John Kricfalusi, best known as the creator of “Ren & Stimpy,” posted to his blog last month a collection of excerpts from a comic book from 1948, about a couple of guys who volunteer to publicise a new private hospital but wind up causing the doctors even more grief in the process. (You can read the whole comic here.) John K posted it to show off Milt Gross’ artwork, but one panel in particular stood out to me for a different reason:
This was what measles meant to me when I was growing up: it was a fictional disease, a gag, the sort of thing you only ever saw on TV or in books. No one ever got measles in real life; at least, no one I knew. I guess that makes me incredibly fortunate; in Milt’s day, a dumptruck full of children with measles probably wasn’t too much more out of the ordinary than any other dumptruck full of children.
But thanks to antivaccinationists, this specter of the past may be a vision of the future. That’s no laughing matter. As Phil Plait noted today, children are dying of vaccine-preventable illnesses. Vaccine denialists, in their misguided quest to associate vaccines with health risks such as autism (a thoroughly debunked hypothesis), are doing real damage to humanity.
And the antivaxxers are apparently okay with that. In an interview with Larry King on 4 April, antivax celebrity duo Jenny McCarthy and Jim Carrey had this to say:
KING: Isn’t the problem here, Jenny, that people sometimes listen with one ear are going to panic. And not vaccine at all?
MCCARTHY: Probably. But guess what? It’s not my fault. The reason why they’re not vaccinating is because the vaccines are not safe. Make a better product and then parents will vaccinate.
CARREY: We’re not the problem. The problem is the problem.
(For more on that interview, see Science-Based Medicine)
Jen, Jim, here’s the thing. You think you smell smoke. You think you see flames. So you’re raising the alarm, because even if people panic and get injured in the stampede for the exits, it’s better than letting the building burn down around them, right? But you’re wrong about the danger. There is no fire. We’ve tried to explain this to you, but you refuse to listen to reason. And we’re trying to calm the crowd, but it’s hard when you keep inciting them to panic.
You think you’re in the right, but you’re emphatically not. The problem you’re warning about doesn’t exist. Meanwhile, you’re shouting “fire!” in a crowded theatre, and people—real people—are getting hurt. That is your fault. You are the problem.