"Here we go again. The 2009 recipient of the Richard Dawkins Award, anti-vaccine wingnut and lover of cancer quackery Bill Maher, decided to use the occasion of the season finale of Real Time with Bill Maher to answer some of the criticisms that have been leveled against him. All I can say is this: I'm incredibly grateful that this is the season finale of Maher's show. I don't think I can take much more of his moronic anti-science stances being proudly trumpeted.
...
No, what Maher has said in the past was far, far more than just arguing that a healthy diet and exercise can maximize your resistance to infection with the flu or other infectious diseases, which is true but in a trivial sort of way. If that's all Bill Maher had said, then I would have had little or no problem with him. But that's not all that he said or even what he said. Rather, he parroted a lie about Louis Pasteur that he had "recanted" on his deathbed, echoing the same sorts of false "deathbed conversion" stories that circulate claiming that Charles Darwin recanted about evolution. The implication was plain: That Pasteur had doubted germ theory on his deathbed and come over to his rival, Antoine Beauchamp, who had claimed that it wasn't the microbes that caused disease but rather the "biological terrain." While it is true that immunosuppressed or debilitated patients are more susceptible to various infections, many, many pathogenic microbes can still cause serious disease in perfectly healthy people. The strain of virus responsible for the 1918 influenza pandemic, for instance, tended to kill younger and healthier people. Indeed, it got started in the U.S. in an Army barracks, and it doesn't get much healthier than young men between the ages of 18-22 in the military. Similarly, the current H1N1 (a.k.a. "swine flu") pandemic shows disturbing signs of similarly affecting the young more severely. Maher also said on many occasions that he views disease as being due to "aggregate toxicity" from all the "toxins" of modern life and the "poisons" that we ingest.
...
Then Bill goes completely off the rails:
...I do understand the theory of inoculation. Yes, you give someone a little bit of the disease and it fools your body into providing antibodies which fight it. Brilliant! Bravo! Maybe there is some occasions where inoculation is a wise thing to do. I hope not. I hope I would never have to have one because, you know, to present it just as this genius medical advancement, no, it's actually a risky medical procedure that begs long term cost-benefit analysis.
If anyone still doubts that the 2009 recipient of the Richard Dawkins Award (Bill Maher) is anti-vaccine, pure and simple, to his very core the above statement should lay to rest any doubts. Vaccination is not a "risky medical procedure." It is among the safest medical procedures there is. Depending on the disease, it is also among the most effective. Arguably, no medical intervention ever envisioned by human beings has saved more lives at so low a cost and so low a risk as vaccination. His ignorance is just as toxic as any of those "toxins" he fears, particularly his ignorance that vaccination has undergone and continues to undergo long term cost-benefit analyses, safety monitoring, and study.
...
But that's not the worst. This is:
People have said, "Well, Bill, there are people now dying of the swine flu who were in good health." By whose standards? Hospitals serve Jello. They have fast food franchises in their lobby. The autopsy report on Michael Jackson came back, and they said he was in good health. OK, to me he looked a little pale. So, I don't always agree with what Western medicine says means good health.
Holy flaming non sequitur, Batman!
I don't have HBO so I didn't realize just how bad Maher was. Yeesh.
Printer-friendly format
Email this thread to a friend
Bookmark this thread
(1000+ posts)
Send PM |
Profile |
Ignore
