Jenny McCarthy Protests About the Presence of Viruses in Vaccines

Trevor Butterworth

The good thing about the blog Respectful Insolence is that its surgeon scientist author, Orac (a nom-de plume) is relentless in his pursuit of quackery in the mainstream media; the bad thing is that it’s like reading Medieval Times.

Actress Jenny McCarthy is the latest media-blessed avatar of a pre-scientific mindset by virtue of writing a book about how she dealt with her son’s autism. As Orac writes:

“While contemplating the burning stupidity that is Jenny McCarthy over the weekend as she mindlessly parroted some of the worst misinformation of the antivaccine movement and assured an interviewer that she would , all the while solemnly proclaiming that, were she to have another child she “”wouldn’t vaccinate at all, never, ever,” all the while objecting to her being portrayed as “antivaccine,” I couldn’t help but notice perhaps an uptick in the use of a favorite antivax question in reference to vaccines:

“Why are we injecting TOXINS into our babies?“

Jenny McCarthy repeated that question (or variants thereof) multiple times in her interview, while piously proclaiming herself “antitoxin” not “antivaccine” and demanding that the CDC “get all the toxins” out of the vaccines. Her protestations otherwise, McCarthy had latched on to a favorite antivaccination trope that is trotted out with some regularity to try to scare parents…”

In a nutshell, anti-vaccination activists comb through the ingredients in vaccines, seek out the studies which found the adverse effect level, and then cite these studies as proof that the ingredient is a toxin, and, well, babies shouldn’t be injected with toxins. As Orac notes, this kind of scaremongering is both “deceptive” and “as dumb as it gets.”

Why? Because the dosage makes the poison. (Orac helpfully goes through the relevant ingredients to show how deceptive and dumb the claims made about their toxicity are).

Have gene therapy and personalized medicine been overhyped by scientists and the media?

Trevor Butterworth

In a “Lunch with the FT” interview, Craig Venter, founder and former president of Celera Genomics – a commercial venture to map the human genome that rivaled the non-commercial Human Genome Project – criticized scientists and journalists for exaggerating the likely impact of genetic research. As Clive Cookson records,

 

“He dismisses the near-term prospects for gene therapy – replacing patients’ defective genes or giving them new genes to help fight a disease such as cancer – and for personalised medicine, in which treatments are precisely matched to genetic make-up. “Gene therapy has almost no chance of working in the near future,” he says. “Personalised medicine has been equally hyped.”

Venter also dismissed James Watson’s recent remarks about the apparent connection between intelligence and race, specifically that African and black intelligence was not on a par with Caucasian intelligence and social policies which assumed so were ripe for failure.“Skin colour as a surrogate for race is a social and not a scientific concept,” Venter tells the FT. “There is no basis in the human genetic code for the notion that colour will be predictive of intelligence.”