Larry King is an enigma to me. He has somehow become an institution on CNN despite being one of the world’s worst interviewers and continuing to book peddlers of nonsense. He has given reptiles like Sylvia Browne a far bigger platform than someone of her (barely passable) cold reading skills deserves. This Friday, though, old Larry is reaching a new low. He is having Dr. Jenny McCarthy and Dr. Jim Carey on his show to talk about autism. Oh, wait, did I say doctors? Sorry, I meant, actress Jenny McCarthy and actor Jim Carey. It’s so hard to tell doctors and actors apart after all.
Thanks to the anti-vaccine movement, we are now seeing pockets of measles and polio rise out of places that had previously been free of those diseases. Nigeria, a country suspicious of western medicine, has had immunization boycotts and now is an exporter of polio to countries around it. In the United States, the only people who die of tetanus are those who aren’t vaccinated.
There is little debate in the scientific community that the world wide vaccination efforts mark one of the greatest achievements in modern medicine. Just a couple generations ago, smallpox, polio, measles, etc were commonplace. Our lifespan has increased because of this.
And now, we have Jenny McCarthy and Jim Carey, armed with nonsense and enough scientific sounding jargon to appear reasonable, telling parents to reject one societies greatest accomplishments. There isn’t a single study that I could find that has ever, ever linked vaccinations to autism. The one study, back in 1998, that got everything started has been debunked and discredited. Study after study since then has shown there is no link between vaccines and autism. None. Please, let’s get past this.
Now Jenny and Jim will be on Larry King, being interviewed by someone who probably won’t bother to read anything about vaccines, who will toss softballs all night, and who will unlikely challenge any of the drivel Jenny and Jim spout. Enough of this garbage from Larry King. Time to let him go off to pasture. Time to fire Larry King.
