Friday 7 August 2009

Somebody has been letting celebrities comment on things they don't know about. Again.

Jim Carrey is a motherfucker. I've decided I hate him now based on this article in the Huffington Post.

Jim Carrey is the Riddler at best. He is not a doctor- he isn't a scientist at all. He's just some Canadian bloke who happens to be good at gurning. And somebody let him loose on vaccines. Who the fuck did that? They deserve a good kicking. According to Wikipedia, Jim Carrey took three years to finish 10th grade at his high school. That's not really the type of person who will make intelligent judgements about science is it?

So yeah, basically good old Jim went off on one about how vaccines are eeeevil and the big bad drug companies are brainwashing us all into thinking it's okay to pump kiddies full of chemicals. I suppose it's fair enough to say that we need the truth and Big Pharma may not always want to give us the truth, but that's not quite where this article ends up.

The very first vaccine that is accused of being incredibly evil and damaging to children is... (drum roll please)... MMR. Yep, the same vaccine that has already been shown to have NO LINK with autism. The same vaccine, in fact, that has uptake of less than 50% in some areas of London despite the fact that the famous paper connecting MMR with autism has now been discredited and partially withdrawn.

What makes me angry about this is not the fact that people still believe that MMR is going to give their kids autism. Well okay, that does make me angry, but something else bothers me more. Our culture has got to the point where the majority of people listen to celebrities and random strangers over doctors and other people who are trained in a particular field. There are people who think that prayer, homeopathy, crystal healing and all that supernatural bollocks will help them get better and that doctors are not to be trusted because they 'play God'. God isn't doing anything (existing would be helpful) so somebody's got to do it, you fucking morons. Would you listen to a model who was telling you what was wrong with your car? No. You should be even more sceptical of people who tell you what's wrong with your body if they aren't medical doctors. By all means ask for a second opinion when you're at the doctor, but bloody well go in the first place!

Allowing yourselves to be 'educated' about medicine by people who have little to no scientific knowledge is stupid.

It kills children.

And that's not me being overdramatic- kids have died from measles since this whole MMR thing blew up in 2001 and the rate has increased since then. Not only that, but kids in America are dying because their parents thought prayer was better than medical care. Ignorance kills people.

The worst thing about this is that this isn't the first time I've written about MMR, celebrities commenting on things they know nothing about and mindless twats believing things even though there is a mountain of evidence to the contrary. We can't afford to just laugh it off when a generation's physical, sexual or mental health is at risk. People are fucking up their kids' lives.

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I got the article mentioned (raged about) above via Pharyngula, a blog belonging to PZ Myers. You might have heard of it. I suggest you read it, especially if you dislike all religion except Cthulhu cults.

2 comments:

  1. Damn he is slow, not a comment on the 10th grade thing but on MMR hysterics. Seriously, the paper showing correlation (remember kids that's not causation) was overinterpreted by an amateur, scaremongered by the media, shot down as false (which papers blamed on the research not themselves), and settled down to background level by now.

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  2. I'm not defending his intelligence, because I don't think he has much of it. (though I find him rather amusing). But one of his wife's kids was autistic. WAS being the key word. They put the child through treatment, and he no longer has signs of autism.The doctors can't seem to believe autism just goes away, so they're now claiming they misdiagnosed him. Because it doesn't just go away, in normal circumstances. So they think the toxins in the shot is what triggered the temporary autism.

    As a mother myself, I have to look at this from her point of view. Think about it:

    Your child is fine.
    Recieves an MMR shot, and suddenly begins developing signs of autism, while the world is contributing autism to vaccines.
    The doctors diagnose your child with autism.
    You put him through extensive treatment that would be believed to clean his system.
    The autism goes away. He stops showing any signs of it.
    The doctors now claim, he must have been misdiagnosed, because a person can't recover from autism.

    If it was my kids, I'd probably think the same way they do. I'm weary of vaccines anyways, because I hate putting unknown chemicals in mine, or my kids' bodies. In this case, they aren't really all unknown chemicals. They're things like mercury and ether. I don't know about you, but the idea that those things are being put into my kids every few months for the first two years of their lives scares the hell out of me.


    Now I don't think they should be scaring parents away from vaccines. That's just irresponsible. But I do agree with their ideas on making vaccines more "green". I agree with taking the toxins out of them.

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