Declension wrote:
I think that I sort of understand why people believe people like Jenny McCarthy. It's not really the people who have autism that fall for it, it's their worried and stressed-out parents. I think that a lot of parents who have severely autistic children feel a sort of helplessness. They really want to help, they really want to do something, but they don't know what to do. Even worse, some of them may feel that society is judging them and that people think that they caused their child's autism by bad parenting. (This is still a widespread belief.)
So someone comes along and says: "I know why this happened! It's not your fault, it's because of a conspiracy involving vaccines! Come and join the fight against the big pharmaceutical lobbies that are responsible for all of this!"
It could be described as despicable preying on the vulnerable, except that I'm pretty sure that Jenny McCarthy really believes it too, since she has a child with autism.
The truly horrible person is Andrew Wakefield. He doesn't have any sad reason to want to believe this stuff. He just got paid by some lawyers to falsify evidence. Nothing more complicated than that.
As I understand it, Jenny McCarthy's son may not have ever been autistic. Rather, he may have had another condition that mimics autism, which eventually diminishes with age. Even she's conceding these days that that may have been the case. I don't know what - if any - effect that may have had on her anti-vaccinations crusade.
-Bill, otherwise known as Kraichgauer
18 Mar 2012, 2:31 pm
