Say It Ain't So, OWhy is Oprah Winfrey promoting vaccine skeptic Jenny McCarthy?
Posted Wednesday, May 6, 2009, at 11:47 AM ET
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StumbleUponMcCarthy's popularity has created a lot of anger and disbelief in that tiny sliver of society that believes in evidence-based medicine. One person who's feeling particularly frustrated is David T. Tayloe, president of the 60,000-member American Academy of Pediatricians. (Remember them? A pediatrician is a person with a medical degree who takes care of children. Some of them are said to trust science more than celebrities when it comes to health care.)
"I think show business crosses the line when they give contracts to people like Jenny McCarthy," Tayloe says. "If you give her a bully pulpit, McCarthy is going to make people hesitate to vaccinate their children. She has no medical or scientific credentials. It disturbs us that she's given all these opportunities to make her pitch about vaccines on Oprah or Larry King or U.S. News or whatever. We have to scramble to get equal time—and who wants to see a gray-haired pediatrician talking about a serious topic like childhood vaccines when she's out there blasting the academy and blasting the federal government?"
Still, others involved in the effort to refute the vaccine/autism myth aren't as worried about McCarthy. "Jenny McCarthy doesn't bother me that much because I don't think most people take her as a serious commenter on medicine," said Dr. Paul Offit, a vaccine inventor and author of Autism's False Prophets. "I'd be more concerned if it was someone like Meryl Streep, someone seen as person of gravity and good sense."
What's a little sad about this episode is the fact that once upon a time, big stars like Humphrey Bogart, Louis Armstrong, and Elvis Presley stood up for vaccination campaigns to protect the lives of children. (Actress Amanda Peet recently stepped up to counter McCarthy's message, saying that people should get their advice on autism and vaccines from doctors, not actresses. But Peet seems to lack McCarthy's entrepreneurial verve and hasn't drawn the same level of attention.)
In those days, parents and children clamored for vaccination. Especially children in places like the South Side of Chicago or rural Mississippi (where Oprah was born in 1954), who suffered higher rates of polio in the late 1950s because their parents couldn't afford the new vaccine.
Over the past year, new outbreaks of measles, whooping cough, and other vaccine-preventable diseases have occurred in communities with parents who choose not to vaccinate their kids.
Oprah, think of the children.
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It took a half century and hundreds of lawsuits to hold cigarette manufacturers culpable for the harm their products caused.
Vaccines may eventually be found "innocent" of causing or triggering autism, but that verdict is not established because three court cases were lost or because a herd of doctors deem them innocent.
This is the only area of medicine where we so vehemently deny side effects. Vaccines as they are now manufactured and administered to children can cause autism. This might not occur often but denying that it ever occurs flies in the face of the observations of experienced pediatricians and affected families.
--Jay Gordon, MD, FAAP
Editor's Note: Jay Gordon is the doctor of Jenny McCarthy's son Evan and wrote the foreword to her book Mother Warriors: A Nation of Parents Healing Autism Against All Odds.
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Those lawsuits would have been dead in the water if they didn't have verifiable, reproducible empirical evidence that cigarettes do harm. So far, the anti-vaccine lobby has failed to produce reproducible evidence of any link between vaccination and autism. On the other hand, there has been repeated and consistent evidence published that vaccinations are not related to autism. Any doctor who believes otherwise is a victim of his own pride and ignorance.
-- MarginofError
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