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

so sick of jenny mccarthy milking her kids autism for 15 more minutes of fame.

― sanskrit, Tuesday, April 15, 2008 3:14 PM (8 months ago)

she blames diets
she blames the vaccines
but she never seems to blame all the dicks she took in the 90s

― sanskrit, Tuesday, April 15, 2008 3:14 PM (8 months ago)

^^^^ REALEST OF TALK

I wonder if people get involved with this movement just because deep down they're terrified of needles.

I had a moral crisis over thanksgiving because my sister-in-law was like "can you copy a couple DVDs for me?" and I said "sure" thinking it was gonna be a copy of baby mama or something and she dropped off some crazyass anti-vaccine DVDs. to maintain family peace I held my tongue and kept telling myself that anybody with any sense isn't gonna be swayed by this bullshit.

a couple i'm very good friends w/ have a young daughter and are kind of buying this bullshit and i think skimping on her vaccines or intending to in the future, and it really takes all the willpower i have not to get into a shouting match with them about this because man you don't wanna tell people how to raise their kids, especially when you're not a parent yourself

I really try to be respectful when discussing this with people, but I do find it frustrating because unfortunately when enough people stop vaccinating, the risk for those diseases they have chosen to not vaccinate goes up even to people who have been vaccinated. (Not to mention the people who, for whatever reason, cannot receive those particular vaccines - i.e. allergy to eggs or immunosuppression, etc.)

BTW ZS: I might be wrong about the book! Maybe crazy aunt lady said she saw McCarthy *appear* on Oprah. I dunno. I'd had a few drinks.

I just found out that another famous AIDS denialist (and Duesberg follower) Christine Maggiore died of pneumonia a couple of weeks ago. Her daughter whom she never had tested or treated for HIV, died at age 3.

I started following Christine Maggiore about 10 years ago when I first went into HIV/AIDS primary care and thought, "she's gonna kill a lot of people" and damned if she didn't. When I heard that she had a 2nd kid, declined the AZT, and breastfed, I knew one of 'em would end up dead.

The LA Times did a great piece on her after LJ's death and Respectful Insolence has had a lot of posts on her and the AIDS denial movement since her death.

Kate - thanks for those links. I can't believe that I hadn't heard about her death until this evening. It'll def be interesting to read RI posts about the topic.

a - i have never had chicken pox, which i hope means that i got it as an infant and no one noticed, otherwise o_O
b - these antivaccine people are stunningly dumb fucks

As far as the antivaccine fuckwads go, they are usually the people who think they are oh-so-progressive by not vaccinating their kids. How progressive is it to allow the rest of your community to assume the low risk vaccines pose so you can benefit from herd immunity? Assholes.

As much as I don't want to see little children get sick and die for their parent's misguided convictions, I think it's gonna take a big, scary epidemic of a previously-bygone disease to kill a bunch of upper-middle class kids to get this quackery to die out. And the worst thing is that it's not a matter of 'if', it's a matter of 'when'.

xpost, no prob ENBB!
John Justen, get vaccinated tomorrow.

Let me also take this chance, as the ilxor public health nurse, to remind everyone to have their boosters. I diagnosed a whooping cough epidemic at my college radio station last year, so git those shots!

Wait, people are taking anecdotal evidence from a pornstar over the opinion of the majority of doctors?

I know it's pretty cliche but seriously wtf USA?

i think you are thinking of jenna jameson dude

To be fair, Jenny McCarthy is apparently Jim Carrey's girlfriend, which gives her a bit more fame than she'd otherwise have.

Also, yes, McCarthy has a book out about autism and "curing" her son; I caught her on Oprah one afternoon. She makes me cringe.

John, I can't believe you haven't gotten that vaccine yet, ffs.

Yeah isnt Jenny Mccarthy from 90210 or something?

jenny mccarthy will always & forever just be that girl on that dating show on mtv.

jenny mccarthy isn't the problem and has next to nothing to do with the problem
she sure is an easy target for rational skeptic smartaguy bloggerers though

Dude you cant cure autism.

i was actually completely unaware that there was a chicken pox vaccine, no lie.

^^^no, but she's annoying as hell, plus she spreads disinformation all over the place.

The problem is that people don't understand basic science or logical fallacies. Good luck fixing that!

yah i was just coming here to post that too xpost

how long has the chicken pox vacc been around?

Years. A decade, at least.

xp You probably want to get the vaccine; you really don't want to get chicken pox as an adult. No one tells adults about it because they assume you've had chicken pox. Unfortunately, this is a bad assumption to make. I had a friend who contracted chicken pox when she was 2 months pregnant. NOT COOL.

the problem is that the public health system in this county is grossly politicized (by businesses, non-profits, and our elected reps) and has a ludicrously awful track record of being slow, ignorant, purposefully obtuse, and flat-out lying to the public about the risks of you-name-it, for most of the last century, in fact. And you have trained, experienced medical professionals who get fed the fuck up with the system and decide that the way to "fix things" is to write a book or go on television instead of continually publishing peer reviewed research, and it ends up sort of working for them because patients don't read peer reviewed literature, patients read bestsellers and watch teevee.

The United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland to thread

well fuck wait a minute will this lay me up for a few days or just be a little irritating, because i am so not down with getting adult chicken pox. xposts

I mean fuck it watch And The Band Played On, you might take your chances with the ex-playmate too

this is not to say that i cant be bothered with doing it, im just trying to work out the timing.

ok this will probably sound really dumb but:
i had chicken pox when i was a kid, but it was a super, super mild dose - got it from my little brother and sister who had it way worse than me. as long as i've had it once, i can't get it again, right? even tho it was about the most mild case possible? apologies if this is an ignorant question.

xpost JJ, a friend of mine got chicken pox last year (he's 25) and he got it all over his PENIS!

xp - getting chicken pox could be very serious/unpleasant. You're an adult. Get the vaccine; that should only be mildly irritating.

