Jenny McCarthy, who you may remember for showing her boobs in magazines and eating her boogers on MTV, is trying to find a cure for autism. She'll be appearing on Saturday Night's Main Event on August 2nd on NBC to promote autism awareness. Now, she may be a snot-munching exhibitionist, but trying to find a cure for autism is a noble goal, and I salute anyone who takes up that flag and runs with it.
 

The problem with the former playmate, and girlfriend to former Riddler Jim Carey, is that she, along with her organization Generation Rescue, claims that there is a link between autism and vaccines. There isn't. In fact, she and her organization make several claims about the dangers of vaccines in general which are patently false at worst or naively ignorant at best.

She and her organization are "anomaly hunting." If you don't know what that is, it's basically finding the weird or seemingly contradictory elements of a phenomenon and using them as the basis for an explanation. It's using the exceptions AS the rule. McCarthy has already made up her mind that vaccinations gave her child autism, and she's looking for any proof that fits her predetermined idea. That's not how you figure these sorts of things out. Generation Rescue uses the endorsements of doctors who later disassociate themselves from her organization. They use fringe studies and non-peer-reviewed papers that hold no weight in the scientific community. They use data and statistics which are cherry-picked and massaged into seeming as though the apparent rise in autism diagnoses is caused by vaccines. In short, it's bullshit.

Jenny McCarthy and Generation Rescue, while their hearts are undoubtedly in the right place, are approaching this issue from a place of ignorance. They're trying to use people's questions and fears about the potential dangers of vaccines to forward their agenda. They're preying on WWE's intellectually deficient management and niche popularity to try to get people who don't know any better to jump into their witch-hunt-like bonfire of emotionally fueled, fear-ignited ignorance.

Don't buy their crap. Don't give them money. Don't be that guy.

Wanting a cure for autism is a noble pursuit. Getting there through bullshit just wastes everyone's time and risks people's lives. Funding them wastes your money. Much, maybe all of it, will go to taking out more full-page ads in major newspapers and making commercials and getting Jenny McCarthy on more TV shows to help promote their cause. Not because it will help find a cure, but because the louder you yell, the more people will listen... even if what you're yelling about isn't true.

COUNTERPOINT: Autism Fucking Rules
by Jeb Tennyson Lund

Autism fucking rules. Stop being such a fucking asshole, Brad. Even as we speak, I'm working on an online petition to get the government to declare that the 2000-2010 decade should be referred to as the "aughtisms." I'm actually mainlining MMR vaccines right now to get autism. I'm going to Vegas in about two weeks, and I am going to TEAR. THAT. SHIT. UP.

But seriously, I have no counterpoint. Generation Rescue is run by and for idiots.

I'm all for Occam's Razor: all other things being equal, the simplest explanation is the best. Unfortunately, the MMR theory of causing autism isn't reasonable, and it isn't even simple. It's a kind of perversion of Occam's Razor, where the correct explanation is the pithiest one that still gets people to write checks. Thus we have a theory that the Measles, Mumps and Rubella (MMR) vaccine, which contains mercury, causes autism - only somehow it only manages to do it in 1 in 1,000 people, despite virtually every single person in the country under the age of 40 receiving this vaccination.

There is a famous logical fallacy that describes this thinking. It's called post hoc, ergo propter hoc (Latin: after this, therefore resulting from it) or the Correlation-Causation Fallacy. Basically, what this means is just because something happens, and then something else happens, doesn't mean that the first thing caused the second thing.

You close your car door, and a pigeon shits on the hood. You and I know that a car door's closing does not cause hot pigeon guano oozing down the hood of your totally fucking cherry 1977 Chevette. But if we didn't know what caused pigeon shit, maybe this would be reasonable. We don't know what causes autism. So you can see how the speculation arises: "Where does autism come from? My son was diagnosed by our doctor at his latest checkup, but he was fine at the checkup before that. Wait! The doc gave him a vaccine last time. That must have caused it!"

I understand the impulse at work here. Autism is scary. If you're thinking about having kids, its almost unbearable to think of your child having something wrong with his mind. What's even scarier is when that something is a condition whose cause you can only guess at. If you can't identify it, you can't avoid it, fight it, treat it or cure it. So it's comforting, it's almost a relief, when you can assign blame to something and then start doing something else in response, however ineffectual it might be.

We've been doing this for millennia. Thousands of years ago, we didn't know why storms came and went, so we assumed a god created them. One day someone slew an ox during a terrifying gale, and the storm passed; someone noticed, and deduced that slain animals please god and make storms go away. And there'd still be thousands of people lined up on Florida beaches beheading rodents during every hurricane season if, long ago, a quizzical fellow named Pfffnognorathppa or something hadn't noticed that: (a) often times it didn't matter how many damn pets you killed, the storm was still going to stick around anyway; (b) you can do about a billion different things right before a storm goes away, but that's going to mean bupkes next time the cyclone hits.

