Without evidence of benefit, an intervention should not be presumed to be beneficial or safe.

- Rogue Medic

CBS Neck and Neck with CNN for Most Incompetent Network

Also possibly posted as part of the Skeptics’ Circle over at The Mad Skeptic. I procrastinate and am late in sending this in. Maybe The Mad Skeptic has already finished this edition. Anyway, go check out the rest of what is there.

Then:

Complain to CBS: CBS resident anti-vaccine propagandist Sharyl Attkisson sucks up to anti-vaccine pseudoscientist Andrew Wakefield.

The most famous fraud in medicine, that Criminally Blundering Scientist, Andrew Wakefield, was praised on the television network that has decided to give CNN a run for its money in the category of incompetence.

The CBS (Comedic Bumbling Scaremonger) network decided that they would give some air time to an exposed fraud to promote his latest larceny. He has already been shown to have taken payoffs from trial lawyers to fake his research. Is he pushing a book? So, why does anyone pay any attention to him? One reason. He tells them what they want to hear. And if it is written in a book, it must be true. OK, 2 reasons. He tells them what they want to hear, he feeds their paranoia, and if it is written in a book it must be true. OK, 3 reasons. . . .

If you believe that the people reporting the news, such as Sharyl Attkisson, are objective, you probably were told that by a reporter. If you believe that Andrew Wakefield does anything that is not designed to make him money, you probably were told that by Andrew Wakefield or one of his accomplices. If you think that Generation Rescue Generation Revenue knows anything about medicine, you probably were told that by somebody at Generation Revenue – somebody trying to sell you something.

Anybody, who uses only bumper sticker slogans as their medical evidence, clearly is not worth listening to. Too much, too soon. Based on what? They don’t know. They only feel. Ignorance is their strength. Green the vaccines. That doesn’t even mean anything. And then they use the made up word, Toxics, as if it were a real word.

Because, when you don’t know what you are talking about, it doesn’t matter what you say. It only matters what you feel. And they want you to feel angry, so they can make money off of you.

You should be angry. They want you to sacrifice your children to satisfy their feelings. They also want to make money off of you. They are selling books and magical mystery treatments – guaranteed to lighten your wallet, but certainly not guaranteed to be safe. They demand more and more vaccine research. The research continually shows that vaccines are safe, but they keep asking for more research – hoping for the fluke grouping of autistic children in the treatment group, so they can claim that it was the vaccine that caused the autism. They already do make that claim, but all of the evidence shows that they are lying.

Of course, they will sell you some of their dangerous all natural products. They don’t have to show that they are safe, because they sell them as supplements, rather than medicines. Supplements will kill you. You have no way of knowing what you are getting, because the politicians (such as Sen. Tom Harkin) have minimized oversight in response to donations from the real big money supplement groups – Big sCAM. And they get a quarter of a billion dollars – each year – of our tax dollars to look for evidence to support alternatives to medicine that has evidence that it works. Talk about pork.

When your money is going to buy their untested supplements drugs, they do not care about safety. When your money is going to pay for well tested vaccines, to protect your children, they are ranting and raving about danger.

One thing that can be said about everything that these 2 recommend – Not Safe!

Not safe for adults – and definitely not safe for children.

Interviewer – And yet in many cases, vaccines have effectively eliminated diseases. Measles is among the top five killers in the world of children under 5 years old, yet it kills virtually no one in the U.S. thanks to vaccines.

Jenny McCarthyPeople have the misconception that we want to eliminate vaccines. Please understand that we are not an antivaccine group. We are demanding safe vaccines. We want to reduce the schedule and reduce the toxins. If you ask a parent of an autistic child if they want the measles or the autism, we will stand in line for the f___ing measles.

Jenny McCarthy on Autism and Vaccines
By Jeffrey Kluger; Wednesday, Apr. 01, 2009; Time Magazine

Reduce the schedule? Based on what?

