I think she's the one on the right
You know, it seems like just yesterday that I criticized the anti-vaccine propaganda site Age of Autism for constantly flinging vitriolic insults at its critics while never actually addressing any of the science they’re so “skeptical” of. You’d think that with all their passion, they’d want nothing better than to discuss their smoking gun scientific evidence that every doctor in the world is in on the ultimate conspiracy to poison and eat our babies. [LINK UPDATED 12.3.09 WITH GOOGLE'S CACHE BECAUSE AOA PULLED THE ENTRY OFF THEIR SITE]
That’s right. It was yesterday. And less than twenty-four hours later, AoA is up to its never-changing tactics of childishly insulting those that tell them they’re wrong. You’d think they’d have better things to do than call people doo-doo heads all day long…like save all those children from being murdered with the evil, Hitler Zombie vaccines that were forged in the bowels of Hell by Osama bin Laden, ManBearPig, and that guy who possessed Locke’s body on Lost.
But no. They’ve back to just childish insults. Enter Katie Wright. I haven’t written about her yet because this is the first time I can remember reading her drivel.
And to think, it started off so well:
After reading the inane interview with Amanda Peet (who referred to parents who veer from the vaccination schedule as “parasites” in Cookie Magazine earlier this year) in this month’s “Self” magazine, I was compelled to satirize the piece in order to better reflect the full scope of Peet’s absurd and pompous proclamations about autism and vaccine safety.
You mean the interview Amanda Peet gave eleven months ago? The same interview, where she later unjustifiably apologized for calling anti-vaccine wackiloons “parasites”? You’re just reading it now?
But you know, I’m clearly cranky today so let’s give Ms. Wright a chance, shall we. Let the five-year-old behavior BEGIN:
Hmmm…. I am not a doctor, but I know one at the Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia. I am not the parent of a child with autism but I know all about what causes it and what doesn’t. I am not the parent of a child with a life threatening infectious disease but I have read about how prevalent this problem is in the THIRD WORLD.
Hmm, what’s a two-word phrase for “not a doctor”?
Katie Wright? Excelent.
Okay, now what’s a two-word phrase for a person who fallaciously assumes that having an autistic child automatically transforms them into the world’s leading autism and vaccine expert?
Katie Wright? Jenny McCarthy?
And what would one call this logically fallacious argument?
Truthiness? Mavericky?
And what’s the name of a person who DOES have an autistic child but disagrees with Katie?
Michael Goudeau? Sorry Katie. By your own line of reasoning, you can’t possibly be correct because Michael Goudeau has a child with autism and he strongly disagrees with you.
I am not the parent of a child with a life threatening infectious disease but I have read about how prevalent this problem is in the THIRD WORLD.
Yes, apparently Ms. Katie Wright has never heard of books or, you know, learnin’ stuff. The only possible way to know anything is to experience it yourself. There’s just no way otherwise.
Okay, stop.
This tirade is even too stupid for me to continue. There’s Ray Comfort stupid. And then there’s Katie Wright, the first education denier I’ve ever heard of.
There’s absolutely nothing in her piece that even comes close to a coherent thought. It’s just her throwing out trite, meaningless buzz words to suggest what a brilliant maverick she is for not accepting what the Truth Nazis, those truthinistas with their fancy books tell her and just declaring the mantel of autism expert by fiat alone while projecting her own side’s arguments onto her critics:
I have “done my research” and “know the facts!”
That’s what you and your AoA cohorts say. The real experts, of which Amanda Peet is not (nor has she ever claimed to be), don’t pretend to know more than what can be demonstrably proven with evidence. They don’t just say they’ve done all the research or that they know all the facts. They’re happy to admit how much they don’t know while explaining the details of what they do know. When has Age of Autism or Katie Wright ever presented a single paper to a scientific peer review. When have they ever published a credible study in a reputable journal? NEVER.
And for someone who acts like she does have all the facts, she sure can misrepresent the real experts’ opinions:
Dr. Offit and I firmly believe that there is no risk whatsoever to injecting babies with an unlimited number multiple vaccines.
When, Katie? When has Dr. Paul Offit EVER, EVER made such a preposterous claim? I will personally give you every dollar I own if you can point me to a legitimate instance in which this claim was uttered by Dr. Paul Offit. Every dollar I own.
People this asshole dumb piss me off more than even sleazebags like J.B. Handley for some reason. This polemic is even worst than the stupid Thanksgiving image. No sane, rational editor of any site wishing to have credibility of any kind would publish this trash. If an eight-year-old claimed to have written this, I’d suspect they were lying and made their younger brother write it. It’s just a new low in Age of Autism’s sinking ship.
Go ahead. Click the link and read the whole bloody article. I fear any further reading on my part would only cause permanent brain damage.
