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. >>
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.