jenny mccarthy wants your kid to get measles: autism, vaccines, and stupid idiots

Oh god, I almost got into a facebook wall clusterfuck about confirmation bias with a friend who was convinced that her store-purchased bread was bad because wildlife wouldn't eat it. She started up with the "what about this mcdonald's hamburger that looked the same after a year" thing.

Pretty sure she also had vaccination reservations.

store-purchased bread IS bad though.

It's bananas that a study based on only 12 non-random subjects got so much traction in the first place. This seriously makes me doubt the Lancet's bona fides.

I know people will believe any old stupid thing for any old stupid reason, but I don't get why they're so attached to the notion that vaccines are evil. That scared of needles?

Because the idea of injecting someone with germs to keep them from getting sick defies common sense. Which is one reason why I don't believe in common sense.

Where does Jenny McCarthy stand on shampoos with tea tree oil, which may or may not make men sprout breasts, according to one dubious study? Huh? HUH?!

no wonder why i have man tits.

nah, that's just the soy, man.

Both of which may be just a way to scare people into thinking that using nice shampoos and eating soy stuff will turn you into a girlyman.

soy does fuck with the hormones of males, though it requires very large amounts to do so (i.e. an entirely soy-based diet).

Where does Jenny McCarthy stand on shampoos with tea tree oil, which may or may not make men sprout breasts, according to one dubious study? Huh? HUH?!

http://john.kism.com/files/2009/08/vera-de-milo.jpg

They did end up breaking up, so I'm guessing she doesn't like them.

zing

Antivaccinationists tend toward complete mistrust of government and manufacturers, conspiratorial thinking, denialism, low cognitive complexity in thinking patterns, reasoning flaws, and a habit of substituting emotional anecdotes for data

http://www.nejm.org/doi/full/10.1056/NEJMp1010594

Can anyone link through to the Andrew Wakefield magazine piece in the Times?

http://www.nytimes.com/2011/04/24/magazine/mag-24Autism-t.html

Michelle Guppy, the coordinator of the Houston Autism Disability Network

Why oh why does life so often pitch us hanging curveballs like this?

Can someone link the MoJo article that Chris Mooney did?

Y'all should read it.

God, Wakefield is an all-time jackass. I'm incredibly perturbed to find out that he's become an Austin resident. There's a not insignificant number of parents around here who have bought in to his nonsense. It drives me up the wall!

“To our community, Andrew Wakefield is Nelson Mandela and Jesus Christ rolled up into one,” says J. B. Handley, co-founder of Generation Rescue, a group that disputes vaccine safety. “He’s a symbol of how all of us feel.”

scary

What has become increasingly clear to Insel is that something is to blame. Some environmental factor is, or many environmental factors are, interacting with certain gene types, yielding who knows how many different pathways to the same disease. And although many parents think they know with instinctual certainty what that factor was in their own child, researchers “haven’t found anything that looks like a smoking gun,” Insel says. To him, the M.M.R. vaccine, so aggressively studied since the media splash following Wakefield’s 1998 paper, is one of the few factors that can be been ruled out. But could it be aspartame? UV rays? Elmo? No one knows.

well that last part is right, isn't it

xps

http://awesomeappliques.com/zc-commerce/images/elmo.jpg

would definitely be down for an anti-elmo movement

ah, here we are, check this:

The Science of Why We Don't Believe Science

http://motherjones.com/politics/2011/03/denial-science-chris-mooney

How our brains fool us on climate, creationism, and the vaccine-autism link.

— By Chris Mooney

They can make a special toy for autistic kids: "Ignore Me Elmo."

"A MAN WITH A CONVICTION is a hard man to change. Tell him you disagree and he turns away. Show him facts or figures and he questions your sources. Appeal to logic and he fails to see your point." - Leon Festinger

my brother and his wife haven't vaccinated their kids, and it's so tough. i just don't even talk to them about it...

You...also don't take your kids to play there?

no, we do! i don't know, it's weird, they have a whole circle of people around them who don't vaccinate.

I guess if your kids are vacc'ed then technically they're prob safe but a whole circle of little germy breeding grounds who aren't vacc'ed seems like a petri dish for the re-introduction of scarlet fever or something.

yeah, that's what we figure. they go to a waldorf school -- i dunno if being anti-vaccine goes along with waldorf necessarily, but it seems to attract anti-vacciners. i dunno, my brother and his wife are very sensible people in a lot of regards ... just not this one!

dunno if being anti-vaccine goes along with waldorf necessarily

Yeah, don't Waldorf schools teach all kinds of mystical "science"?

I don't get how these schools have become prestigious, the sound really cultish to me.

they sound...

“To our community, Andrew Wakefield is Nelson Mandela and Jesus Christ rolled up into one,” says J. B. Handley, co-founder of Generation Rescue, a group that disputes vaccine safety

TS: Generation Rescue vs. Operation Rescue

Inoculations that make you irrationally angry

waldorf schools are for rich white people who want to pretend they live on the prairie. guess what, on the prairie, people died of the plague.

all of that sort of thing gets on my nerves to an incredible degree. I live in Berkeley where you can imagine there is a fair amount of this. in fact, there was an article the other day here: about the rates of vaccinations for kindergartners in the city (my son is starting kindergarten in september). they broke it down by school and the 'favored' private kindergarten (don't get me started on people who actually live in Berkeley who pay for private kindergarten to the tune of $17k a year when we have an incredible public school system) of many of his preschool mates has one of the lowest vaccination rates for incoming students.

sometimes I forget how real this shit, and talk about how stupid fuckin people who believe this are with friends who have just had kids or something, and, its only happened once so far, but a friend got really quiet at first then defended all the anti vac bullshit

not quite related but one time late at night a dude I knew started talking about how major governments have retrieved underwater alien technology for their own uses and I was like wtf who the fuck are you all of a sudden

yeah i have definitely had that moment where an otherwise sane-seeming acquaintance started going off on an anti-vaccine rant and it was like he'd grown another head.

Ugggghhh found self at bar with someone I've known socially for years but never gotten to be friends with, and I was like, aha, finally! time to actually get to know this v talented person, and he turned out to be a committed (lol) Libertarian. So...yeah.

One of the quotes I'm reminded of from that MoJo piece is that if you want to find the closest hotspot of science- and medical-denialism, head to the aisles of your local Whole Foods.

There's a slippery slope between "this food is healthy" and "this food has magical health powers" apparently.

* sips kombucha *

I actually complained to Whole Foods for selling homeopathic remedies - pretty unethical imo - and they sent me a stock response. Then I went to Rainbow Groceries in SF and realised how sane WF is (at least they don't sell homeopathic suppositories...)

*how sane in comparison, that is

i dunno if that slope is exactly slippery.

xps

seems like a well marked cliff to me honestly!

This also eventually leads into 'have your cake, eat it too' approaches. "It's all cacao and no added sugar in this chocolate bar so I can have four a day..."

There is a healthy/organic grocery in my neighborhood that I don't want to ever go back to because they have EAR CANDLES.

The lady at the cash register seemed pretty nice but I ended up having a short conversation with her because she mentioned her dating experiences (I have no memory of how this was a casual topic) and she seemed to be into the worst crazed scammers. Seemed kind of... ditzy? I just have this vision of the all-natural slightly dippy people being taken advantage of by assholes constantly.