How about newsweek
http://www.newsweek.com/id/165644/page/2
He said they can take 100,000 vaccines. It would kill you, the shear volume alone – your body could not even hold the liquid.
Glad we can trust a guy like Offit who’s served on ACIP to make such embarrassing statements. Should he be trusted? $1.5M per year on Merck board, over $30M for Rotateq vax he’s made.
AoA is a sad site for vaccine safety. you are right about that.
Care to source the study you’re basing this on? Oh, that’s right. You don’t have any studies to support your beliefs, no science, no evidence of any kind. You just have your own arrogant sense of truthiness. You completely failed to understand Offit’s statement, and twisted it to mean something else. He’s talking about the dosage of alleged “TOXINS!” He’s not literally suggesting we should get 100,000 vaccines, you nit. He’s saying that the anti-vaccinationists are so scientifically challenged that they don’t recognize the most basic rule of toxicology, that the dose makes the poison. The anti-vaccinationists are off by many orders of magnitude and the amount of mercury and other chemicals that anti-vaccinationists inexplicably hate are used in such minute traces that you’d HYPOTHETICALLY have to be injected with 100,000 vaccines at once before it would be “too much too soon.”
You don’t want to trust one of the leading experts on vaccines and would rather trust your gut, go nuts. But don’t put other people in danger because you’ve deluded yourself into thinking you know better than the experts.
But yes, how dare anyone make money from their job? That’s why I’m sure you never shop for food at a grocery store either, right? Because clearly they profit off of letting you believe their products haven’t been laced with anthrax. And I’m sure you don’t drive a car either because the people who make the cars profit off of convincing you that their cars won’t explode on impact. Can’t trust anyone who makes money off of their jobs, comrade.
Also, did you know that there is arsenic in potatoes and cyanide in apple cores. I bet your grocer would have you believe that you’d have to eat lots of potatoes and apples before it was dangerous. Lying capitalist bastards! Ain’t that right, comrade?
Do you take the time to look at primary sources of information, or do you just take on faith whatever the anti-vax sites say?
If you took the time to seek out the original source of the “100,000 vaccines” comment (originally, he said 10,000, but in later interviews he said it was “more like 100,000″), you’d know that mjr is quite right: Offit was referring to the number of immunological challenges an infant could handle. But “Paul Offit wants to jab your baby 100,000 times” sounds so much scarier, doesn’t it? And repeating what you read from 2nd and 3rd-hand sources is so much easier than looking for the original, isn’t it?
You might also want to check into the source of your $30M for RotaTeq figure, because it’s wrong by about $24M. The folks who came up with that figure made a very simple–I’ll be generous, and say “error”–when trying to figure out how much Offit made on his portion of the RotaTeq patent: they referred to new agreements that were put into place AFTER Offit and his colleagues sold their patents. (Agreements that were, incidentally, revamped in order to share revenues more fairly between scientists and the organizations that underwrite their work.)Poor Dr. Offit would have made a potential $30M or more under the new agreement; sadly, he had to be content with a little more than $6M (a figure he has confirmed), which he says is “way more” than one man needs. Maybe that’s why he’s donating the proceeds of his last book to autism research.
Since you are rightly concerned about trust, you may want to consider if you can trust the source of the false $30M figure, given that the error has been pointed out, yet, astonishingly, has not been corrected in their writings.
While we’re on the subject of trust, can I ask who you trust to advise policy-makers and comment publicly on vaccines, if we are automatically to discount anything said by any scientist who has made any money from them? Conflict of interest is important, and it is a problem, particularly when it is unrevealed.
I suggest you take a look at the transcript of the hearing Sen. Dan Burton held to try to imply that COIs were tainting U.S. vaccination policy. It sheds quite a bit of light on the topic, but not in the way Sen. Burton probably had hoped.
Right, thanks for mentioning Offit’s actual profits. I meant to do that myself but got caught up in the rest of the craziness.
The anti-vax obsession with bogeymen like Paul Offit, Amanda Peet (not to mention J.B. Handley’s weird fixation on David Gorski, a blogger) is unsurprising.
They have been very successful at framing the “controversy” over vaccines as a narrative, which is naturally more compelling to more people than dry, complicated, messy science. Every good narrative needs a villain or two. That’s why “our side” gets more attention when we make fun of folks like Jenny McCarthy.
It’s also why pieces like the Wired story got so much traction, and raised such ire in the anti-vax community. The lack of science behind their position has been covered before, but rarely with a reporter calling out the “bad guys” as explicitly as Amy Wallace did. For better or worse, the pro vax side is beginning to take a page from the anti-vax playbook, and they don’t seem to have another one waiting in the wings, so they just throw out more and more of the same.
It’s becoming a very interesting show for students of PR and propaganda.
My thought exactly, Squillo!
Excellent post, Skepacabra!
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