Jenny McCarthy is a Witless Bully
30 September, 2008
Author’s Note:
Originally
when I wrote this column, I used some particularly harsh language to
characterize Ms. McCarthy. I was informed that the term I
applied to her was sexist and misogynist. This I would not do
intentionally; I strive to be reasonably inclusive in my language and I
harbor no prejudices toward race or sex. I apologize to readers of
Stiletto for this offense and will strive to avoid making similar
mistakes in the future.
When I
was in college, the folks in charge of my freshman dorm had to issue an
edict to the occupants of the building. Specifically, they
had to remind the flea-bitten, caucasian-dreadlock-sporting,
filth-encrusted-hemp-baja-pullover-wearing,
snot-green-corduroy-pants-clad hippy art students to FLUSH THE FRIGGING
TOILETS. You see, the art students had found environmental
consciousness — “Earth Day” was upon us — and were going to save the
planet one unflushed bowl of sewage at a time. The
simplistic concept here, of course, is that refusing to flush the
toilet saves water and thus helps maintain global water supplies, or
something.
Well,
the issue is, you don’t preserve water at the cost of basic sanitation.
Back when cities were festering disease pits notable for their open
sewers, where the mud streets weren’t just mud, but mud and horse
shit, there wasn’t as much water being used, no.
There was also a lot more disease running rampant in urban
areas. Bringing basic sanitation to those urban areas CUT THE
THREAT OF DISEASE CONSIDERABLY. It came at the cost of using
water to flush the stuff away into actual sewers, yes. This
is an IMPROVEMENT, not a crime against nature. Now, perhaps
my priorities are misaligned, but I think preventing your population
from dying of, oh, let’s say, dysentery
is worth a few gallons of water flushed away forever. Don’t
you?
In a
similar vein, and using propaganda and “junk science” that rivals the
worst luddites among the “global warming” conspiracy theorists, there
are people today spreading the false notion that getting your children vaccinated
will somehow give them autism. As a result,
they’re convincing some parents to apply a lengthened vaccination
schedule, stretching the injections out over a longer period of time
(and thus delaying the onset of protection against the diseases
involved). What’s worse, some parents are actually buying
into this nonsense so wholly that they believe they needn’t or
shouldn’t vaccinate their children at all.
This
hysteria would not be nearly so widespread if it hadn’t been picked up
by celebrities, most notably Jenny McCarthy. If you don’t
know or remember who Jenny McCarthy is, I will remind you:
She is a famous blonde woman who got famous by being naked in
things. Those “things” include what we used to call “dirty
magazines,” like Playboy.
She then leveraged her being-naked-in-things to become a
television personality,
which is a politically correct way of saying, “Someone who is on
television but has no discernible talent.” She eventually
built this into actual “acting,” if you want to call it that, and later
to dating Jim Carrey. Jim Carrey, if you don’t know, was a
comedian, and then he became an actor, and then he apparently became a
deluded tool. (To be perfectly honest with you, I think
an entire generation of men in this country is still trying to recover
from the first time they heard Jenny McCarthy talk.
Making the transition from silent pictures of a naked Jenny
McCarthy doing nothing particularly annoying, to listening to this
incredibly obnoxious woman make sounds loudly and incessantly, must
have traumatized countless connoisseurs of airbrushed, soft-core
pornography.)
We are
stupid. We are stupid for many reasons as a people, but
foremost among these has to be the fact that we listen, not to doctors
or scientists or people who actually spend their time and have been
educated to study diseases, medicine, and mental disorders, but
to witless bullies like Jenny McCarthy. We listen
to her because, well, hell, she was naked in things, and then she was
on the television, so that means she must know better than do we, the
mere mortals who’ve never actually hosted our own talk shows. ( I mean,
I know I haven’t. Maybe you have.)
It
wouldn’t be quite so frustrating that people listen to what celebrities
and “personalities” like Jenny McCarthy have to say, except
that to fight the mindless propaganda spewing from McCarthy’s maw, we have to enlist our own celebrities. We can’t
use facts, research, or the testimony of medical doctors, you
see, because none of those people have been on VH1 or appeared in a
direct-to-video coming-of-age sex comedy. There is,
therefore, no
compelling reason to listen to them. Fox News reported today
that actress Amanda Peet had gotten herself into trouble with the
vaccines-create-autism crowd. It seems Peet — whom you
probably don’t know, but who is perhaps best known for showing her
breasts in the Bruce Willis comedy The
Whole Nine Yards — was enlisted by the vaccination
advocacy group Every
Child By Two to combat the presumably overwhelming star power
Jenny McCarthy and Jim Carrey bring to bear on the issue. She
said something negative about parents who refuse to vaccinate their
children (or who fail to vaccinate them in a timely manner), and one or
more
autism groups called for a boycott of her movies and said mean things
about her. Tragic as I’m sure it would be for a movie buff to
forego a body of work that includes Saving Silverman
and The X-Files: I Want
to Believe, I think the film industry will
survive the financial impact of this far-reaching act of protest.