The thing that Pfffnognorathppa accidentally discovered (probably right before discovering religious outrage) was the scientific method. He took a theory - dead animals please god and end storms - tested it and noticed that the results did not support the theory. Which is what should bother you about Generation Rescue: because they want you to notice that 1 in 1,000 times a kid gets MMR vaccine, he gets autism. What they decline to draw your attention to are the 999 other kids who don't and their inability to explain why.

Brad already went to the trouble of criticizing this "anomaly hunting" and linking to the factual problems Generation Rescue has, and that's probably enough. If nothing else, the fact that several doctors bailed on a cause célèbre (a chance at tapping into a goldmine of potential funding) and disassociated themselves from it ought to tell you something. The first thing it should tell you is to put away your checkbook.

The second thing it should tell you is to get mad. Not only at the further degradation of understanding of - and reporting on - the scientific method in the public sphere, but also at the emergence of one of the pet theories of the insane right in mainstream America, borne on the angry fists of white upper-middle class entitlement.

I understand the concept of public health is scary. Any vaccine has the chance to make you slightly ill from a reaction to it, but the risk is important because it can save your life, and because you can help save others' by not spreading a disease they aren't immunized against (some vaccines can fail). When 90% or more of a population is vaccinated, it vastly reduces the chances of societal collapse from epidemic. That marginalizes the individual: it makes you unspecial except as a contributor to the public weal. You may never get measles, mumps or rubella, and your MMR may temporarily make you ill, but this is more important than you. Your risk isn't unique, and, compared to the millions of lives also at risk, it's trivial, too.

Parents don't like hearing that their newborns are no different from any other parent's, and so this phantom risk from MMRs plays right into their sense of exceptionalism by casting PUBLIC HEALTH as some uncaring monolith that poisons their babies with indifference in order to prevent some hypothetical catastrophe. This attitude also plays right into the bourgeois sense of intellectual uniqueness by furnishing them with information they can convince themselves mainstream science wasn't clever enough to figure out. Unfortunately, this self-congratulatory, baseless, anti-collectivist suspicion echoes the conspiracist mentality of the far right.

Vaccines have long been the bête noire of the John Birch Society, Stormfront.org members, other white supremacists who can't figure out the internet, and the more extreme brand of libertarians. It's the ultimate boogeyman - a required injection whose chemical complexity you can't understand, one given to almost every child born in America - and has been used to substantiate claims of government mind control, genetic testing, genetic cataloguing, behavioral modification, forced sterilization, etc. The culprits are usually the Jews, the Bilderberg Group, the Trilateral Commission, something to do with immigrants, The United Nations, some nostalgic commie-related conspiracy, or a many-headed Hydra made up of a combination of the above. Always, the people revealing this suppressed information to you somehow stumbled upon a truth that - despite not actually making any rudimentary sense - is vital enough that others' lives mean relatively little to the keepers of it.

The only thing vaguely amusing about this mode of thought and the people who subscribe to it is that their most recent leader, Ron Paul, simultaneously subscribed to the theory that the government didn't care that heavy metal (mercury) in MMR vaccines causes autism, but that "THE FDA" and "BIG PHARMA" didn't want you drinking colloidal silver because it could be even better for you than antibiotics. Of course, it's easy to think like this when you're completely fucking insane.

The bottom line is that when bad science declares war on good science, it's usually followed closely on its heels by the bad politics and bad social engineering in whose service it acts. Once you're willing to accept the idea that scientifically unsupported data is in fact true because of something "They" don't want you to know, you're pretty much ready to believe something else even more stupid and dangerous.

This is not to say that Generation Rescue has any of these aims or is even malicious. They just happen to have a lot of very famous people raising quite a lot of money under the lights of perverted science. Unfortunately, that flawed science has several adherents who yearn for this kind of unthinking mistrust of government, doctors, replicable data and reasonable conclusions to enter the mainstream and become a normal reaction. The only ones who profit from your accepting unreasonable thoughts are unreasonable people who want you to believe more of them.

Again, I don't think Generation Rescue is this sinister. I think they're well-intentioned (at worst, self-indulgent) but ignorant, and I think they don't understand that there can be incredibly destructive consequences to the paranoid, irrational and unscientific thinking they promote. For the most part, I think what they're doing is an unfortunate waste.

Don't contribute to more. Every dollar sent to an organization like this is a dollar not sent to a legitimate one who would more sensibly use it. Giving an ad budget to unscientific quasi-paranoia only helps institutionalize it and open the door for more. Worse, the further along the fringe a theory sits, the more important it is to expose others to the theory, to generate more contributors. Research money takes a backseat to that advertising money. The money you send in to help find a cure will probably be spent to find two other donors. Because when you don't have concrete science giving logical heft to your ideas, you've got to spend a lot more money to convince people that they somehow make sense anyway. Make out your tax-deductible check to cancer research instead. We're all getting that eventually.

That said, I would fuck Jenny McCarthy. With wild abandon.