Shut up, Jim.

It would be really nice if we could stop giving credence to celebrities just because they're celebrities.

Just like any other slice of humanity, there are going to be some famous actors and singers and so on who are intelligent and sensible (Matt Damon seems to me to be one of those) and others who are either dumb as a bag of hammers, or else batshit insane (hello, Tom Cruise?).  Being in the limelight -- even being a brilliant actor or singer -- does not necessarily correlate with having brains.  So let's stop acting as if everything that comes out of a celebrity's mouth has to be divinely-inspired wisdom, okay?

The last in a long line of A-list stars to demonstrate a significantly low IQ is Jim Carrey, who recently went on a tirade in response to the passage of California Senate Bill 277, which outlawed personal and religious exemptions for parents trying to avoid having their children vaccinated before attending public school.  Carrey has long been anti-vaxx, and in fact was once in a romantic relationship with noted anti-vaxx wingnut Jenny McCarthy.  And now Carrey has launched into a diatribe on Twitter against the new law, saying that it legalizes "poisoning children."  Here are a few of his salvos:

California Gov says yes to poisoning more children with mercury and aluminum in manditory [sic] vaccines.  This corporate fascist must be stopped. 

They say mercury in fish is dangerous but forcing all of our children to be injected with mercury in thimerosol [sic] is no risk.  Make sense? 

I am not anti-vaccine. I am anti-thimerosal, anti-mercury.  They have taken some of the mercury laden thimerosal out of vaccines.  NOT ALL! 

The CDC can't solve a problem they helped start.  It's too risky to admit they have been wrong about mercury/thimerasol [sic].  They are corrupt.

First of all, if he doesn't like the stuff, learning how to spell it might be a good place to start for improving his credibility.  (It's "thimerosal," for the record.)  Second, although he's right that not all vaccines are thimerosal-free, all of the ones given as routine childhood vaccinations are (or are available in a thimerosal-free version).  (It's significant that the one the anti-vaxxers rail about the most often -- the MMR vaccine -- has never contained thimerosal.)

Third, of course, is that in any discussion of vaccines, we have to take a look at relative risk.  Have there been children who have had adverse reactions to routine vaccinations?  Sure.  No medical procedure, however innocuous, is completely risk-free.  There have been extensive studies of the relative risks of side effects, from mild to severe, for every vaccine that's commonly administered, and the vast majority of side effects from routine vaccinations are mild and temporary.  (Here's a summary of those studies -- oh, but wait.  It comes from the "corrupt CDC."  Never mind.)

What about the risk of childhood disease?  Again, the risk is known, and it's high.  Diseases like measles, diphtheria, tetanus, hepatitis A and B, and polio -- for all of which there are now safe and effective vaccines -- are killers.  It's significant that the boy that I wrote about a few weeks ago, the first person to contract diphtheria in Spain in 29 years, died last week, and that the parents are now blaming the anti-vaccination movement for their decision not to have him immunized.  "The family is devastated and admit that they feel tricked, because they were not properly informed," said Catalan public health chief Antoni Mateu.  "They have a deep sense of guilt, which we are trying to rid them of."

Interesting way of putting it.  Maybe they should be experiencing a deep sense of guilt, given that it was their decision that led to his death.  And it's hard to see how in this day and age, being anti-vaxx qualifies as not being "properly informed."  Falling for scare talk and pseudoscience isn't "not being properly informed," it's being anti-scientific and gullible, which isn't the same thing.  And there's a fundamental principle operating here, which is that you can't save people from themselves.  Humans are going to make dumb decisions and then cast around for someone to blame them on -- this is hardly a new problem.

It's just tragic when those decisions result in the death of an innocent child.

Which, by the way, is exactly why we should have mandatory vaccination laws.  Adults are going to make their own decisions, and some of them will be based in ignorance and fear, and some of them will result in people being injured or killed.  But society has a responsibility to step in and protect children when their parents won't do so voluntarily.

That's what Senate Bill 277 is about.

