We should.
But when they change only their posture, how much credit is due?
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For those saying âpoor Jennyâ here, listen to what she could do: She could say she was WRONG. She could say she was terribly MISLEAD. She could put as much effort into speaking out against the bad ideas she bought into and her own inappropriate use of her self as some kind of expert. She could tell people she mislead them and use her platform to try to correct that.
Instead, sheâs just denying any wrong.
That gets one no sympathy from me.
Oh might she face consequences for admitting she was wrong? Oh nooo. not consequences! Oh dear!
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Sheâs not saying sheâs changing her mind, sheâs refactoring her statement to try dodge fallout.
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There are 3x the number of vaccines because doctors continue to work to make us all healthy. Itâs the only medical treatment that can actually say that it has completely eliminated a disease, polio. No other medicine has come close to the effectiveness of vaccines.
The Scientific Method is governed about questioning everything; especially questioning yourself. But you must follow the data, not the opinions.
Jenny McCarthy has questions; questions are good. She just doesnât look for the answers. There is very little (trusted) data supporting the danger of vaccines, and huge quantities of data supporting its success.
Drugs are tested, over and over, doubly so for infants. In the real world, doctors give shots because they know for a fact that it works. If it didnât, they wouldnât do it, and if it was actually hurting their patients they would make a big deal about it. Whatâs happening now is doctors are making a huge deal about having more patients coming in with Measles or whooping cough, more than they have ever seen it for decades! That is a serious problem because there is a simple solution for it and itâs just irresponsible not to use it.
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Well let me be a little more clear; Jenny McCarthyâs antivax campaign and suggestion of a link to autism has been incredibly damaging to vaccination programs and has resulted in parents not getting vaccinations for their children, and there have been outbreaks of disease as a result. Those outbreaks have killed children; 20 from pertussis in 2012, to cite just one year of one disease.
But people should not think that just because Jenny McCarthy is (was?) wrong, that vaccines are perfectly harmless They are not. There were roughly 7000 reported severe reactions to vaccines last year in children under the age of two, and at least three dozen deaths. Now there are a lot of children out there getting vaccines so statistically speaking thatâs literally 99.9% of all kids have only mild or no reaction at all. But .1% is still a large number of kids, and as far as Iâm concerned itâs completely legitimate to ask whether the current schedule of vaccinations is the safest way to prevent disease.
If I ate three times as much spinach this week then I did last week I would probably be healthier for it, not worse off. Obviously this argument breaks down at the point I give myself toxic doses of vitamin A, but it is up to those who âask questionsâ about vaccines to give us some reason to think we are near that point with the current schedule, and a gut feeling doesnât count.
Infant mortality is about half of what it was when I was born, as is mortality between 5 and 14. To be clear, Iâm not crediting this drop to vaccines - itâs just that given the trend, it makes more sense to guess that changes weâve made over the few decades have made children safer rather than put them at greater risk. In order to argue that giving more vaccines has caused more death and injury, weâd need to quantify the risk of each vaccine against the risk of the diseases it prevents, not just point at the number going up. That kind of analysis is precisely what was done to lead to the increase in vaccines.
This idea is very poorly thought out. Why do you think there is no AIDS vaccine? Why is it going to take a Billionaire philanthropist to develop one? If you want to go in on big pharma conspiracy theories (which I 100% support) then you have to think about how they make their money. No one was working on an AIDs vaccine or cure because they make far more money treating AIDS than they would preventing it.
From the greedy for money perspective, vaccines are the absolute worst. Preventing diseases saves money and keeps people healthy, but all of us saving money means big pharma not earning that money. Big pharma wants to treat disease indefinitely, not prevent them from ever happening. Big pharma wants you to not vaccinate.
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Jenny McCarthy is one of the few âcelebritiesâ that I give any sort of thought to, ever, in that I actively despise her. How many celebrities have their own Body Count Website?
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Am I the only one whose ok with this statement of hers? I mean, she had a public position that was obviously in the wrong, then she got a tonne of flack for it, maybe got to hear some evidence that supports the value of vaccination, then changed her stance.
This is good.
This is what weâre supposed to do, we change our minds when we hear evidence.
Letâs not disincentivize that by treating the first position someone has as the only one that matters, all others being disingenuousâŚ
Not entirely true; look at Merckâs recent lobbying efforts to make the HPV vaccine mandatory - thatâs a huge money maker for them. And donât forget that physicians get paid per shot, not per visit, so the incentive is to stack the shots up and minimize time spent on the patient while maximizing billing. Again, just to be clear, Iâm not saying that the HPV vaccine is not a good thing nor that it should not be widely administered, Iâm simply pointing out that there are other interests being pushed other than patient health.
