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May 13, 2009

Star hypocrites and their private jets

From Andrew Bolt

Thursday, May 14, 2009 at 12:04am
 

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Oprah Winfrey is very concerned about global warming:
Oprah gets a pal onto her show to preach about saving the planet:
Former Vice President Al Gore delivers the sobering news about a threat to our civilization’s future.
Oprah suggests he show folks how to save the planet in one little trip:
Take a trip to the hardware store with Al Gore to see what you can do to stop global warming.
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But when Oprah makes her own little trip, all that global warming preaching is suddenly forgotten as she climbs up the stairs to her private Bombardier. Said she this week:
It’s great to have a private jet. Anyone that tells you that having your own private jet isn’t great is lying to you.
Former US vice-president and recent environmental celebrity Al Gore has topped the list of most influential people to champion the cause of global warming in a 47-country Internet survey conducted by The Nielsen Company and Oxford University.
 
Over a quarter of Australian consumers (28%) picked Al Gore as the most influential spokesperson to champion the global warming debate (compared to 18% globally), ahead of talk show megastar Oprah Winfrey (23%) and PR stuntman Richard Branson (20%).
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Oh, and Sir Richard Brazen’s latest effort for the global warming cause?
Australia’s most famous environmentalist, Tim Flannery, has lent his name to a scheme by the world’s most infamous self-publicist, Richard Branson, to burn untold tonnes of greenhouse gases so rich people can become space tourists. Flannery yesterday defended his new role as an “environmental consultant” to Branson’s Virgin Galactic venture, which aims to sell space trips to civilians.
Truly, global warming is the first major religion to be led entirely by shameless sinners, attended by assorted hypocrites and carpetbaggers.
 

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Filed under  //   Al Gore   celebrity hypocrisy   climate change   Oprah Winfrey   Richard Branson   Tim Flannery  

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May 7, 2009

Diseases Coming Back, Thanks to Anti-Vaxers

From Little Green Footballs (The headlong flight from reason and the modern world continues!)

The Wall Street Journal has an article about a report from the Centers for Disease Control warning about new outbreaks of diseases thought to be eradicated—due to parents who are buying into the anti-vaccination craziness promoted by people like Jenny McCarthy: Fear of Vaccines Spurs Outbreaks, Study Says.
Parental doubts about the safety of childhood vaccinations are leading to outbreaks of largely eradicated diseases like measles and whooping cough, doctors warned in a new report.

A U.S. measles outbreak last year — almost exclusively among unvaccinated people — has sparked concern about places where many parents opt out of having their children vaccinated.

In Ashland, Ore., more than a quarter of kindergartners aren’t vaccinated, leading the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention to hold a town-hall meeting on vaccination there earlier this year. ...

Too many abstainers can put a town at risk, wrote Dr. Saad Omer, of Emory University in Atlanta, the lead author in the report in this week’s New England Journal of Medicine.

“People need to recognize that in the case of infectious diseases, what other people do impacts my child,” Dr. Omer said in an interview. “If they live in a community that has a cluster of refusers, their risk of getting a vaccine-preventable disease goes up, just by virtue of who they play with.”

Vaccines for diseases like whooping cough aren’t 100% effective for each individual, and some children can’t be vaccinated for medical reasons. That means that eradicating a disease requires vaccinating a large percentage of the nearby population to stop infections from spreading — what’s called “herd immunity.”

Schools with many abstainers have been linked to outbreaks.
There are actually schools that accept children who haven’t been vaccinated?

And by the way, in addition to being a shill for “intelligent design” creationism, Republican Tom Tancredo is also an anti-vaccination kook:
A woman asked Tancredo, “What do you think of autism in this country?” She has a 4-year-old with autism. Tancredo said, “I think much of it is due to the number of shots we give to kids . . .” They talked about mercury in vaccines’ preservatives.
UPDATE at 5/7/09 10:32:34 am:

And if you haven’t heard already, Oprah Winfrey is now promoting the anti-vaccination kooks too, by giving a talk show to Jenny McCarthy: Why is Oprah Winfrey promoting vaccine skeptic Jenny McCarthy?

UPDATE at 5/7/09 10:41:35 am:

And to make things even worse, support for anti-vaccination insanity is now beginning to show up in GOP state platforms; from the Oklahoma platform:
5. We support the right of parents to apply for exemptions for their children from school vaccinations requirements for medical reasons, religious reasons, or other reasons of conscience.

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Filed under  //   autism   health   irrationality   Jenny McCarthy   measles   Oprah Winfrey   Republican Party   vaccines   whooping cough  

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May 6, 2009

Oprah and the vaccine sceptic

What strange times we live in.
 
How else to explain the campaign currently being waged by the stupid, the ignorant and the irresponsible against one of the greatest achievements of medical science? One that has saved countless lives and which has changed parenthood completely?
 
It was only a hundred or so years ago when to be a parent was to face the fact that you almost certainly would have to go through the horror of watching one of your young children die of disease in front of you.
 
And watch helplessly.
 
Not any more. Now, thanks to modern medical science, what parents expect as normal is to watch all of their children grow up to adulthood. A death in childhood is now the exception, not the rule.
 
So much pain and suffering prevented.
 
And yet we actually have a sorry collection of irresponsible people who are putting children's lives at risk by not getting their own kids vaccinated and trying to persuade others to do likewise.
 
The result? Diseases some of us may never have heard of, like Scarlet Fever, are back. Measles is on the march again. False claims - and we now know they are false - about a link between the MMR vaccine and autism are still being spread.
 
The deaths of any children from these totally preventable diseases is on the heads of those who failed to get their own children vaccinated and those who urged them to do so.
 
In relation to the study published in The Lancet referred to below, it involved only 12 people and was conducted by a doctor who was already in the pay of lawyers representing an anti-vaccination group and who had already declared that he intended to find "proof" against the use of the MMR vaccine, and made sure he did.

May 6, 2009

 
Plus, a man whose daughter got sick because of anti-vaccine hysteria. (Via Aetiology.) Note this: “The sorry MMR saga began in 1998 with a tiny study (since partially retracted) in the Lancet.” Seems like there’s a lot of bad science in The Lancet. Some vaccine-related thoughts of mine here.
 
 

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Filed under  //   autism   health   idiots   irrationality   Oprah Winfrey   science   vaccines  

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