Friday, July 3, 2015

Jim Carrey denounces new Calif. vaccine law in Twitter rant - The Washington Post


A celebrity critic of vaccines and former partner of another star with an autistic child has taken to social media to denounce a new California law requiring most children be vaccinated.

Jim Carrey dated Jenny McCarthy for about five years before they split in 2010. In 2005, McCarthy’s son Evan was diagnosed with autism; during their relationship and after their breakup, Carrey and McCarthy were vocal proponents of the discredited theory that vaccines and autism are linked.

Carrey, it seems, is still a believer. He slammed California Gov. Jerry Brown (D) on Twitter for Brown’s decision to sign Senate Bill 277, which forces schoolchildren to be vaccinated regardless of their families’ religious or personal beliefs.

“California Gov says yes to poisoning more children with mercury and aluminum in manditory [sic] vaccines,” Carrey wrote. “This corporate fascist must be stopped.”
,,,
"I am not anti-vaccine. I am anti-thimerosal, anti-mercury."
The only problem with that statement, it has been uttered before: 
Sharon Hill over at Doubtful News provides Carrey's tweets which still rely on the "toxin gambit" as I noted before:
So this "toxin gambit" is a tried and tested trope of the anti-vaxx movement used by the likes of Mike Adams, Jay Gordon, Kent Heckenlively, and McCarthy.  (Another name that pops up is Bob Sears.)  Basically, "it consists of listing all sorts of scary-sounding ingredients that are found in vaccines and then trying to argue that vaccines are horrific cesspits of toxins because they contain trace amounts of formaldehyde, for example. It’s a truly stupid, brain dead gambit, but no matter how many times it’s slapped down, there will always be some ignorant antivaccinationist who will resurrect it."

What it is very important to understand when dealing with this gambit is the concept of dose-response relationship; something that is completely ignored.  In other words, as Scott Gavura writing for Skeptic North explains:
What is really bizarre, Jenny McCarthy has to be aware of this concept, why else would she inject herself with one of the most toxic substance currently known.  She campaigns against vaccines because of the "poisons" contained in them, but she has used botox repeatedly.
Jim Carrey denounces new Calif. vaccine law in Twitter rant - The Washington Post

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