A more thorough look,,,I call bullsh*t, if the shoe fits (Pt 1)

When a theory has been confirmed so completely by facts as has the proposition that vaccination effectually performed will prevent an individual from contracting small-pox, or at least so fundamentally modify the disease that it is no longer a serious malady, there is in many minds a natural distaste to fight the battle again or to be constantly defending the position against the attacks of ill-informed or prejudiced persons.

British Medical Journal, July 24, 1897

Just goes to show that the anti-science mentality or science denialism is not just a "right side of the isle" issue.  Not that I considered it as such, but many consider Bill Maher to be a "liberal" because of his anti-religion stance.  Be that as it may, Maher Gish Gallops quite well through the "failures" of Western Medicine, (ie. false in one thing, false in everything) too bad he is mis-informed.

Just how predictable is Maher in his anti-vaxx stance, starting at the 4:25 mark, leading in to what I discuss below, he makes this statement,

,,,that's not true of the medical industry.  They have had to retract a million things because the human body is infinitely more mysterious.  People get cancer, and doctors just don't know why,,, I remember my father had ulcers and they treated it wrong when I was a kid,,,

Now compare Maher's statement (remember, it's 2015) to a 2006 posting over at Respectful Insolence discussing falsus in uno, falsus in omnibus (false in one thing, false in everything):

A particular favorite example of this ploy is to point out how medicine was wrong about the cause of duodenal ulcers, having previously thought them due to diet or other predilections until it was shown over the last 20 years or so that most cases of such ulcers are caused by a bacterium, H. pylori. Never mind that it was science, not alties, that figured out the[ir] own error and that treatments used for duodenal ulcers before the discovery of H. pylori were in fact fairly effective (just not as effective as the treatments we have today and all too often requiring surgery)

Gorski then goes on to explain why FIUFIO doesn't work in science:

The problem is, this principle doesn’t work in science,,, In most cases, being incorrect doesn’t mean the scientists were lying, and it is the totality of the evidence that must be weighed. Moreover, it is not valid to treat all of science as a single source. Science is not a single witness that can be interrogated. Well-accepted scientific theories (like evolution, for example) are supported by many interweaving lines of evidence from many different sources. If you impeach one minor source or piece of data, that does not invalidate the rest of the supporting data,,, when scientists find inconsistencies in the data supporting a hypothesis or theory, they do not reject the entire theory out of hand in this manner,,, they use such anomalous pieces of data or experimental results as a chance to improve our understanding of a phenomenon. They see if the theory can be modified to account for the observation. They make hypotheses about potential explanations of the anomalous observations and then test them experimentally. If they see if a new theory with better predictive power and utility than the old can be developed that takes account for the new observations.

Stated another way FIUFIO is, as a principle of law, meant to be applied to a single witness or source of authority; something we know science is not.  The use of vaccinations and immunization is not based on one scientist or one kind of science. FIUFIO has no effect on other witnesses/authorities, let alone on objective evidence that does not rely on testimony for its validity.   As this comment points out, "applying FIUFIO gets you no further than to refute a single argument; it does not prove any other. " [See comment #2]


In response to another Bill Maher anti-vaxx faux pas, Gorski makes it clear,

,,,[I]f you’re not antivaccine, then stop repeating long discredited antivaccine talking points as though they were scientifically valid. That’s what antivaccinationists do, and if you continue to do such things, then you shouldn’t be surprised when people conclude that you are antivaccine. It’s a reasonable conclusion based on your own words and failure to be educated over the course of many years.

This is why countering the tripe that comes out of Maher's mouth is important.  His arguments are not original and if one were to visit any anti-vaxx site, these exact same arguments used by Maher will be found.  Dissecting Maher’s anti-vaxx stance from a layman's POV is useful; if I can do it, so can you.  It also shows how lazy Maher is being; it reminds all skeptics and atheists that they can be just as irrational as believers in the woo-woo and proponents of pseudoscience if we leave our critical thinking skills at home. 

For someone who considers himself as being rational and skeptical, tooting his own horn about his atheism, Maher certainly seems to be rather credulous about other things that do not fit into his anti-establishment world-view.  What Maher and his anti-vaxx buddies like to forget:

[A]ll scientific knowledge is provisional and vulnerable to be proven incorrect by future experiments or evidence. That self-correcting mechanism of science is not a weakness at all, but rather sciences’ greatest strength, in which present concepts and theories are constantly subjected to testing and attempts to falsify them. Those hypotheses that can stand up to such attempts become accepted as closer to the “truth” than previous understandings (and may even reach the level of being called a theory), and, with each successive iteration, scientific understanding eliminates error and comes closer to the way things “really are."

What it boils down to for me is this, you know who else says she is not anti-vaccine (besides Amy Holmes and Marianne Williamson) Jenny McCarthy!  To just accept Maher's assertion that he is not anit-vaxx, we would also have to accept McCarthy's as well.

Thinking I should have titled this, “Bill Maher, leads the Anti-Vaxx Movement."