Reduce the toxins? She is giving a chant, like a cheerleader, so repeating the word reduce works in the cheer. The toxins claim is just naming ingredients that are in microscopic quantities and are safe, even in children. Of course, this complaint about toxins is from someone who has botulism injected regularly, to maintain a youthful appearance. What does she understand about toxins?

Do you want the measles or the autism? Again, based on what?

These questions are nothing but a scare tactic.

There is no connection between vaccination and autism. You can look at all of the research, or you can listen to a stripper and an exposed fraud. A fraud who faked his research to make it appear that there is a link between vaccines and autism. Listen to real doctors? Or listen to these 2 ringleaders of a circus of ignorance and anger.

Why do people listen to such psychotic ranting? Mao was more compassionate than either of them and he tops the updated list of greatest mass murderers. Judging by the number of people skipping vaccines, we will probably not get people to realize just how dangerous her advice is until there are a lot of dead children. Probably not even close to Mao’s 73,000,000, but who knows how persuasive she can be.

So that you can keep track of how many people are being killed, because of people listening to the anti-vaccine mob, get the Jenny McCarthy/Anti-Vaccine Body Count widget. There are 2 other designs at the web site.

Jenny McCarthy Body Count

217 dead? The current numbers are actually 235 dead and 49,556 preventable illnesses. I don’t know why the widget is not up to date.

2007: Jenny McCarthy Begins Promoting Anti-Vaccination Rhetoric

Maybe it is just a coincidence. Maybe it is a coincidence that the number of cases of disease, and there are plenty of other diseases documented at the site, began dropping with the introduction of vaccinations, leveling off at very low numbers, and staying low until Jenny McCarthy started telling people that it is wrong to protect their children from these illnesses. Be fair to measles, or something like that.

Why is it wrong to protect my child from these vaccine-preventable diseases?

Loving parents should protect their children, not listen to a stripper giving deadly medical advice.

Am I being unfair?

Ask a parent who has had a child die because of Jenny McCarthy or Andrew Wakefield.

Then there is the big question.

Why was Andrew Wakefield being interviewed about an article appearing in a minor medical journal?

Do they normally cover all of the articles published in the more reputable medical journals, but are now adding to that extensive medical coverage?

Not at all. This is important news only to those who believe in the religion of Andrew Wakefield. The Lancet, which published the study that had to be retracted due to Andrew Wakefield’s fraud, is not going to believe that he had a sudden onset of honesty. JAMA (the Journal of the American Medical Association), the New England Journal of Medicine, Pediatrics, the British Medical Journal, et cetera, have reputations for quality that they need to maintain. Professional responsibility. Why even look at something from these frauds? Maybe the peer reviewers had no idea of the identity of the authors, but did not see anything about the paper to justify inclusion in a major medical journal.

Neurotoxicology? I never heard of the journal before, but maybe they wanted a bit of publicity. Dr. David Gorski goes into detail on the many conflicts of interest in this study. He also has links to the full study, which has been published at a couple of autism misinformation sites. Monkey business in autism research, part II.

For further information on Andrew Wakefield there is the reporting of Brian Deer:

Thoughtful House: Since the Royal Free ejected him in October 2001, Andrew Wakefield first re-emerged as “research director” of the self-styled International Child Development Resource Center, in Florida, which sells expensive products for autism, including enzymes and purported “genetic tests”. He was then installed at Thoughtful House in Austin, Texas, earning $280,000 a year.

Wakefield’s patents: Nine months before Andrew Wakefield and London’s Royal Free hospital medical school unleashed a global scare over the MMR vaccine, they filed, on June 5 1997, the first of a string of patent claims for theoretically vastly profitable products which could only succeed if MMR’s reputation was damaged. These included a purported safer measles vaccine – a potential competitor – and treatments for bowel disease and autism. All were based on claims that measles virus in MMR was at fault.

These are just 2 examples of the many sleazy activities of Andrew Wakefield. There are a lot more at http://briandeer.com/. Andrew Wakefield is not a doctor in the United States, although he works in the US. Has he been practicing medicine without a license? It would be a surprise if that were the one ethical part of his life.

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