TNR's Ioffe: "Thanks Jenny McCarthy" (or "Welcome back Whooping Cough!")

[Danzig]

Originally Posted by Kasept

New Republic's Ioffe with a funny (but not so funny) take on idiotic McCarthy and her myopic anti-vaccine fellow travelers...

http://www.newrepublic.com/article/1...gn=mostpopular

There’s a reason that we associate the whooping cough with the Dickensian: It is. The illness has, since the introduction of a pertussis vaccine in 1940, been conquered in the developed world. For two or three generations, we’ve come to think of it as an ailment suffered in sub-Saharan Africa or in Brontë novels. And for two or three generations, it was.

Until, that is, the anti-vaccination movement really got going in the last few years. Led by discredited doctors and, incredibly, a former Playmate, the movement has frightened new parents with claptrap about autism, Alzheimer’s, aluminum, and formaldehyde. The movement that was once a fringe freak show has become a menace, with foot soldiers whose main weapon is their self-righteousness. For them, vaccinating their children is merely a consumer choice, like joining an organic food co-op or sending their kids to a Montessori school or drinking coconut water.

amazing that people will listen to a woman like her, with no medical training...and not doctors and scientists with knowledge who KNOW about this stuff.
unreal.
she must have been educated in texas, who still has people teaching creationism in science class.

when steve jobs was diagnosed, he did other treatments instead of listening to his doctors. later, he admitted he screwed up by doing so. too late then.