMR vaccine because of fears of autism. McCarthy was delighted. "I'm so proud you followed your mommy instinct," she wrote.
Indeed. Check out this baby that died from "Mommy instinct."
Get your kid vaccinated or be prepared to be called a murderer.
Autism's False Prophets: Bad Science, Risky Medicine, and the Search for a Cure
FearTheReaper is a writer, actor and stand up comedian. Check back each Tuesday and Friday for more from FearTheReaper You may also enjoy his blog, Stop All Monsters.
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