'I Never Told Anyone Not to Vaccinate'

http://www.theatlantic.com/health/archive/2014/04/i-never-told-anyone-not-to-vaccinate/360655/

?n42rtx
Initial shipment of polio vaccine in 1955 (AP)

In the way the word cancer quiets a room, polio once did. Now it sounds archaic. So does measles, which can make it difficult to comprehend that a woman from Seattle came down with measles two weeks ago after a Kings of Leon concert. That song "Sex on Fire" that you sometimes still hear on the radio? They were playing that while a woman was developing measles. Which will not impress you if you spent 2011 in France, where there were 15,000 cases of measles. Then, in the U.S. in 2012, almost 50,000 people got whooping cough.

Because parents are choosing to forgo or delay vaccinations, one in eight American kids has not received all that are medically recommended. In trying to understand the drivers of that idea, which is at odds with the science of infectious disease and public health policy, Jenny McCarthy has emerged the most visible detractor. The name of the host of The View now appears in medical journals. This week though, in an unexpected move, McCarthy said she is not against vaccinating children to protect them from infectious diseases. “I am not ‘anti-vaccine,’” she wrote in a column in Chicago Sun-Times Splash section on Sunday. That might seem like a dramatic change of heart, except that she says it’s not. “I’ve never told anyone to not vaccinate.”

That’s a false sentence, but we don’t need to pick that apart. Well, okay, here's just one of her anti-vaccine statements from 2009: “It’s going to take some diseases coming back to realize that we need to change and develop vaccines that are safe. If the vaccine companies are not listening to us, it’s their fucking fault that the diseases are coming back. They’re making a product that’s shit. If you give us a safe vaccine, we’ll use it. It shouldn’t be polio versus autism.”

Really, though; an argument with Jenny McCarthy over consistency has no winners. Vaccines are safe, and widespread vaccination programs are definitely good for public health. Writers at Slate, Time, and other places already exhaustively rebuked McCarthy for backpedaling and hypocrisy in this column. It's a lot of fun to catch someone contradicting herself, but the old statements are in the past. Jenny McCarthy really isn't the enemy; the misinformation she spread is. As long as she ends up on the side of the discussion that leads to the fewest outbreaks of mumps—the discussion which most doctors agree shouldn’t even be happening, and diseases that definitely shouldn’t—fine.