Last month, PoliticOlogy chastised the Chicago Sun-Times for hyping (and sponsoring) an autism fundraiser held by Jenny McCarthy's organiation Generation Rescue, without finding space to mention in their 1,100-word article that Generation Rescue is the primary hawker of the discredited vaccines-cause-autism theory that's bringing whooping cough back like 90s fashion.
Turns out, vaccines don't cause autism—Jenny McCarthy does. You look at graph now:
The blue line is Jenny McCarthy's popularity—beginning with her Playboy appearance in 1992 and continuing through a string of now-forgotten movies and soon-to-be forgotten television shows to her height as an anti-vaccine spokesperson—while the red line shows the increase in cases of autism. The rise of the two is almost identical. Clearly, McCarthy's campaign against vaccines is a cynical one of distraction; who would ever suspect the anti-autism crusader?
Now, you might look at this chart and say, "Wait a minute, that just shows correlation, not causation! Simply because two phenomena rise in a similar pattern in no way suggests that one causes the other!" No, gentle reader. No, they do not.
(Also, the blue line is made up. Whatevs.)
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Follow on Twitter: @evanmcmurry | @OlogyPolitics
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