It’s a fascinating example of motivated reasoning. Bill Maher has been raked over the coals on his irrational, anti-scientific attitude towards vaccines; his own guests have scorned his views on his own show; he’s been confronted repeatedly with the evidence and the rebuttals. He’s got to know by now that there is no rational justification for claiming that vaccines or thimerosal cause autism, or that the drug companies are profiting hugely by including poisons in their vaccines (which makes no sense, even if you do believe in greedy pharmaceutical mega-corporations).
So what does he do? He invites anti-vax crank extraordinaire, Robert F. Kennedy Jr., to sit around and commiserate with one another about how they’re called cranks and liars for merely denying the scientific consensus.
There’s a reason they’re called kooks: because they are. Another indication that they’re crackpots is that they’re so refractory to learning — rather than look at the evidence, they’re digging into their little bunker of denial and having a pity party.
Don’t take my word for it. David Gorski does a thorough dissection of the lies and conspiracy theories.
After this season of incredibly embarrassing anti-science rants by Bill Maher, my retort to his wounded indignant cries that he’s “not antivaccine,” is simply to say: If you’re not antivaccine, then stop repeating long discredited antivaccine talking points as though they were scientifically valid and stop doing credulous interviews with antivaccine activists like RFK, Jr. 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.
As far as I’m concerned, Bill Maher is just an atheist Vani Hari, and needs a similar kind of exposure.
What’s really sad about this is that Kennedy is a force for good (AFAICT) in his efforts to restore and preserve waterways and provide clean drinking water to the less-fortunate. How he could be so right on one issue and So. Damned. Stupid. on another is just baffling and sad.
Does Maher ever present the ubiquitous “disclaimer”: The views presented by these guests are solely their own, and in no way represent the opinion of Maher.
IOW, maybe Maher could claim that he is presenting these kooks to show exactly how wacky they are, with no paraphrasing, or editing, on his part. Just giving them a soapbox to show us how out-to-lunch they are, in their own words. Has he ever said anything along those lines, to give the slightest hint that Maher is a rational person? If not, I hope he not surprised that we think he a kook also.
Meh, it’s not that unusual. Look at Dawkins.
Life’s a bitch when reality refuses to conform to one’s own notions.
” Hateful P.Z. Myers says Bill Maher is an atheist Van Hari and against science. 5000 words to follow”
– The Irish Wanker.
Kennedy isn’t anti-fax; he said he had his kids vaccinated and that we should get vaccinated. He’s a plaintiffs’ attorney and sees lawsuits everywhere. He said he’s against mercury in the vaccines (which I personally don’t know how much if any Is actually in vaccines. And Ive had both my kids vaccinated without any problems). He also said that he is suspicious of all the “new vaccines” coming out; whatever that means. So, I’m not defending Kennedy, I’m just correcting the statement that he’s anti-vas. I think he is big-pharma paranoid. I have to say that I am a bit paranoid about big corporations too. I think that these businesses do put their profit margins ahead of the public interest. There have been a too many drugs released that had high profit margins with devistating side effects. And they’ve been writing legislation that gives them incredible bargaining powers.
There’s a difference between dissent, where you have scientific evidence to back you up, and denial, where your argument is totally emotional, and you grasp at pseudoscientific straws to back it up. The big pharma conspiracy is a pseudoscientific strawman. Maher sounds like he has an emotional argument, not a scientific one.
I think it was removed from vaccines a few years ago. Not that there was ever any danger. There’s less mercury in a vaccine shot than there is in a tuna sandwich. Literally.
Mercury is removed from all vaccines except multi-dose flu vaccines. This has been true for the last 14 years or so. And yet autism spectrum disorders continue to rise.
This would be enough to convince some people that they were on the wrong track. RFK Jr is not one of those people.
In any case, the thimerosal in vaccines is not the really toxic form of mercury. The really toxic form is methylmercury. Thimerosal (ethyl mercury) is nothing to mess with, but it’s not the horror that the fearmongers would have you believe it is. (Someone tried to commit suicide by drinking it a while back. He failed.)
@congaboy: Almost no one ever calls themselves “anti-vaccine”. Jenny McCarthy claims she has never been anti-vaccine. What he calls himself is irrelevant when he makes statements like this:
“They get the shot, that night they have a fever of a hundred and three, they go to sleep, and three months later their brain is gone,” Kennedy said. “This is a holocaust, what this is doing to our country.”
http://scienceblogs.com/insolence/2015/04/09/the-annals-of-im-not-antivaccine-part-15-robert-f-kennedy-jr-and-the-vaccine-associated-holocaust/
LykeX:
IE: the Hg in Tuna is methyl-Hg
That’s why methyl-HG is toxic, it remains in the muscle tissue when consumed; as exemplified by the mercury intoxicated tuna. Ethyl Mercury in the vaccines is not incorporable into ones muscle tissues, so the kidneys can just flush it out of the blood.
.
I want to thank Wakefield for pointing out the danger of Mercury in vaccines. The consequences of that identification are astronomical. All the american vaccine producers removed the preserving Hg, reducing multidose vaccine vials to multiple vials of short lived single dose vials. Thus making prices skyrocket; making it too expensive for the people who need it most.
Thank you Wakefield. /sarcasm
~
I too can go the anti-vax antirational route: claim Wakefield did it as his version of genocide, to eliminate all those poor people in 3rd world countries who can’t give all their money to Wakefield (to buy his “patented version” of the vaccine).
Bill Maher is such an infuriatingly mixed bag of the rational and the irrational put in a can of opinionated self righteousness found in the entertainment industry. The sad thing about his show is that he, confident in his superior intellect, constantly has right wing guests that out-fox him. The televised personality left is a step behind the right wing owing to our tradition of written argument. Our greatest minds have a low “Q” rating, leaving the stage open to outrageous cranks.
