Is this a supposed ABA therapist who is promoting a vaccine link? Run! Run far away! No self-respecting behaviorist should believe such unscientific bullshit.
This is a great pitting and timely for me.
My brother’s fiancee is pregnant with their first child. I would describe her as a fairly normal woman - not overly interested in intellectually engaging the material she hears on tv and with a high exposure to pop culture/media. I was over to visit when she first found out she was pregnant, and we were talking about how nerve wracking it was to become a mother… all the decisions to make, the worries etc. She told me she was interested to see a recent program on oprah featuring jenny mcarthy and that she was now worried about vaccinating. She referred to having to make a choice to vaccinate her kid. I think that Jenny is incredibly destructive because her talk is playing to the basest instinct of a mother - to protect your child. And, if you see her talk on a program that you trust (eg oprah), she might make some sense to you. I sat her down and BEGGED her to vaccinate her kid - I explained why Jenny was wrong. I started sending her articles on why jenny was wrong. I bring it up everytime I come over. I think she’s leaning towards vaccinating, but it is frustrating that I can’t appeal to her intellect in this instance - the fear overwhelmes I guess.
Jenny is a dangerous woman. I fear we will start to see the consequences of just how dangerous she has been in a few more years. I hold Oprah equally culpable.
Oh it was from one of her therapists. She did preface everything with the “I don’t know if it’s true but” I think our talk helped. I emailed her a few good studies, and she emailed me back in shock that Oprah and others do not show that side of the debate.
NPR’s Science Friday had a segment on vaccinations a few weeks ago (web site here: http://www.sciencefriday.com/program/archives/200808292). The guest was the aforementioned Paul Offit from the Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia (an outstanding institution that has done wonderful work on multiple members of my family). They took a call from a woman who was an anti-vaxxer and started spouting her misinformation. I thought Dr. Offit did a remarkable job of keeping his cool and trying to counter her nonsense with cold, hard facts. After a while, when it was clear that this was having no effect, the host asked the caller if there was anything Dr. Offit could tell her that would change her mind. She said, “No,” and that was all I needed to know about her, and a lot of her crowd. It was really sad, and kind of difficult to listen to.
What really bothers me is that vaccines are actually one of the easiest parenting decisions on the planet. They’re pretty much a no brainer. The risks from non-vaccination far outweigh any potential illness. So vaccinate.
You want tough parenting? Tough is epidural or no epidural. Tough is how to cope with playground bullying. Tough is what to do with the MIL who treats you like dirt but wants to see the grandkid. Tough is reading problems and how long should I be a stay at home mom and how to avoid always playing the bad cop to your husband’s good cop.
That’s tough.
Vaccination? Not even fucking close.
So you’re taking a really straightfoward parenting decision and turning it into this ludicrous, over the top, fraught with peril, handwringing, melodramatic terrifying decision. Which is completely crazy. In the process you’re literally risking all kinds of truly awful diseases.
This is really very simple. If you child can get vaccinated then vaccinate your child. If your child cannot get vaccinated then don’t vaccinate them. But if your child cannot get vaccinated do not run around telling others not to vaccinate their children. The only thing you’ll do is put your child even more at risk.
The whole thing makes me want to ban some people from any form of public media ever again unless they’ve had a brain transplant and a dozen common sense implants.
Holy shit, it’s just about every health fad or scam all rolled into one.
We went on a local cemetery tour today (which was quite interesting, by the way), and discovered another argument for vaccinations; just request that any anti-vaxxers you meet go out to the cemetery and check out how many graves there are there for babies and children from about 1900 to 1930 or so. That might snap them into reality. Our tour guide told us today that the infant mortality rate was about 10% then.
Countering McCarthy’s blather is Amanda Peet, who has been acting as a spokeperson for getting kids vaccinated. Peet is quite up front about saying that being a celebrity does not make you an authority and is merely using her fame to promote an issue, not act as authority about it.
So Jenny ‘nose-picker’ McCarthy’s reply is a vague hint at mob violence vs. Peet.
Amanda Peet is way hotter too. 
On a serious note, McCarthy and her “until she walks in our shoes, she really has no idea.” for some reason pisses me off. I have spent years walking in those shoes, and she does not speak for me and many others I am aware of.
Damn straight.
Jenny strikes me as one of those celebrity women who as Max Headroom once put it: “They think they are the only women who ever gave birth”. I think she thinks that twice as much with regards to having an autistic child.
Thing is, if your cousin’s kid is both autistic and a coeliac, then the problems associated with being coeliac were bothering him but he had no idea how to deal with them. The guy I bought my flat from is a coeliac and had found out about it only two years before. When he mentioned it I said “ah, it must have been such a relief, finding out that all these ‘little bothers’ that you’d taken for normal your whole life weren’t normal and that you had an easy way to get rid of them!” He said yes.
