Liar, Liar: Jim Carrey and the Misinformation About Vaccines and Autism
By Dan Summers
Corynebacterium diphtheriae, the infectious agent responsible for diphtheria, is a nasty little germ. Known once upon a time as the “strangling angel of children,” affected patients would develop a membrane that covered the airway, as well as significant irritation in the throat and surrounding tissue. Respiratory and circulatory collapse commonly followed, with resultant coma and death. Removal of the membrane would lead to profuse bleeding.
I graduated from medical school almost exactly ten years ago, and did my residency in pediatrics at NYU Medical Center in New York City. I have never seen a single case of diphtheria in my career, which is a statement that many pediatricians of my generation could probably echo. Indeed, I have never seen a single case of smallpox, polio, tetanus, measles or a handful of other once-common childhood illnesses, despite having been taught about all of them in medical school and being expected to know about them to pass my certification exams,. The pediatric wards of Bellevue Hospital, once full of children ill with epiglottitis and bacterial meningitis, were largely empty during my time there.
The reason for this gulf between my textbooks and my experience can be attributed to the various vaccines now commonly administered as part of a standard schedule in the United States. While very little in contemporary medical practice is totally free of risk or adverse effects, from the perspective of pediatric infectious disease the advent of vaccinations has been as close to an unalloyed good as is likely ever to occur. Diseases that once killed thousands of children a year are all but unheard of now.
It’s hard to argue with that kind of success.
Sadly, Jim Carrey has seen fit to try. It was with singular frustration that I read his recent missive in the Huffington Post, full of the usual “vaccines lead to autism” misinformation and pseudoscientific mumbo-jumbo. What was most frustrating about the post was not so much that I think Mr. Carrey is wrong (though I think that he is very, very wrong), but that he is dishonest.
May 7, 2009 54 Comments
