…Dr. John Kiely, a.k.a. EpiWonk, will school you otherwise. (I had to attend a function for work last night; so no new insolence for you right now. Maybe later. Hard as it is to believe, I do sometimes have to let my job interfere with my blogging. Fortunately, I’ve been meaning to plug Dr. Kiely’s post since it came out.)
After telling the harrowing story of his brush with serious complications from the measles as a child, he sums up the current day know-nothing, “green our vaccines” antivaccination movement succinctly and accurately:
Meanwhile, the modern anti-vaccination movement, which has become a hobby of upper-middle-class activists and Hollywood celebrities with no time to learn the basic tenets of epidemiologic methods (or even of the scientific process), has used pseudoscience and misinformation to gain far too much influence on our public discourse on child health.
Exactly. There’s also the bankrolling of propaganda organs like Age of Autism by wealthy businessmen and, now, by the dollars that Jenny McCarthy’s D-list celebrity and her boyfriend Jim Carrey’s A-list celebrity can bring in through Hollywood and celebrity fundraisers that disguise Generation Rescue, for example, as an “autism” charity (“We’re raising money for an autism charity! Isn’t that wonderful?”), instead of what it really is: An antivaccination organization. Somehow, “We’re raising money for an antivaccinationist fringe group!” doesn’t sound as good, but that’s what’s happening now that Jenny McCarthy has become the celebrity face of the antivaccination movement.
Don’t be shy about heading over to EpiWonk to show Dr. Kiely some love.
