I watched PBS’ Frontline – The Vaccine War last night. Overall a pretty good show well put together and well balanced. Of course in their attempt to provide a balanced view they gave a bit too much time to unfounded points of view, but that’s the nature of the beast.
Jenny McCarthy
I cringe every time I see Jenny McCarthy open her mouth and talk about science and medicines, two areas she’s completely unqualified to comment on. But here’s an interesting tidbit I found this morning: McCarthy changed her story as strong evidence that there is no link between thimerosal or the MMR vaccine and autism has been piling up. She went from:
“Right before his MMR shot, 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,’ and he swore at me, and then the nurse gave [Evan] the shot,” she says. “And I remember going, ‘Oh, God, I hope he’s right.’ And soon thereafter — boom — the soul’s gone from his eyes.
To:
I don’t think it was just the MMR shot that caused any kind of trigger with autism. I think it was a compilation of so many shots to a kid that obviously had some autoimmune disorders. So I would saymaybe a couple of months, a month or so after the MMR, I started to notice some physical ailments such as constipation, rashes, eczema. That was like the first little sign. And then the train just kind of descended from there.
Now, that’s not really surprising, it is a hallmark of the pseudo-science crowd to move the goal posts every time their position becomes untenable. But it is despicable that people who rare totally unqualified to comment on the science and medical aspects of something like vaccines and autism use their celebrity as a platform to convince people that vaccines are bad. These folks don’t even understand the difference between correlation and causation. Because an event happened soon after another one, doesn’t mean the first one is the cause of the second one. It just so happens that autism is most often diagnosed right around the same time that kids receive several vaccines, but research shows clearly that the two are not related. As the evidence comes in, the anti-vax crowd just keeps moving the goal posts. Meanwhile, valuable time and money that could be spent on actual autism research is wasted on this instead.
Andrew Wakefield
In related news, Andrew Wakefield, the crooked doctor who started the whole anti-vax movement has lost his MD license.