Predictably,
McCarthy operated her betoothed yap (which never actually
closes) to attack Peet for daring to
disagree.
Why, if you criticize parents for refusing to vaccinate their
children, you must be attacking the parents of autistic children, not
to mention those autistic children themselves. Wait, what?
Really? And here I thought Peet was critizing people
who recklessly endanger their children and the children of other
parents by permitting them to contract and spread childhood diseases
that are both preventable and possibly fatal.
“She has
a lot of [nerve] to come forward and be on that side,” Fox quoted
McCarthy as saying, “because there is an angry mob on my side, and I
like the fact that I can say she’s completely wrong.”
Now, let’s
analyze thyat for a moment. Ms. Peet “has a lot of nerve” for disagreeing with Jenny
McCarthy.
It couldn’t possibly be that the other side of the argument contains a
valid viewpoint, even in part. No, you must simply have gall
that
will not quit if you dare
to
hold an opinion that differs from McCarthy’s. What’s more,
McCarthy delights in the fact that the force of her opinion comes, not
from copious amounts of research, not from firm and reproducible
medical evidence, and not even from reasonable and logical speculation,
but from legions of irrational and rabidly superstitious parents who
simply know
that they’re right, regardless of what may be true.
Question them, and they will shout you down, insult you, and
condemn you… all because you dared to oppose their ridiculous and
dangerous campaign on the grounds that medical science proves exactly the opposite
of what they claim.
Now, I have
nothing but
sympathy for the parents of autistic children. I know how
much
parents worry about the wellbeing of their children, and I understand
how upset parents get when they think their children have been
attacked. THAT IS NOT HAPPENING HERE. This isn’t
about autism
at all. This is about refusing to believe conspiracy theories
when there is ample evidence to refute them.
The truth
is that the vaccines in question protect against illnesses that
will kill your child.
The mythical and
completely unsubstantiated link to autism promulgated by fools like
McCarthy (and her celebrity eunuch Jim Carrey) is far less a danger
than the
very real, very immediate threat of diseases like polio.
Earlier this month, I saw this snippet in the news:
No
Connection Between Measles, Mumps, Rubella (MMR) Vaccine And Autism,
Study Suggests
ScienceDaily
(Sep. 5, 2008) — In a case-control study, the presence of
measles virus RNA was no more likely in children with autism and GI
disturbances than in children with only GI disturbances. Furthermore,
GI symptom and autism onset were unrelated to MMR vaccine timing.
That’s
a fancy way of saying that getting vaccinated against measles doesn’t
increase your risk of autism as a child. I read a companion
story the same day that cited this study, but also pointed out that
we’re seeing a dramatic rise in the incidence of measles cases because
these children aren’t being vaccinated against the measles.
It isn’t just measles, either; other childhood
diseases are
on the rise, all because some parents are so concerned with listening
to Jenny McCarthy that they aren’t allowing their children’s
pediatrician to protect those children from disease.
Modern
science is not the threat. Modern medical science and modern
household technology are developed in order to lengthen and preserve
human life, if not simply to make it easier or more
convenient. You may choose to embrace technological
innovation and change, or you may choose to be willfully
ignorant. If you play games with your child’s vaccination
schedule because of idiotic propaganda spread by brainless propagandists
like Jenny McCarthy and her ilk, both you and, more
importantly, your children will suffer the consequences. The
damage, however, isn’t limited to just your family. You are
endangering the children of everyone with whom your kids come into
contact. (The concept is called herd immunity. It’s important.)
When children die from diseases that could have been prevented, vapid celebrities like McCarthy share in the blame.
The true responsibility, however, is yours.