And as far as Jim Carrey: dude, go back to making movies.  You made some pretty good ones -- The Truman Show and Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind are two of my favorite movies.  (You also made some pretty stupid ones, but let's be as charitable as we can, here.)  You are not only not a scientist, you have shown that you can't even make an intelligent assessment of scientific research.  Hell, you don't seem to be able to spell.

So maybe it's time to retreat to Hollywood in disarray.  Or failing that, simply shut up.  That would work, too.

Intransigence

If there's one thing I find discouraging, it's how resistant crazy beliefs are to eradication.

You'd think that as we know more about how the universe actually works through science, the remaining spaces would become smaller and smaller, forcing woo-woos to cede ever greater amount of territory to the rationalists.  The parts we can't explain would be all they'd have left to fill up with wacky claims.

"Crap of the gaps," is kind of how I think of it.

In practice, of course, this isn't true.  Crazy ideas like astrology are as popular as ever.  And if we needed further evidence of this rather dismal tendency, we got it this week with the release of the Chapman University Survey of American Fears.

In this survey, they looked at a representative sampling of 2,500 Americans, and asked them whether they believed in a variety of claims.  You want to feel depressed?  Consider the following:

• The percentage of Americans who believe in Atlantis (63%) exceeds the percentage who think that vaccines are safe and effective (53%).
• The belief that "Satan causes most of the evil in the world" is held by a greater number of people (46%) than is belief in anthropogenic climate change (33%).
• More people believe that UFOs are alien spaceships (41%) than believe that the Earth is 4.5 billion years old (27%).
• People are far more likely to believe in ghosts and hauntings (54%) than evolution (31%).
• Almost exactly the same percentage of people believe in Bigfoot as believe in the Big Bang (21%).

There are a lot of reasons for this, of course.  One has only to turn on the This Really Isn't History Channel or Imaginary Animal Planet or the Discovery of Things That Don't Exist Channel to see one of them.  When shows like Ancient Aliens get a longer run than shows like Cosmos, we have a problem as a culture.

Glitzy, hyped woo-woo -- Monster Quest and Ghost Hunters and Finding Bigfoot and The Unexplained -- has soared in popularity.  To be fair, it's not that I don't see the draw; I love a good scary story, myself, and still consider The X Files to be the pinnacle of television to date.

But The X Files was marketed as fiction, for fuck's sake.  This stuff is being broadcast with the premise that it's true.  And because we don't really put a premium on critical thinking, in public schools or pretty much anywhere else, lots of people are just swallowing it hook, line, and sinker.

Of course, that's not all.  There's also some more insidious forces at work, ones that really aren't about the profit motive.  You only have to consider the influence of evangelical religion to understand why evolution and the antiquity of the Earth and the Big Bang scored so low.  And for the vaccines thing, look at Jenny McCarthy (Not Directly!  Always Use Eye Protection!)  Why so many people consider an actress a more credible source of information on medical science than an actual medical researcher is a minor mystery.  We still tend, as a society, to buy into the whole "cult of ignorance" -- that the scientists are out-of-touch ivory tower intellectuals, who could just as well be evil as be good, and that we're better off trusting good ol' boys who talk plain English.

Or, as the case may be, Playboy models who are college dropouts.

I live in hope that we're still making progress, even despite Chapman University's rather discouraging findings.  After all, if I didn't think humans were educable, my raison d'être for being both a science writer and a science teacher would be gone.  And as Neil deGrasse Tyson put it, "Science literacy is a vaccine against the charlatans of the world who would exploit your ignorance."

But the poll results indicate that we still have a long, long way to go in fighting intransigence.

A shot in the arm

The website of the World Health Organization states it this way: "Immunization is one of the most successful and cost-effective health interventions and prevents between 2 and 3 million deaths every year."  UNICEF places the lives saved at closer to 9 million, and states that "vaccines have brought seven major human diseases under some degree of control - smallpox, diphtheria, tetanus, yellow fever, whooping cough, polio, and measles."

The members of my family understand the impact vaccination has had all too well.  My grandfather's only full sister, and his eldest half-sister, died five days apart of measles at the ages of 22 and 17; and my mother had polio as a child, stunting the growth in one leg and leaving her with a permanent limp.  (Still, my mom was one of the lucky ones; less fortunate polio survivors ended up partially paralyzed and spent the rest of their lives in an iron lung.)

