If They Choose Not to Vaccinate, It Makes it Worse

Jenny McCarthy is a well-known celebrity who once posed for Playboy and is married to mega-rich actor Jim Carrey. While most of the public knows her for her looks, she has a cause that some believe is very dangerous to the rest of the public. She’s among a growing movement of people who believe childhood vaccines cause autism and are pushing others to reject vaccinating their children.

Dr. Paul Offit was the subject of an article in Wired this month, he is the frequent target of the anti-vaccine crowd’s angry wrath. They claim Offit is in the pockets of drug companies, and despite the mountain of pro-vaccine evidence presented in the story, still insist that the country’s autism explosion can be blamed on thimerosal and other chemicals in the vaccines.

A sidebar showed a gallery of other celebs who are lined up against childhood vaccines…from Don Imus to Joe Scarborough, Robert Kennedy Jr and Senator Joe Lieberman. But there is a bigger problem, since clusters of disease outbreaks like measles, mumps and pertussis can be created when even as few as two percent of kindergartners refuse the vaccines. In other words, their choice becomes other people’s problems, since vaccine effectiveness weakens significantly if there are large pockets of unprotected kids mixed with protected kids.

The story included another sidebar entitled “How to Win an Argument about Vaccines,” and here the facts show that since 2001, thimerosal hasn’t been included in vaccines, and that aluminum (another anti-vaccine bugaboo) is perfectly safe in small doses. Further, 12 scientific studies have proven the safety of measles/mumps/rubella vaccines.