ICBS Everywhere

Posted April 27, 2009

Jim Carrey has taken to blogging about vaccines now.

In a blog entry on Huffington Post last week, he continued his (and Jenny McCarthy’s) assault on public health by arguing from ignorance.

…a ruling against causation in three cases out of more than 5000 hardly proves that other children won’t be adversely affected by the MMR, let alone that all vaccines are safe. This is a huge leap of logic by anyone’s standards. Not everyone gets cancer from smoking, but cigarettes do cause cancer…

Court rulings do not attempt to “prove” anything and whether a reporter decided that it was time to stop arguing about it is irrelevant. No proof is required of those claiming no link exists.

There is no controversy. Scientists do not disagree. There is no “lack of research”. Although the claim that the MMR vaccine is responsible for autism has been tested repeatedly from every angle, no link between vaccines and autism of ANY kind has EVER been found.

This is not something a court decided. This is what we KNOW. Science is not a bunch of people sitting around telling people what they think. Science is a means of acquiring knowledge. Knowledge = THINGS WE KNOW.

However, the burden of proof is on those who claim the existence of something, not on those who dispute do not. The analogy that smoking causes cancer is ridiculous. The hypothesis that smoking causes cancer has always been a plausible one. It did not take a court ruling to convince anyone; it took scientific study. Smoking is highly correlated with cancer in study after study, there are clear models which describe the causal chain and are supported by an abundance of evidence. By contrast, the supposed relationship between MMR vaccines and autism was never plausible and was based solely on a casual observation of a common age of onset, which is hardly a reason to hypothesize, much less insist, that a causal relationship exists.

If we are to believe that the ruling of the ‘vaccine court’ in these cases mean that all vaccines are safe, then we must also consider the rulings of that same court in the Hannah Polling and Bailey Banks cases, which ruled vaccines were the cause of autism and therefore assume that all vaccines are unsafe.

Propaganda is the worst kind of stupidity because it involves deliberate lies. It would take a great deal to convince me that nobody has informed this man of the truth about these cases: that the claims made by Carrey, McCarthy, and “Generation Rescue” are untrue. In neither case did the courts rule that vaccines caused autism in these children. For the details about what they did rule, I recommend a post at Science-Based Medicine about the full-page ad the organization used to spread these lies.

In this growing crisis, we cannot afford to blindly trumpet the agenda of the CDC, the American Academy of Pediatrics (AAP) or vaccine makers.

Shocking. Absolutely shocking.

We should not support the agenda of the CDC and AAP?? Last time I checked, the agenda of the CDC was to ensure public health and the agenda of the AAP was to ensure the health of our children, both through scientific investigation of disease and treatment. Instead, Carrey, an ACTOR, wants you to “trumpet” his agenda, and that of his girlfriend – whose claim to fame is having posed naked for pictures to be published for world-wide distribution.

The arguments put forth by Carry, McCarthy, and the rest of the pro-disease people are clearly flawed and missing important concepts, yet repeated rebuttals which clearly point these out are ignored.

In his tyrade, Carrey says that the CDC, AAP, and “vaccine makers” have found no evidence of a link between vaccines and autism because they have ignored “mountains of scientific information and testimony”. So, the scientists have ignored the evidence? I don’t think so. The only “evidence” Carrey presents is anecdotal garbage posted on the Generation Rescue website.

We have never argued that people shouldn’t be immunized for the most serious threats including measles and polio…

Um… Yeah, they have…

In all likelihood the truth about vaccines is that they are both good and bad. While ingredients like aluminum, mercury, ether, formaldehyde and anti-freeze may help preserve and enhance vaccines, they can be toxic as well.

This is more than ignorance; it’s negligence. I will never believe that Carrey was never told that vaccines don’t have anti-freeze in them, or that he has never been given straight information about the other ingredients in vaccines.

I have written about the consequences of this stupidity and the spreading of this garbage on many occasions as have many others, but the story about which Bad Astronomer Phil Plait wrote yesterday is heart breaking. This story, about a 4 week old baby in Australia who died of whooping cough, is difficult to watch, but it is not atypical. I honestly believe that Jenny McCarthy, Jim Carrey, and all of those responsible for the drops in vaccination rates should be forced to watch things like this.

I admit to having fleeting thoughts that perhaps this new swine flu strain will scare some people into educating themselves and learning the truth about vaccinations, how they work, what they truly contain, and the consequences of failing to use them. I do not hold out hope, however. The anti-vaxxers will most likely create conspiracy stories suggesting that vaccine makers created the strain to scare people into vaccinating…

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