Vaccination, however, has been increasingly under attack, with spurious claims linking vaccines to everything from autism to allergies.  This, despite the fact that repeated controlled studies have found vaccines to be safe and effective, and despite the "studies" linking vaccines to negative health effects having been roundly discredited.

Even with all of this, there's still a scare campaign going on that "Big Pharma" is secretly trying to kill you every time you get a shot.  Just last year, we saw Stephanie Messenger's book Melanie's Marvelous Measles published, and it's still available on Amazon despite 147 (out of 200) one-star reviews:

In it, we get to read about little Melanie, who is just delighted to get measles so she can "heal naturally."  The book, Messenger says, "was written to educate children on the benefits of having measles and how you can heal from them naturally and successfully."  Even worse is The Mother magazine, which in its March/April issue had an article that stated that "Measles will only develop in a body that is low on vitamin A," and suggests eating more carrots as a preventative.  We are also told that "people don't die of measles -- they die of medical mismanagement of the fever."

Too bad my Aunt Anne and Aunt Emelie didn't know about all this, isn't it?

Unfortunately, though, the anti-vaxxer nonsense has caught on, based in equal parts on fear, a poor understanding of science, a sneaking sense of suspicion about the ethics of medical/pharmaceutical corporations, and a large dose of the naturalistic fallacy.  Most recently, the whole issue has hit Canada, where just yesterday the British Columbia Medical Journal released, in its May issue, an article stating that Health Canada has just granted license to "homeopathic vaccines" called "nosodes" -- and yes, they are the usual homeopathy bullshit, made from substances diluted past Avogadro's limit, which are therefore pure water.  Nevertheless, Health Canada saw fit to give their stamp of approval to "nosodes" for influenza, measles, pertussis, and polio, despite its stated mission to "(test) products for safety and efficacy before allowing them to enter the market."

So now, we don't just have people avoiding vaccines, we have them taking fake vaccines.

And we're beginning to see the effects of this foolishness.  Wales is still recovering from a measles outbreak that sickened 700 people last month, resulting in at least one death.  Two days ago, the BBC ran a story that states that "Levels of vaccination have been too low in some countries, particularly in rich western European nations...  Experts said it was not too late to hit the target, but 'extraordinary' effort was needed."  The WHO and other medical oversight groups are concerned that in many places, we have dropped below the levels needed for herd immunity, the number of immune individuals needed in a population to prevent the disease from catching hold.  Once that happens, epidemiologists warn, an epidemic is almost certain to occur.

It's hard to combat all of this.  Prominent voices like Andrew Wakefield and Jenny McCarthy have spent enormous amounts of time, energy, and money sowing suspicion and drawing false correlations, and once you've activated the fear module in people's minds it's almost impossible to repair the damage.  Doctors are said to be hand-in-glove with corporate interests; skeptics like me are seen as shills or dupes.  If the government itself forces its citizens' choices -- compulsory vaccination programs for school attendance, for example -- it is claimed to be infringing on rights.  When epidemics occur, as in Wales this year, it causes a brief flurry of activity, but once the survivors recover, most people forget about it.  The fear remains that the anti-vaxxers are right -- perhaps the epidemic would have occurred anyway, even if everyone had been vaccinated, and then maybe there would have been all of these cases of autism to contend with.

Here, have a carrot.

I wish I had a good suggestion regarding what to do about all of this.  While I'm all for personal freedom, I really wish governments would step in and say, "Look, I'm sorry you have fallen for pseudoscientific superstition.  That's unfortunate for you.  Roll up your sleeve, please."  If this happened in enough places, maybe we could eradicate measles and polio, the way we eradicated smallpox in 1980.  While getting rid of diseases like the flu, which affect other mammals as well as humans, is unlikely, we could certainly get further along in stopping or slowing down epidemics.

Think of the human suffering this would eliminate, and the lives it would save.

Maybe it's time to apply some science and rationality, here, and not succumb to fear tactics, fallacious thinking, specious claims, and the "research" of outright frauds.  Wouldn't that be marvelous?