The World Health Organization says that the scientifically illiterate movement opposed to vaccination poses one of the 10 greatest public health threats of the year.
You may have Hollywood to thank for this.
Although the anti-vax movement technically began with a fraudulent medical study by Andrew Wakefield in 1998, the lie that vaccines have a connection to autism circulated only in fringe circles for more than a decade. Then, Jenny McCarthy, a professional model, actress, and conspiratorial crackpot, came along and catapulted it into the mainstream.
In 2007, she published a book about her son’s struggle with autism, claiming that chelation therapy helped treat autism by offsetting the cause — namely, vaccines preserved in mercury. She promulgated this story everywhere, from “The Oprah Winfrey Show” to “Larry King Live.” The anti-vax movement, which she has since said she doesn’t strictly believe in, found champions in Alicia Silverstone, Jenna Elfman, Charlie Sheen, Jim Carrey, Kirstie Alley, Rob Schneider, Danny Masterson, and Kristin Cavallari.
It turned out that McCarthy’s son probably wasn’t autistic in the first place. For one thing, austism is an incurable condition, but McCarthy claimed she cured it. Another is that her son’s symptoms, which began with violent seizures that eventually died down, probably indicate that he actually had Landau-Kleffner syndrome, a condition commonly confused with autism.
But McCarthy succeeded in opening a Pandora’s box, and now the anti-vax conspiracy theory is wreaking havoc on children across the country, killing the herd immunity that had previously protected society from measles and had even effectively eradicated polio from the globe. Now, the offending celebrities, who, might I remind you, have been entertained as no big deal by the media as recently as last year, have exported their murderous movement around the planet. Only seven in 10 French people now agree that “vaccines are safe,” as vaccination rates across the rest of the Europe begin to dip. (Louis Pasteur must be rotating in his grave like a medical centrifuge).
The overwhelming majority of people in America still reject the anti-vax hysteria, but nonmedical vaccine exemptions have spiked in 12 of the 18 states that allow them. Worldwide, measles cases jumped by 30 percent from 2016 to 2017. We have bad science and bad actresses to blame.
