Attacking Dissent in Defense of Vaccination

The media's odd fixation with Jenny McCarthy continues. Last night I came across this laughable attack on Ms. McCarthy by New York Times writer and vaccine fanboy Frank Bruni.

He begins his piece with an unsupportable assertion couched as a question:

“What do you call someone who sows misinformation, stokes fear, abets behavior that endangers people’s health”

I don’t know, Frankie. What do YOU call it. It really doesn't matter since the actions you describe are not descriptive of those of Ms. McCarty. 

The type of speech Ms. McCarthy engaged in endangered no one. If her personal experience dissuaded some from vaccinating, those people simply failed to protect themselves from generally mild illnesses or illnesses for which their children were not at risk.

They did not endanger anyone.

Mr. Bruni then raises the entirely irrelevant point that:

“Because she posed nude for Playboy”

Which is curious since he fails to point out the heroin addiction of Mr. Seth Mnookin - a prominent vaccine evangelist whose talking points are featured prominently in the article

Mr. Bruni proceeds by sharing Ms. McCarthy’s claim that, “I am surely not going to tell anyone to vaccinate,” which seems to be an unusual claim from someone who is “antivaccine”

But “antivaccine” is just a meaningless propaganda term parroted by vaccine cheerleaders such as Mr. Bruni in order to stigmatize those who choose to spare their children a lifetime of vaccines.

Mr. Bruni continues his nonsense stating:

“And on The Huffington Post a year after that, she responded to experts who insisted that vaccines didn’t cause autism and were crucial to public health with this declaration..”

As to the claim regarding vaccines and autism, it is important to realize only one vaccine, the MMR, and one vaccine ingredient, thimerosal, has ever been seriously investigated. So how experts would know “vaccines didn’t cause autism” is a mystery. Perhaps they are clairvoyants.

As to vaccines being “crucial to public health” I’m sure being able to force vaccines on America’s children is crucial to the vested interests comprising the public health establishment, but it’s certainly not crucial to the health of individual children - the vast majority of whom dealt with mild childhood illnesses quite well before the deluge of vaccines that began in the mid-forties.

Mr. Bruni goes on asking:

“When did it become O.K. to present gut feelings like hers as something in legitimate competition with real science?”

It’s always been O.K. She has a right to free speech as guaranteed by the constitution – you know that founding document so hated by main stream media publications such as The Times

He concludes with this:

“Are the eyeballs drawn by someone like McCarthy more compelling than public health and truth?”

I don’t know the source of the “truth” about which you speak. Perhaps it’s the science statists revere so deeply. But science, especially science conducted by the very interests dedicated to foisting vaccine after vaccine upon an unsuspecting public, is not the “truth.” Science is a way of investigating the natural world. It’s not “the truth”