Anti-vaccine campaigner Jenny McCarthy says "I'm not anti-vaccine"

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a.k.a. “tryin’ to save my ass from extremely bad PR”

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She’s not anti-vaccine… she’s just anti-doctors injecting vaccines into people.

You know, like how guns don’t kill people…

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Anti-doctor. Much better!

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Well, of course!  Just look at how many people in the U.S. alone die shortly after seeing a doctor!

(Whaddya mean, my cause and effect are reversed? Is that a new disease the doctors are trying to convince us is real?)

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Hey, I’m not excusing anything she’s done, but in the interest of the common good maybe we should try to make it easy for people who have bad and dangerous ideas to change their mind. I care a lot more about saving future kids’ lives than about punishing her.

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Well, you can be sure not one kid is diagnosed as autistic until after they see a doctor.

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Anti-doctor unless they’ve had their license revoked and can only practice [Frontier] medicine in Texas.

Fuck off, McCarthy. She’s mad that her harmful organization has kept her talk show career from taking off, nothing more. She hasn’t changed her opinion, she’s just listening to her handlers and lying. She is not pro-vaccine either. She’s moved onto being a Concern Troll and continues “just asking questions”, still persuading people not to vaccinate her children.

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Reading the articles by Phil Plait, I have to think that he’s gone a little too far - he’s vociferously anti-Jenny, and it comes out as a bias.

Going through some of the science and research on this subject from both sides, I think there is legitimate reason to question big pharma on the safety of vaccines, especially when they have been shielded from lawsuits which makes them far less likely to be concerned about the products they’re pushing.

For those who don’t have children, you probably don’t know but the current schedule recommends vaccines for more than three times the number of diseases as most people of child-bearing age had when they were kids. 34 doses total, 24 of which are in the first year. And most are given through in an aggressive schedule with multiple injections per visit. The infant body does react to these injections, sometimes severely. Autism, no. But injury and death, yes. And if that’s the case (which is verified) then why subject children to so many shots in such a short period of time? Wouldn’t scientific methodology suggest that each dose be given individually so that if the child has a reaction, it can be linked to the source, and so that a child doesn’t have compound reactions to multiple vaccines?

Don’t get me wrong - I think vaccines are very important and have done a lot of good. And I’m no fan of Jenny McCarthy. But people who point out dangers and suggest alternative schedules do have legitimate concerns.

That’s baloney, if she had made the statement once, then backed down a couple days later when the idiocy of the things she said were made clear, that’d be forgivable. But you don’t get to broadcast bullshit all over the world for ~8 years putting who knows how many lives at risk and then just pull a “whoopsie you all misinterpreted what I was saying!” apology at the end of it and expect everything to be okay.

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I would ask why Jenny McCarthy is being given space, even in an op-ed, to air her opinions in The Chicago Sun-Times, but a more important question is, why is she being allowed to contradict the facts, even in an op-ed?

It’s great if she’s changed her mind, but let her say “I’ve changed my mind”, not “People have the misconception that we want to eliminate vaccines.”

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Not really.

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But that’s the thing, she hasn’t changed her mind. She’s saying she has never been anti-vaccine and that we are the ones who misunderstood her.

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You know what’s sad is I do find her entertaining. Her two books she wrote about early parenthood were hilarious.

I’ve seen some of her published work, as well… but, uh… just for the articles, I swear!

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This is the anti-vaxer thread. Texting sociopath thread is down the hall.

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Let me summarize Jenny McCarthy’s editorial:
Out, damned spot! Out, I say!—One, two. Why, then, ’tis time to do ’t. Hell is
murky!

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People should have bias against misinformation, especially about something that people’s lives depend on. Read through the articles again, the examples they give, and where he’s actually objecting.

He hasn’t condemned talking about how to schedule vaccinations to minimize harm – something evidence suggests has been done reasonably well, by the way – but ignoring facts about that in favor of meaningless caricatures like contains toxins. He’s vociferously against Jenny not because she wants to consider data about possible harm, but because she’s repeatedly described vaccines as linked to autism, and they just plain aren’t.

And frankly, he could say much more about the horrible comment that parents should rather see their children exposed to measles than risk of autism, as if they would be better off dead than one of those people. At any rate: if you can recall him saying anything on this topic that wasn’t a reasonable reaction to putting others at risk by spreading falsehoods, you will have to point me to it.

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So, she has accepted her future is on FOX? Great.

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Yeaaaah no. It does not come out as a bias. Your own bias did that. Go check if the pot is black, then the kettle. Think on it before you blast a response back.

How could we get you wrong? You seem about as clear as, well, Jenny McCarthy on the subject.

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