Refuse to vaccinate your children and you are placing the
barrel
of a gun in their mouths. Your superstition, your fear, your arrogance should
not trump the reality of their needs, or of your responsibilities to
them. >>
Post Script
When I wrote this column I had no idea just how powerful
is
the junk science community. After I posted this at an
online discussion forum, I quickly found out just what it is like to be
met by the “angry mob” invoked by Jenny McCarthy. I
discovered firsthand what it is like to be attacked personally for
daring to uphold medical science over superstition and thoroughly
discredited conspiracy theories. No amount of data I produced
mattered; no amount of logic was heard. No, I was
simply a Very Bad Man for daring to criticize and insult Jenny McCarthy
and those like her as they have criticized and insulted others.
One very ardent group of vaccine deniers kept bringing up the
Hannah Poling case. Unfortunately for the
vaccines-cause-autism true believers out there, the Poling case doesn’t
prove their point — it proves mine.
As Paul Offit wrote in
the New York Times,
ON March 6, Terry and Jon Poling stood outside a federal
courthouse in Atlanta, Ga., with their 9-year-old daughter Hannah and
announced that the federal government had admitted that vaccines had
contributed to her autism. The news was shocking. Health officials at
the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and at the American
Academy of Pediatrics have steadfastly assured the public that vaccines
do not cause autism. Now, in a special vaccine claims court, the
federal government appeared to have said exactly the opposite. What
happened?The answer is wrapped up in the nature of the unusual court
where the Poling case was heard. In 1986, after a flood of lawsuits
against vaccine makers threatened the manufacture of vaccines for
children, Congress created the National Vaccine Injury Compensation
Program, financed by a tax on every dose of vaccine.…The system worked fine until a few years ago, when
vaccine
court judges turned their back on science by dropping preponderance of
evidence as a standard. Now, petitioners need merely propose a
biologically plausible mechanism by which a vaccine might cause harm
— even if their explanation contradicts published
studies.…In 2000, when Hannah [Poling] was 19
months old, she received five shots against nine infectious diseases.
Over the next several months, she developed symptoms of autism.
Subsequent tests showed that Hannah has a mitochondrial disorder
— her cells are unable to adequately process nutrients
— and this contributed to her autism. An expert who [filed an
affadavit]
in court on the Polings’ behalf claimed that the five
vaccines had stressed Hannah’s already weakened cells,
worsening her disorder. Without holding a hearing on the matter, the
court conceded that the claim was biologically plausible.On its face, the expert’s opinion makes no sense.
Even five vaccines at once would not place an unusually high burden on
a child’s immune system. The Institute of Medicine has found
that multiple vaccines do not overwhelm or weaken the immune system.
And although natural infections can worsen symptoms of chronic
neurological illnesses in children, vaccines are not known to.…The vaccine court should return to the
preponderance-of-evidence standard. But much damage has already been
done by the Poling decision. Parents may now worry about vaccinating
their children, more autism research money may be steered toward
vaccines and away from more promising leads and, if similar awards are
made in state courts, pharmaceutical companies may abandon vaccines for
American children. In the name of trying to help children with autism,
the Poling decision has only hurt them.
I found a great deal of further supporting material, much of
it cross-linked at Junkfood Science (all information
from which was summarily dismissed by the Luddites with whom I was
arguing because it “came from a blog,” even though the blog itself
simply organizes, quotes, and links to supporting studies,
editorials, and information). What I learned, ultimately, is
that no matter how many times these conspiracy theories are debunked
and discredited, there will be people willing to believe them.
The factual evidence — or rather, the lack of credible
evidence supporting the superstition — is overwhelming.
As Ned Calogne wrote, in the Denver Post,
There now have been 16 separate, independent studies
undertaken in five countries, involving millions of children,
that have found no link between vaccination, vaccines or vaccine
preservatives (namely, the mercury-based thimerosal) and autism. We
have more data supporting this lack of association than for most other
“known facts” in medicine. The sheer number of children
included in
these studies precludes the theory that there may be even some small
but significant number of children for whom vaccination was at fault
for, or contributed to, any measurable degree of autism. [emphasis
added]
Clearly, there is a contingent of interests among the
conspiracy
theorists who prey on the fears of concerned parents. There are also a
great many parents who, while their grief and upset are understandable,
cling to this discredited theory because it gives them a kind of false
hope. They believe in the link between vaccines and autism because they
want to
believe it and because they need
to believe it. Real answers and real solutions concerning autism are
much harder to find, and much less easy to believe, than the idea that
we must somehow be responsible (and that we can stop it). This is the
true tragedy when superstition trumps medical science. It makes victims
of all involved, on both sides of the issue.
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