Everyone is entitled to their own opinion but not to their own facts.
-- Daniel Patrick Moynihan
Politics is full of people making up their own facts. Candidates do it for votes, sitting politicians do it so they can keep the votes that got them elected, and the media does it to boost ratings. If you don't like reality, change it. Even if the other guy can prove you wrong, he's not going to. Why? because most times, he has no use for the truth either.
This article, Shouting Fire was written by Scott Hurst for the JREF blog "Swift" It highlights the problems with the anti-vaccination crusade headed by Jenny McCarthy and Jim Carrey. The two of them are guilty of either manipulating the facts so they seem to support what they are saying, or of not making the attempt to see things as they are rather than how they want them to be. Most of the time, we can ignore people who seem determined to be wrong with fierce conviction because they rarely harm anyone but themselves, but when Jenny and Jimmy mount a crusade to convince others, claiming no other authority than that they are concerned using evidence long since refuted, they cross the line from comical to deadly. Children die because parents believe them. It costs our health care system more money because parents believe them.
So what responsibility does anyone have to speak the truth? If you catch someone at a lie, they can claim that they just didn't know the truth and that they really believed what they were saying. We accept that very readily, but what happens when that untruth costs lives? There are plenty of tragedies that are nobody's fault. An old tree falls just at the right moment and kills a passerby. A lightning strike kills a jogger. We don't say "Well that man should not have been jogging." or "Couldn't that man see the tree was old and rotten." No, that's just bad luck.
However, what if someone in authority gets the wrong idea into his head, refuses to listen to acknowledged experts on the subject, going so far as to try to silence them or ridicule them so no one else will listen to them and refuses to learn about the subject he is talking about? What if people die who would otherwise have lived had he, at some point along the way, derailed his crusade by learning the facts AND being open to them? Even if we are assuming he actually believes what he is saying, how much responsibility does he have to get his facts straight?
If you went into an intensive care unit in a hospital and took some random patient there off life support because you ferverently believed that hospitals were evil and the life support was actually killing him, you would immediately be arrested and most likely considered crazy. Why do we do that? We do that because life support does NOT kill people. In fact it keeps people alive when almost everything else has failed to do so. We know this because we have a mountain of evidence gathered by people who spend their entire lives studying the subject. We know it because patients who are placed on life support live when before they would have died. But we arrest people who arbitrarily shut them off for two reasons: People could die as a result of that belief and this man should have known better. He doesn't have to have any medical training. He doesn't have to have studied medicine or even know what the machines in the ICU are doing, yet we place on him the responsibility to "know better" because there is plenty of readily available information telling him that what he's doing is wrong, yet he continues to do it. Either he's malicious or he's crazy.
So why would Jenny McCarthy be any different? Virtually ALL the available medical research and vaccination studies tell her that she's wrong. By her own words she relies on studies that have already been found to be wrong, yet she persists in her actions and by her actions parents decide not to vaccinate their children. When vaccination rates go down, children die. At what point do we say "She should know better."? 10 deaths? 100? Where do you draw the line?
Of course, you could say she is entitled to her opinion and those parents who listen to her could go to more reliable sources of information and learn for themselves, so it's really the parents fault when they don't vaccinate their children. Of course, you'd be right, but I speak of responsibility, not fault. How responsible should we expect someone like Jenny McCarthy to be? She has an international forum. She claims to know a lot about vaccines and autism. When she talks, she has to understand that people will listen. That's her goal. Doesn't she have a greater responsibility to get her facts straight than most people?
Now that she's got Oprah on her side, where is that line?
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