TOMBOT - yes.

and down his throat

http://www.badscience.net/category/mmr/

just1n3, I like how you go for the ARGH factor here.

just1n3: If you had a mild case of chickenpox, you might not have built up sufficient immunity. Go to your doc or NP or PA and ask to have a varicella titer drawn to to if you're immune. Chance are, you're probably ok.

I had a bf who got adult pox and he was pretty rashed up, *covered* in sores, but apart from a fever not too sick (as you might get with measles, which as an adult can give you encephalitis or something horrible). I didnt catch it off him, so I guess having had it as a kid is a good immunity!

to see if you're immune

GAH DUDES i am not trying not to get this vaccine, i have just learned about it in the last five minutes and am confused and have sort of a complicated solo proprietor issue going on at the moment.

also just1n3 obv your friend should have kept his penis out of his throat duh

he is a big fan of max hardcore what can i say

justeeeeeen you should go to grad school while working full time and be in a really stressful long distance relationship (plus drink lots) and if you get shingles you're A-OK

John Justen: the vaccine will most likely suck a lot less then the disease. And you won't unwittingly expose others should you get the pox naturally. It's not a big whoop.

Usually if you've had it, you're good, but basically what kate78 said. Although it might be cheaper just to get the vaccination rather than have a titer drawn and then get the vaccine; I had some titers drawn last year for nursing school and someone in the clinic claimed they were expensive. (Can't remember, but I think insurance must have covered it.)

I'm going to be mildly controversial and say that my attitude on this is sorta "A pox on both your houses", as it were.

In other words: I think the people who aren't vaccinating their kids are making a mistake, and there's a lot of bullshit and misinformation being peddled on that side of the aisle. If I had kids, I'd get them vaccinated. People who are doing otherwise are contributing to a genuine public health risk, at best.

OTOH, the triumphalist rhetoric that I'm hearing from the other side makes me very leery. I've seen firsthand how a drug that's been heralded as one of the medical breakthroughs of the recent past (statins) can do pretty fucked-up things to people who, through some fluke of genetics or biochemistry or whatever, get hit with supposedly rare side effects (in particular, bizarre memory problems) whose appearance and disappearance coincide respectively with administration or discontinuation of the drug.

But I know a fair number of doctors who won't listen to any dissenting opinion on the subject, just as I've encountered dentists who angrily dismiss any concerns about amalgam fillings (which is a whole 'nother issue). I don't doubt that statins save lives, but I also have no doubt that they do fucked-up shit to certain people, and that needs to be acknowledged, even if clinical trials have yet to demonstrate that it's happening to the extent that I suspect it is. (Not to mention that there's a lot of $$$ in these drugs, and in establishing a new, ridiculously-low baseline for serum cholesterol -- but again, different issue.)

Really, it's that lack of humility that bothers me -- that unwillingness to acknowledge that, for all the things that medicine has accomplished and will continue to accomplish, there are huge, gaping holes in our knowledge. I think we (professionals and laypeople) vastly overestimate our ability to foresee unintended consequences, and vastly underestimate the degree to which individual variation influences outcomes. Despite all our progress, when it comes to our understanding of the whole, we're still like people wandering through a labyrinth by candlelight, and if we forget that -- even for a moment -- then our thinking becomes incredibly reductive, the worst sort of Enlightment arrogance.

(The best country doctors had a sense of this -- the irreducibility of medicine -- and a really good old-school physician is often possessed of insights gained through a combination of experience and intuition...insights that might be difficult or impossible to prove through double-blind studies, because they often involve instinctive apprehensions of a patient's particular situation. Practical medicine doesn't have the luxury of repeatedly reproducing essentially identical starting conditions, as is the case in the physical sciences.)

For what it's worth, I think there is actually something going on with autism and vaccination. It's been clouded by hysteria and bandwagon-jumping, but I've been hearing "my kid got fucked up right after s/he got vaccinated" stories for too long to think that there's nothing to it. But I think the number of cases is extremely small, and that the reason may remain elusive for many, many years.

More importantly, I think that the public health value of compulsory vaccination is more important than the damage done by vaccines to individuals. I can't imagine any prominent doctor having the balls to say "Sucks that your kid's messed up, but even if vaccines did it, it's still worth it to the rest of us", and yet that strikes me as the real bottom line. Better 50 kids with autism than 5000 dead kids with measles.

(tl;dr)

i have to have a big medical check-up thing for immigration purposes pretty soon, and they check all the vaccines if i don't have medical recs for them, so i guess i'll find out then.

^^^^^ to Nylund

tombot: both my mother and sis have had shingles fairly recently - does not sound like a good time at all

oh no it's a great time! the best is when the breeze makes your shirt touch your skin and it feels like you've been stabbed.

Pretty interesting segment about this on "This American Life" a few weeks ago:

http://thisamericanlife.org/Radio_Episode.aspx?sched=1275

Measles cases are higher in the U.S. than they've been in a decade, mostly because more and more nervous parents are refusing to vaccinate their kids. Contributing Editor Susan Burton tells the story of what happened recently in San Diego, when an unvaccinated 7-year-old boy returned home from a trip to Switzerland, bringing with him the measles. By the end of the ordeal, 11 other children caught the disease, and more than 60 kids had to be quarantined. (21 minutes)

Fuckin' Switzerland.