Jenny McCarthy Channels Wakefield

I wrote about the BMJ expose of Wakefield in a previous blog and in an oped I wrote for the that you can find here:

Since then Jenny McCarthy has fired back — I guess such words are still allowed by Congress — through her blog on the Huffington Post, which has been a reliable platform for vaccine conspiracy types since it’s founding.

Here is what she wrote back in March of 2010:

The idea that vaccines are a primary cause of autism is not as crackpot as some might wish. Autism’s 60-fold rise in 30 years matches a tripling of the US vaccine schedule.

With so many kids with autism, the environment has to be to blame, and vaccines are an obvious culprit. Almost all kids get vaccines — injected toxins — very early in life, and our own government clearly acknowledges vaccines cause brain damage in certain vulnerable kids.

Take those simple facts, along with tens of thousands of parental reports of regression after vaccination, not to mention a growing list of court cases where our government paid claims to children with autism acknowledging vaccines as the trigger, and the case we Moms are making makes sense.

http://tinyurl.com/yzbkd4w

Yesterday she lamely tried to defend the flimsy pseudo science behind her anti-vaccine cause as NOT anti-vaccine. She claimed that Wakefield never claimed vaccines caused autism and then contradicts herself by claiming once again that lots of shots cause lots of autism.

Rebutting these silly claims takes up time and diverts resources from more important matters. Which is the point. Going forward the response to tabloid medicine has to be proactive and anticipatory. As I noted in my American Spectator article: Wakefield wannabes now overrun scientific discourse, dominate medical journals , flood the blogs, intimidate public health officials. They shape public perception of medical innovation­’s risks and benefits and damage the public health.

The best defense is a good offense.