Singling Out people who talk through their asses

Hey, world, guess what: if you stake your children’s lives on medical advice from these people:

Then congratulations, you’re a giant moron. Somehow, you’ve decided that the word of two celebrities whose popularity averages out to C-list (at best) trumps the mountains upon mountains of actual scientific evidence from actual scientists.

I can hear the cries now: “but Jenny and Jim have scientists on their side!” Yes, and so do the flat-Earthers, the Creationists, and (to co-opt the antivax crowd’s favorite example) the tobacco companies. What Jenny and Jim and Generation Rescue and Age of Autism and the other pro-disease groups don’t have is anything resembling a preponderance of evidence to support their hypotheses. They don’t even have enough evidence to make their hypothesis seem like a worthwhile and plausible research avenue. After the MMR/Autism link was demonstrated to be the result of an interest-conflicted researcher gaming the data from small poorly-controlled studies using analysis from a compromised lab, the antivax crowd changed the hypothesis–now the connection was proposed to be the mercury in thimerosal, not the measles virus in MMR. So the real scientists rolled up their sleeves again, the legal process bent over backwards to accommodate the antivaxxers’ suspicions, and thimerosal was removed from childhood vaccines while scientists tested the hypothesis. Study after study, data set after data set, have refuted the purported link between thimerosal and autism, and oh by the way, there’s no proposed mechanism for such a link anyway, given what we already know about how ethylmercury compounds like thimerosal interact with the body. Now the antivaxxers have shifted the goalposts again, retreating to that refuge of scoundrels and charlatans, the vague and unscientific notion of “toxins.” They throw out terms designed to baffle and frighten the chemistry-illiterate public and intentionally fail to understand the important role of dosage in determining a substance’s toxicity. And despite this failure to comprehend basic things like measurement, they augment this toxin gambit with a mantra of “too many, too soon.” Yes, curse those doctors for giving our children too many attenuated viruses and viral protein fragments before they can be exposed to the real things. I mean, surely nature, which is fluffy and nice and clean and wonderful to all living things would be much more forgiving with its exposure schedule. How well we remember those halcyon days of tooth enamel-destroying fevers and iron lungs. If it weren’t for the fact that “toxins” is sufficiently vague and untestable and unfalsifiable as a complaint–so much so that it’s ubiquitous among woo-woo garbage–I would expect the next antivax meme to be about the “energy” of the vaccines causing autism.

This constant goalpost-shifting is not a hallmark of a scientific hypothesis. It’s not the sign of rational examination of claims or a desire to actually determine whether or not one’s convictions are true. It’s the tactic of the true believer, the unsinkable rubber ducks whose certainty insulates their beliefs from criticism, evidence, and any harsh contact with reality. Good science has invalidated each of their hypotheses in turn, demonstrating that their proposed causal link is borne out of fallacious post-hoc thinking and unscientific ideology. The scientific method is to abandon mistaken hypotheses, not to make them vaguer and less prone to falsification until they lack any explanatory power at all. This is what the antivax crowd has done; this is emphatically not scientific.

Jenny McCarthy trusts her “mommy instinct” and her Google-based research, but neither of these are reliable sources of truth. The Internet is wonderful in that it gives everyone a voice, and terrible in that it lacks any quality control or fact-checking requirement. “Mommy instincts” are great for skinned knees and stormy nights, but they aren’t reliable sources of truth–just ask any geeky kid whose mom says he’s the handsomest boy in his school, or any mom who thinks her college-bound daughter is pure and virginal as the driven snow. If “mommy instinct” were as reliable as Jenny seems to think, then there would be no need for pediatricians.

But she is a celebrity, and so is her boyfriend, and so they have the means and prestige to promote their arrogant, dangerous ignorance to a humongous audience of credulous people, and they are given equal standing with actual scientists, their ignorance pitted against actual evidence as though the two had similar claims to the truth. I’m all for celebrities having and sharing their opinions; what they shouldn’t be doing (and what our media shouldn’t be complicit in allowing them to do) is pretending that their SAG memberships make them authorities on anything more complicated than method acting. I applaud celebrities like Amanda Peet for standing up and giving the side of reason and science a voice, but I deplore a system and a society where the side with the most famous people on it is commonly believed to be the side with the truth.

So go ahead, put your kids at risk for dozens of debilitating, easily preventable diseases by putting your trust in this asshole:
Me, I’ll stick to science.