@Nerd of Redhead, Dances OM Trolls #7:
You’re going to have to be a little more specific about what you mean by the phrase “big pharma conspiracy”. It is a matter of public record, for example, that pharma corporations routinely make minor changes to drugs in order to avoid losing patents, bribe doctors to over-prescribe, and game drug studies using a number of methods. Seriously, what the fuck would make you think that any massive for-profit corporation in a capitalist system wouldn’t be shady as hell? It’s practically illegal for them to not try to maximize profits no matter the social or environmental or human costs, as long as their shareholders care more about profits than anything else (and so many of them do – that’s how they got enough money to own companies).
Your paranoia is showing absent you providing evidence that vaccine production has the problems you list.
John Horstman, “Big Pharma conspiracy theory” has to do more than the usual corporations behaving like corporations do.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Big_Pharma_conspiracy_theory
Also, obviously, anti-vaxxers and homeopaths talk about this conspiracy as well.
Here’s rational wiki’s take on it.
http://rationalwiki.org/wiki/Big_Pharma
LykeX @8: Thank you for clarifying that and I like your point about the tuna sandwich.
specialffrog @10: Good points, thanks for pointing that out to me, I sit corrected.
slithey tove@11: Wow! interesting information, thank you too.
I have to say that I like RFK Jr. as a person, but I find his feelings on this topic very disconcerting, to say the least.
I loved when RFK Jr took down a murderous (as in for real) coal baron named Don Blankenship. Very sad to see he’s been taken in by it all.
Bill Maher is a sexist, anti-GMO, anti-vax nutjob who happens to call himself an atheist.
@slithey tove (twas brillig (stevem)) #2:
He then would have to do it for basically every show, considering how frequently he has on right wing twits like S.E. Cupp and David Frum, even if they’re there just as the token conservative. And many times the conservative guest will not even be that different from Maher, who is usually just as much in favor of the U.S. killing people as are many hawks, the difference being that he wants it done through a court of law rather than by presidential fiat.
But back to his vaccine views, we can at least take a little comfort in the fact that Maher has no children of his own to subject to such quackery–and I would hope any parent would ignore his advice, considering how vehemently he is against children.
Eh. What’s not to believe?
Corporations must be greedy by law.
Any corporation above 100 000 employees is inherently evil.
@19 Not only that, but literally everything they do is evil.
literally!!!!!
Corporations are heartless, soulless and conscience-free, and are motivated solely by greed, the love of money. Pretty much what John the Revelator was describing as the image of the beast. The beast being a cruel and greedy tyrant, and a corporation being legally a person.
The anti-vax backlash has been so swift and so intense that most people no longer will self-identify as actually being against vaccines. They will say they pro-“safe” vaccines (implying there is something wrong with the ones we have now), or they’ll say they are for delaying vaccines or “spacing them out.” They’ll say they just want parents to have the right to choose what goes into their children’s bodies. They are pro-moms! They are pro-freedom!
Their views haven’t changed, but like creationists they hate being labeled anti-science.
congaboy #6,
Those are well known antivax talking points. Read Gorski’s linked post at SBM, and browse the many others about antivax (through the tags), you’ll see they’re common antivax tropes.
Since there is no thimerosal in most vaccines, does this mean that an otherwise minor error in the vaccine plant will result in an armload of bacteria and/or fungus?
Jim1138@25 — no, there’s almost no risk. The way the manufacturers get around the lack of preservative is to use single-dose vials. That is, the vaccine is sterile until opened, used once, and then the container is discarded. There’s nothing wrong with this approach per se, but the reason why vaccine manufacturers and public health physicians resisted dropping out the preservatives is that single-dose, preservative-free vials are (i) more expensive, and (ii) require more thorough cold chain control. This is a minor problem in rich countries like the US, but in poorer countries with less industrial infrastructure, this can create huge problems in vaccine delivery.
So, I keep seeing Maher pop up here and there and as somebody who applies vaccines regularly in his work and accepts their efficacy and value, I’ve grown so weary of him and his ilk. Is it unfair of me to disregard him wholly for his awful woo anti-science attitude? I mean, it’s true that it doesn’t mean he is necessarily going to be as incredibly wrong on every other topic, of course, but then the same is true of YECs. And yet, would anybody want to ask a YEC about their opinion on a topic that isn’t about evolution and creation? Would anybody ask Ken Ham about his views unrelated to those topics? Perhaps I’m just too miffed and should give Maher some credit on other issues, but I’m tired of his idiocy. I’m not really interested in being fair to him anymore. Is that wrong?
Bill Maher did a long criticism of climate change deniers in which he argued that the overwhelming scientific consensus was that man was responsible. But on vaccines he denies the overwhelming scientific consensus. I wrote and told Bill that he can’t have it both ways.
Congaboy@6
Another way to look at the mercury thing is that chemical compounds to different things. One kind of mercury is OMFWTFHORRIBLES, so people without much knowledge of chemistry therefore assume everything with mercury is OMGWTFHORRIBLES.
Sodium EXPLODES when it comes into contact with water, and Chlorine is a very nasty and potentially lethal gas. Sodium Chloride? That’s table salt.
After reading him describing the existence of people with autism as a “holocaust?”
saganite, being sick of Maher because of his anti-vax nonsense and assorted assholeries (sexism, Islamophobia) has been a pretty common sentiment, at least among Pharyngulites.
@saganite #27 I don’t think you are being unfair.
You have no moral obligation to listen to someone you don’t like or to take them seriously.