Bill Maher: STFU about food, health, and ESPECIALLY vaccines!

The BBQ Pit
1

Bill, you’re a funny guy, and you’ve said a lot of things that needed saying over the years. You’re relatively balanced politically, and are able to get a wide variety of guests on your show, including a fair number of conservatives. You’ve been helpful in showing people it’s possible to be a funny atheist, something Richard Dawkins and Christopher Hitchens have not quite mastered.

But for Og’s sake, STFU about health, food, and especially vaccines!

I was dismayed to learn a few years ago that you’re a strong supporter of PETA. I think they’re a bunch of terrorist-supporting wingnuts, but I let it ride as a misguided but relatively harmless eccentricity.

A year or two ago, you started talking about how our food is making us sick. Now, there’s some truth in this. Americans have a rather unhealthy diet, and it’s causing us problems. But you seemed to turn it into a major conspiracy theory against American health, instead of what it really is: a conspiracy to make money.

And you added big pharma into that conspiracy, saying that they basically invent illnesses to sell us drugs. Okay, some truth here, too. I am not an unalloyed supporter of the pharmaceutical industry. But I thought you went way too far and made some rather outrageous and unsupportable claims about how the food and pharma industries are actively trying to make us sick.

It became an idée fixe with you, and I cringed every time you made some idiotic comment about health, food, or drugs.

But you went off the deep end on your show tonight when you revealed yourself to be an anti-vaccination nut and, in a discussion with former U.S. Senator Bill Frist (R, TN), urged people not to get a flu shot. Who knows how many misguided fans of yours will follow that advice, and get seriously ill or die as a result of your unwillingness to understand and accept basic principles of science?

You, who claims to be a rationalist, who rejects the notion of God as a fairy tale, who seems to be pro-science in most other ways, are just too stuck in your stupid ego-driven conspiracy theory to accept that maybe real scientists know a little more than you about how disease is spread and prevented.

You have blood on your hands!

Just STFU, you ignorant asshole!

2

I’ve never gotten a flu shot and don’t plan to.

3

That’s nice. Anti-vaxers are still nutty as fruitcakes, though.

4

That’s disappointing.

5

I agree, with medicine so advanced in this day and age, you would think people would know better. I had many illnesses when young.

6

It is irritating.

I try to imagine these people dealing with things like variolation or Dr. Jenner’s early efforts in vaccination.

Vaccination has been a victim of its own success - from Smallpox to Poliomyelitis to the entire series of infectious diseases that have been brought to heel by vaccines.

The utter simplicity of the elegant idea of the vaccine: that the immune system can be trained to deal with the future risk of an infection belies the initial genius required to conceive them.

But hey, pretty and famous people don’t like them, so fuck, say, millenia of experience, dating from the use of variolation predating Jenner through the scientifically rigorous development and deployment of the Salk and Sabin vaccines for Poliomyelitis.

7

I never have gotten a flu shot and never gotten the flu. I also never watch Bill Maher for the same reason I don’t read the Huffington Post.

8

I hope you’re not likening the flu shot to vaccines for childhood illnesses. If you are, I can think of someone else who needs a remedial science lesson.

9

I was done with him when I found out he doesn’t train his dogs, not even to the extent of telling them to stay off the furniture or anything innocuous like that, because to train a dog is to impose artificial human values on their essential dogness, or some such nonsense.

Uh, no, Bill, it’s not, anymore than educating a child is imposing artificial adult values on their essential infantness. A dog utterly without training is like a child raised by wolves. But it gives him a sense of moral superiority over people who abuse dogs by training them.

Barf.

10

Oh, certainly not. But from the OP, it sounds like Maher is one of your garden-variety anti-vax nutters, and not just someone who has doubts about the seasonal flu vaccine. Perhaps I read too much into the OP.

11

Here’s how the Influenza Vaccine Thing (IVT) works:

Lots of people get the vaccine - so the flu propagates less successfully and in fewer people. In highly successful levels, this is called herd immunity. In herd immunity, fewer people get the flu because lots of people who would have been vectors didn’t get the flu.

Duh.

There are benefits to influenza vaccination:

  1. lesser risk of getting the flu, which even in the absence of complications. An infected person infects others, and loses as many as three weeks of functionality to a flu cycle.

  2. lesser risk of infecting people with high risk of susceptibility and of complications.

There are others, but in successful vaccine programs, those who refuse to be vaccinated get a free ride via herd immunity from those who do. Unless you have some sort of individual immunity.

12

Influenza vaccines induce type-specific immunity of short duration; necessarily, then, the herd immunity benefits associated with such vaccination programs are minimal. Not to mention that many people will still fall ill (and spread disease) from any of the non-influenza viruses that also thrive during flu season. If, indeed, many people take false comfort from the flu vaccine and neglect other prophylactic measures, flu vaccines could have a negative public health effect.

13

My pharmacist told me unless you are unhealthy or work around children, its not a neccesity. I am one who is not around a lot of others, so don’t feel i need it.
I do enjoy the conspiracy folk who believe its a government plot to either control people or knock them off.

14

I suspect that the issue with the lack of long term duration of the protection is due, perhaps, more to the tendency of influenza to consistently mutate from season to season. The herd effect is very relevant during the intended term - flu season.

It is true that influenza prophylaxis is multifaceted: vaccination, hygiene, protection of mucus membranes…the need for the others is part of the overall effort. Vaccination can impart immunity as a last resort when all the other stuff fails.

The rationale that people get sick from non-influenza pathogens does not detract from the benefits of vaccination.

And I agree that the balance of individual risks and benefits must be considered. But the wrinkle is this: some of the high risk groups are high risk because of immune-related issues brought on by various and sundry conditions: advanced age, specific medical conditions and the like. These people will not benefit so much from individual vaccination as from population level immunity and enhanced personal measures.

There are distinct perspectives in considering the risks and benefits of vaccination.

And Bill Maher is indeed an asshole.

15

I agree with everything in the OP except the assertion that Bill Maher is or has ever been funny. This is wrong. Bill Maher is an incredibly smarmy jackass and I’m pretty sure this has always been the case.

And yet he got an award named after Richard Dawkins (an honest-to-God biologist who understands how disease works and everything) because, like Dawkins, he’s some poster child for Atheism. Seriously, what the fucking hell?

16

I didn’t watch the show. What was Bill Frist’s take on that? You’d think he would have corrected Mahr.

17

Seriously?

Um… just how much shit does he have lying around his house by now?

18

Try hitting up youtube for his Be More Cynical standup routine. I think it’s broken up into like 9 parts. It is in fact, very funny.

19

Bill Frist argued facts Bill Maher tried ranting back. They didn’t get very far before they moved on to the panel.

I like Bill Maher but he has some stupid views I disagree with. I’m happy he is willing to voice and stand by his views even if they are stupid or unpopular.

20

Yeah, I was cringing at that interview last night too.

FWIW, the doctor was talking circles around Bill; which is a real credit to the doctor because that doesn’t happen often.