Given the pervasive corruption and administrative clusterfuck that is our health care system, Iâm not sure Iâm inclined to leave the asking of questions up to other people, just like I donât take for granted the testimony coming from GM executives or NSA officials.
Doctors routinely prescribe medicines based on drug company research, or because drug salesmen have told them itâs the best treatment. Often doctors are paid directly or indirectly for prescribing specific medicine, and do so even to the detriment of the patient. The same is true with procedures and billing insurance companies or the Government - it happens all the time. Sometimes itâs out of ignorance or sloth, but sometimes itâs specifically to make money - either way, itâs wrong. And the only person who can prevent it from happening is the patient who must be an informed consumer. To blithely think that every doctor is only doing what is in your best interest is dangerously naive.
I think the point is that she has not changed her stance. She is saying that WE are wrong, weâve simply been misquoting her and mischaracterizing her stance for years.
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This is just like the time George Lucas said that Greedo always shot first and we were just confused.
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Iâm not sure you are ok with this statement, then, because it doesnât say any of that. McCarthy has explicitly not changed her stance; her second sentence is âThis is not a change in my stance nor is it a new position that I have recently adopted.â
Instead what she is saying is that her stance should not be considered anti-vaccine, just âasking questionsâ and demanding âsafe vaccinesâ with âreduced toxinsâ. There is nothing mentioning on any of the things she has been wrong about, or the way she has mischaracterized existing vaccines, just rejecting the name anti-vaccine for her position.
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Who cares about âcreditâ? If she wants to pretend she was never anti-vaccine, thatâs great. I mean, sheâs full of crap, but as long as she stops pushing this dangerous nonsense on other people, I donât care how she frames it or what she does or doesnât get credit for.
Perhaps you might review more carefully âhow she frames itâ, though you might have to give enough of a crap to make your way through several whole paragraphs.
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âAnti-intellectualism has been a constant thread winding its way through our political and cultural life, nurtured by the false notion that democracy means that âmy ignorance is just as good as your knowledge.ââ
Isaac Asimov
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Iâm not Anti-Jenny McCarthy, I just think we should perhaps consider the idea that the world would be a better place if sheâd shut the fuck up and stop talking dangerous bollocks.
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But a paranoid yet paradoxically credulous patient who falls for snake oil and superstition because it isnât âBig Pharmaâ isnât educated or informed.
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Actually, absolutely true. Vaccine worse than cure is worse than treatment. When you happen to have a patent on a vaccine, obviously you are going to market it, but vaccines that are getting made today are getting made because people want to prevent diseases (or are discovering them by accident) and being marketed as an afterthought. Big Pharma works on treatments, not vaccines, and government funding largely follows suit for some crazy reason.
âAsking questionsâ is a pointless exercise because there is no reason to trust the answers. What is McCarthy (and you?) really advocating? Is it time to do controlled experiments on a host of children, some being given vaccines all at once and some being given them one at a time then compare the outcomes? Who is going to pay for those tests to be conducted? How many more childrenâs lives would be saved by any other sensible intervention?
Jenny McCarthyâs âIâm just asking questionsâ is suggesting that we really ought to be answering those questions. As you point outed out, vaccines have gone up by three times in a few decades. As I pointed out, mortality in infants and children has gone down by half in the same time, despite the fact that thanks to the anti-vax movement and increasing number of children are dying from preventable diseases (admittedly a very small number).
If âasking questionsâ generates zero answers and causes the deaths of children, then it isnât really just asking questions.
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Donât try to paint me in to a corner, especially with Jenny McCarthy already standing there. Iâm not anti-vaccine. Iâve been very clear about that. Youâre trying to take one element of my argument, âask questionsâ and match it up with Jenny McCarthyâs argument of âIâm just asking questionsâ and then equating her entire position on this as mine, when nothing could be further from the truth. Do you not agree that consumers of medical treatment should be informed? Do you not think that asking questions and researching is critical to being informed? Do you think that you should simply rely on a single doctor to inform you accurately about the risks and benefits of specific treatments and alternatives?
I guess itâs my fault; I should have known better than to expect any kind of reasonable discussion on the Internet, especially about vaccinations.
Thatâs not true. Physicians are paid per shot and per visit. If a doctor really wanted to gouge you, heâd make you come in separately each time for each shot. Thatâs how heâd maximize billing. To the contrary, stacking up the shots saves the patient money (and, incidentally, time, which is additional money).
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