For a normal kid it’s already difficult to know when the right response is to “man on,” when to complain and when to bawl one’s head off. For an autistic kid, it’s got to be harder. Being autistic doesn’t preclude being a coeliac, allergic to nuts or a diabetic but treating one doesn’t solve the other. And putting every autistic kid on a rigid diet “in case” might lead to dietetic deficiencies. No, putting them all on a “rice bread and water with pills” diet isn’t the solution either (a :smack: here for the people I know who take that kind of approach of “why should I bother with veggies when there’s pills”)
Helen Mirren is way hotter.
The truly frightening thing is that I know a woman even more psychotic than Ms. McCarthy. Has a thirteen-year-old quadriplegic daughter, the result of a vaccination injury. This is a real vaccination injury—there are about 40 such cases a year in the United States. Does she pump the kid full of vitamin supplements, noni, wheat grass, etc.? Yup. She also believes that the spirit of a long-dead American Indian warrior resides in her, that she’s telepathic (read: Indigo rugrat), and that someday she (the mother) will ultimately cure her (the daughter) through some harebrained New Age voodoo ritual. Mom’s nuttier than a fruitcake, but you can’t tell her that. She’s never even seen the inside of a community college classroom, but to hear her tell it, she possesses the wisdom of the ages, which she will gladly impart on you whether you want to hear it or not. She never shuts up, and she’s on twelve different antipsychotic, anxyolytic, and antidepressant meds at any given time. She used to be mega-hot, but 40+ years of drinking and sun-worshiping have taken a heavy toll, which she’s trying desperately to conceal both to herself and the rest of the world. On top of it all, she has way too much money from the court settlement. She’ll never have to work again, if she even could. She spends her time acting as a spokesperson/advocate for every specious disability-related cause she can think of. On top of all that, she’s trying to sell her story to Oprah, as if anybody gives a fat rat’s ass about her life. Problem is, her manuscript is 200 pages of grammatical and rhetorical gibberish. I could write better prose when I was in elementary school. Get the picture? This is what happens when you mix an unstable personality with intellectual and educational mediocrity, and sprinkle it with too much money. And the scariest thing? She has a huge parade of coprophagic butt leeches following her every move and tenderly romancing her every word. And just like Ms. McCarthy, she’ll die all alone and rapidly forgotten.
Jenny McCarthy is a blithering idiot. She once modeled Candies™ brand shoes while sitting bare-assed on a toilet. The fact that anyone gives any creedence to her opinions makes me weep for humanity.
Jenny McCarthy, shut the fuck up. You do not speak for me.
I know what it’s like to have your child diagnosed with autism. I remember grieving my dreams for my daughter’s future and having to let go of hopes of “a late talker”. Don’t get me wrong, I love our girl very much, but she’ll never be what I expected when I first found out I was having a girl.
I even remember when the vaccinations link was first questioned, way back around 2001. I wanted to be able to blame my daughter’s autism on someone else, but it didn’t prove true. Let it go and stop scaring people or giving them false hope.
Jenny, I used to like you. Up until you decided you needed to speak and raise awareness about autism. I’d rather you leave the awareness raising to Robert Smigel, and you just shut your pie hole.
I am someone who actually has a lot of respect for much of the work Oprah does, especially in her charities for children. Sure she sensationalizes a bit but for the most part she uses her broad audience base responsibly. So when I saw this show, my jaw dropped over how unbelievably irresponsible she was in promoting the myths about autism. For someone with as big of an audience as she has, to give validation to the idea that vaccinating is a personal choice, or should be anything other than the norm, is very disturbing. For all her work in Africa, she should know better than most how vaccinations save lives.
I could forgive it if she had someone on to oppose the view, even in a later show, but she has not. For someone who gives her beloved Dr. Oz so much air time, (and I usually enjoy those shows, he does a good job of explaining how the human body works) I wonder what he would have to say on the subject.
Jenny is so smug, she actually went on the show with a woman who lost both her arms and legs due to an infection from childbirth, and compared herself to her. They were both ‘warriors for their children’ because they never gave up, or some such. If I were that woman, I would have headbutted her to the ground and then ran over her with my wheelchair.
I wish the government would step up and make it law that if you choose not to vaccinate your child, your child can not attend school. (Barring an extreme case, due to medical issues or something where your child cannot receive a vaccination.) If you just don’t want to vaccinate, your child should not be with other children. The attitude of “I am just being super safe with my child, but I want him to enjoy the relative protection of other people’s children being vaccinated” is contemptible to me. And the attitude of “no one should get vaccinated because they might get autism” is just horrifying.
Just send her copies of the Playboy’s that Jenny appeared in and ask if she wants to take parental advice from a playmate.
(no, your brother did not pay me to say this, much)
Just in case you weren’t being sarcastic- no, she didn’t. She is an active danger to children, and I wish she would shut the fuck up. While diet can help with the gut issues that many autistic children have, that is not what “cured” her child. Intensive applied behavioral analysis treatment is the only proven treatment to help kids with autism do better socially and behaviorally. She does actually say that, but it gets lost in the anti-vaccine bullshit.
She is a fucking moron flogging her book. Who is the greedy one, again, Jenny? :rolleyes: