Jenny McCarthy Body Count

[onager]

Jenny McCarthy is a celebrity from the United States. She is most well known for posing nude as a Playboy Playmate, for picking her nose on the MTV show Singled Out, and for being the girlfriend of actor/comedian Jim Carrey...

http://www.jennymccarthybodycount.com/Jenny_McCarthy_Body_Count/Home.html

[Orrex]

1. If only these kids had gotten more vitamin D

[trotsky]

2. Bwah ha ha

But you bring up a good question: how to the anti-vaccine woos incorporate the Vitamin D cure-all theory? If you get vaccinated AND not enough D, do you get Super-Autism?

[Orrex]

9. Vitamin D would have prevented the Tunguska Event

Why didn't the fools listen? Why?!?

[realisticphish]

10. Now all those dead trees

all for a lack of D :cry:

[lizerdbits]

11. You mean when that UFO crashed?

I saw that on X-Files. I think that's when the alien virus was released so the Russians found a vaccine before the US. :rofl:

[TZ]

3. That was posted in GD awhile back.

Of course the OP got blasted for being horribly mean and a shill to boot! Jenny is fighting the system. She's a real hero! :eyes:

[LeftishBrit]

4. To be fair...

I wouldn't single out Jenny McCarthy, above many other people. She doesn't help; but the anti-vaccine woo is a feature of other countries besides the USA, and has gone on before 2007. Apart from religious fundies - of, it seems, all the major faiths - I would place a lot of blame on our own dear Andrew Wakefield, RFK Jr, and, most of all, the media who make money by promoting this stuff. Jenny McCarthy wouldn't get that far if the media didn't promote her. In the UK, the worst is probably the Daily (Hate)-Mail - on this issue, as on many others.

[TZ]

5. The problem is Oprah featured her views.

And in this country Oprah has a LOT of influence. I blame Oprah for much of the woo woo attitude we find here from that anti-vax nonsense to her pushing of The Secret.

[moggie]

6. Curious thing about that

Ben Goldacre points out, in his book Bad Science (highly recommended), that anti-vax scares are surprisingly regional:

Before we begin, it's worth taking a moment to look at vaccine scares around the world, because I'm always struck by how circumscribed these panics are, and how poorly they propagate themselves in different soils. The MMR and autism scare, for example, is practically non-existent outside Britain, even in Europe and America. But throughout the 1990s France was in the grip of a scare that hepatitis B vaccine caused multiple sclerosis (it wouldn't surprise me if I was the first person to tell you that).

In the US, the major vaccine fear has been around the use of a preservative called thiomersal, although somehow this hasn't caught on here, even though the same preservative was used in Britain. And in the 1970s - since the past is another country too - there was a widespread concern in the UK, driven again by a single doctor, that whooping-cough vaccine was causing neurological damage.

He describes several other localised panics, and concludes:

The diversity and isolation of these anti-vaccination panics helps to illustrate the way in which they reflect local political and social concerns more than a genuine appraisal of the risk data: because if the vaccine for hepatitis B, or MMR, or polio, is dangerous in one country, it should be equally dangerous everywhere on the planet; and if those concerns were genuinely grounded in the evidence, especially in an age of the rapid propagation of information, you would expect the concerns to be expressed by journalists everywhere. They're not.

the anti-vaccine woo is a feature of other countries besides the USA, and has gone on before 2007

Yup. Goldacre quotes a paragraph from Scientific American in 1888, about an anti-vax panic in Switzerland in that decade which led to a resurgence of smallpox.

[TZ]

7. Interesting.

I'm aware of the anti-Polio nonsense in Africa that sprang up under the last administration here. Thats been a huge cause of Polio not becoming extinct...

[onager]

8. I agree, plenty of blame to go around

But at least in celeb-crazed America, the team of McCarthy and St. Oprah add up to a Woo Juggernaut. With their large and credulous audiences, they can do a lot of harm.

For your consideration, I present...erm...this kind of crap:

Bravo, Oprah. You allowed Jenny to tell it like it is. You have helped millions of Moms across America understand what happened to their children, who changed physically, mentally and emotionally after getting vaccinated, and now suffer with autism and other kinds of vaccine-induced brain and immune system dysfunction such as learning disabilities, ADHD, seizure disorders, asthma, and diabetes.

http://adventuresinautism.blogspot.com/2007/09/jenny-mccarthy-on-oprah-vaccine-injury.html

The comments on that thread are really hair-raising. Like this one, though it's only a sCAM artist trying to push his product:

I call the CDC the "Creative Disease Corporation."

The astonishing truth about vaccines is:

1) vaccines have never been shown by science to prevent any disease;

2) vaccines HAVE been shown by science to be the most dangerous of all medical interventions; and

3) the two-century-long coverup of vaccine dangers is the most documented coverup in the history of medicine...