In a 1,100 word article on Tuesday, the Chicago Sun-Times managed to discuss an upcoming event held for Jenny McCarthy's Generation Rescue Foundation, and interview the "warrior mother" herself, without ONCE mentioning the foundation's role in spreading the completely discredited thesis that vaccinations cause autism.
McCarthy has touted this nonsense for years, citing Andrew Wakefield's 1998 study that purported to demonstrate a link between childhood vaccines and cases of autism. That study was thoroughly discredited by British journal BMJ, which called it an "elaborate fraud" that deliberately misrepresented every aspect of the data. Wakefield was stripped of his medical license, but not before the panic he started over vaccines created an epidemic of measles in England.
Despite the falsified link, McCarthy has continued to push the bad science, resulting in plummeting rates of vaccinations in the U.S. and multiple outbreaks of measles or whooping cough among populations with low vaccinations, including a recent outbreak of whooping cough in Washington. As Slate pointed out, it's often not the healthy-but-unvaccinated kids who suffer, but those who can't afford vaccinations and whose immune systems are more susceptible:
It’s more likely that one of their healthy kids, if infected, would pass, say, measles on to a child being treated for cancer, or with a blood disorder, or an infant. My friends’ children would probably be fine. The other infected child, whose parents might never even know what unlucky choice of seat on a bus or passing exposure led to her illness, might not.
The Sun-Times' article almost starts a discussion about class and health care costs, though it instead trips over how wealthy McCarthy is (she brags of moving Generation Rescue's office across the street from her for convenience's sake), underscoring how much her false claims of vaccination prey on poorer families who are the least able to afford proper health care, and thus most vulnerable to its lack of protection.
Surely all this would have warranted mention in an article on Generation Rescue gala. Instead, we get treated to questions like this:
Q. I hear you have a desk in the Generation Rescue office and have regular hours. What is your week like?
Q. Tell me about the Rescue Our Angels cocktail event. The event sounds like it is going to be fun!
OMG for realz! I'll get started on a Whooping Cough Cocktail recipe right now (it'll have Campari).
At the bottom of the article: "The Sun-Times proudly supports Generation Rescue & Autism One." And, hey, Generation Rescue looks like it has a lot of resources for parents with autism, which is great.
But as BMJ, the journal that discredited Wakefield, point out, anti-vaccination crusades don't just lead to rising rates of preventable diseases:
But perhaps as important as the scare's effect on infectious disease is the energy, emotion and money that have been diverted away from efforts to understand the real causes of autism and how to help children and families who live with it.
Even worse, no amount of evidence seems to convince groups like McCarthy's, who dismiss out of hand any and all studies disproving the link. The anti-vaccination movement is a black hole down which time, money and expertise disappears, to the detriment of legitimate autism research. The more media outlets give voice to this baseless paranoia, the more the scientific community is forced to stop and fight bad science. As one British journalist put it, "The vaccine panic is best understood as the monstrous offspring of the London press' baffling aversion to fact-checking."
Or hyping a gala that a newspaper supports. Sponsor or no, the Sun-Times has a responsibility to acknowledge overwhelming criticism of an organization's touting of aggressively irresponsible science that promotes extremely dangerous behavior. If it truly cared about stopping autism, it could start with its own cocktail hour.
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