Once again, Bill Maher (and his science expert, David Duchovny) went off on a tirade against vaccination on his show, full of ignorance and stupidity and lies. Time to read Orac some more.
Bill Maher and his apologists frequently gasp in indignation whenever someone like myself or other skeptics call him antivaccine. Unfortunately, as I showed last week, antivaccine tropes fly fast and furious out of his mouth. His misleading claim about the lack of vaccinated/unvaccinated studies is not only misleading, but objectively not not true. It simply isn’t. Also, whenever antivaccine organizations try to do such studies themselves, inevitably they’re utterly worthless and/or actually show the exact opposite of what antivaccinationists had hoped. When vaccinated/unvaccinated studies are planned, they are actually attacked by antivaccine groups because these groups know that the studies won’t show what they hope they’ll show.
Yes, the claim that there’s never been a “vaccinated/unvaccinated” study is an antivaccine trope, tried and true. What Maher said about it would have been perfectly at home on the websites of antivaccine groups, such as Age of Autism, SafeMinds, VaxTruth, and the National Vaccine Information Center. Ditto his analogies about the immune system “needing a workout” by combatting “real disease,” an analogy so breathtakingly ignorant of actual immunology and infectious disease that Maher should really just hang his head in shame.
Maher has zero credibility with me.
Confused by ” but objectively not not true.”
Presumably needs one fewer (or one more?) “not”.
That post from Orac is from last year though. Got a bit confused with the flu vaccine weakness part, but it was referring to last year’s flu vaccine.
PZ, don’t be so hard on Maher. He is just living up to the high standards of a Richard Dawkins Science and Reason Award winner.
To me that’s like saying that the only “real” workout is spearing mammoths in the tundra, and anything else is all part of Big Exercise. Just as if the body would realise that this lifting of weights repeatedly is a sham and would promptly stop building muscle.
He’s not even that funny.
duchovny does mean spiritual http://browse.dict.cc/slovak-english/duchovn%C3%BD.html
So, is Maher modeling himself as an anti-vax version of Moulder or something now?
The anti-vax lies are out there…
BTW, is anybody watching the X-Files? I don’t remember if it was the same before, but the first episode seemed even more conspiracy-themed (to a fault), and purposely blurring the lines between campy entertainment like it always was (and which I liked) and reality, with cheap simplistic references to real conspiracies in order to lend credibility to the ridiculous ones. Tuskegee and Henrietta Lacks were mentioned specifically in a terrible and I thought offensively exploitative bit of dialogue by Mulder.
@8 I think what’s happened is, in the 1990s, conspiracies used to be more fun — anybody remember there was this huge elaborate conspiracy theory community around the death of Marilyn Monroe?
Nowadays we have 9/11, and Iraq WMDs, and slimeball Sandy Hook Truthers, and muslim countries full of people who blow themselves up in our general direction because they think the CIA is trying to make their kids sterile.
I heard that line and it didn’t bother me so much because I was still sorta living in the world that X-Files grew up in, but I agree taken out of that context it makes you sick to your stomach. Back then Mulder could mention Tuskegee or the Lucky Dragon Incident in the same breath as Ancient Astronauts or the Pole Shift Theory, there was a level of detachment, and the idea that the only people that actually put all this together into a coherent worldview were cooks. Nowadays it’s just not fun anymore.
The show used to be, at its heart, escapist, and I’m not sure it isn’t anymore, but if you’re just coming to it now or you were very young when you first saw it maybe you felt differently. I was 22 when 9/11 happened and I remember having the very concrete realization that the concept of “conspiracy theory” in the popular zeitgeist had completely transformed, that it wasn’t really a laughing matter, and I noticed that nobody ever talked about “idealistic” conspiracies anymore, like UFOs.
@8 I read it a different way. On a show like the X Files, you need to tie it to real life events to “sell” it. It’s like Star Trek’s “Rule of Threes” where everytime you list something, you give three, two real and one made up, ie “He’s going to be greatest author of all time, up there with Shakespeare, Hemingway and Vandershneed.”
In my mind, this was a statement of “Here are two real life examples of terrible things the government has done that you can’t argue with, so it gives a bit of credence to our story.” If it were really being put forward as a legitimate conspiracy theory, I’d probably feel similar to you. But since the XFiles has never really tried to be taken seriously but always had fun with it, I think this kind of reference was more meant as a “You know, stuff like this does happen” instead of exploitative.
Hmm. “The X-Files” is definitely darker and edgier this time around.
I’m enjoying the latest episode, though.
[SPOILER ALERT!]
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Mulder did the Mushroom Samba, the perfect X-Files delicious-ham-and-cheese sequence in an otherwise fairly serious episode.
Gordon Ramsay would slap the shit out of you, if he heard you say that!
I don’t expect reason or intellectual honesty from Bill Maher. For some reason I expected better though, from David Duchovny.
@13
You’d think people who do media that treats wacky conspiracy theories as totally fake plot points would get that they’re nonsense in real life too.
Then again, Rowdy Roddy Piper (aka the guy from “They Live”) and Mike Judge (creator of literal conspiracy theory parody Dale Gribble) are both wacky NWO conspiracy theorists, so I guess there’s precedent.
@13
Er, not treats them as plot points, uses them as plot points.
I must thank Orac yet again for both his previous work deconstructing Maher and his ongoing efforts. Thank you! That guy is so irrational while being incredible smug about it.
Doesn’t surprise me in the least. I still remember a few years ago when he had Bill Frist, a Senator and more importantly for this topic, an actual doctor, over vaccines.
While laypeople can at times challenge experts even in the experts field, you have to do your homework to show where they misinterpreted something or are being dishonest. It takes actual work, actual research. Science is full of what appear to be counterintuitive results, you can’t go on common sense here, and the state of the art is under constant revision.
What does Maher do, then? A SINGLE STUDY FROM THE 1960s. At that point it hardly matters if the study was properly interpreted, if it was designed and run well, it’s woefully out of date. Far too out of date to stand on its own when there are many more recent studies supporting vaccination.
He lost me as any sort of serious thinker right then, especially with how he didn’t really engage in the slightest with Frists counterarguments.