When Jim Carrey and his girlfriend appear on Larry King Live spewing inanities about vaccinations and links to autism and presenting it as a legitimate threat to public health, you wonder what CNN segment comes next: “Tonight: the Holocaust — tragedy or myth? You decide.”

Recently, the prestigious British medical journal The Lancet retracted a paper published twelve years ago by Dr. Andrew Wakefield. The paper linked the measles, mumps, rubella combined vaccine (MMR) that all children routinely receive to autism. The Lancet cited not only flawed research methodology, but massive conflicts of interest that Dr. Wakefield failed to report.

With the unsettling growth of the anti-vaccination crowd — despite overwhelming evidence that vaccines are safe — we must consider who is bolstering this epidemic of deliberate disbelief. The fact is that misguided parental advocacy groups can only go so far; it is celebrities who really add fuel to the fire.

It’s not just Bono helping Africans, or Sharon Stone working with Amfar, or Wyclef Jean enjoining people to give to Haiti — it’s also Tom Cruise implying that Brooke Shields is an inferior human being for seeking medical treatment for postpartum depression. These people have to be stopped.

Level 47 Thetan Analyst in the Cult of Scientology or not, Cruise is a menace to public health just as surely as any malicious biological organism. (Although one could say in Ebola’s favor, at least, that it doesn’t have free will.)

We cling to celebrities and their opinions dearly because we no longer have a politically anointed aristocracy. Celebrities may choose the soapboxes upon which they wish to stand, but we may also choose not to listen.

The next time someone suggests that there is some sort of “debate” about such basic biological facts as depression and psychopharmacological aids; or a “debate” about the efficacy and potential “serious side effects” of vaccines that have saved literally millions of lives — ask yourself: Who is stirring up this debate? What are the real facts? And, Why the hell is Tom Cruise jumping up and down on that couch?

Individuals with a tenuous or utterly lacking grasp on the science of an issue can have a tremendous impact on the trajectory of the debate — if only to slow it down and prevent necessary action. When George W. Bush said “the jury [was] still out” on climate change, it was because of an infinitesimally small coterie of politically motivated “scientists” (many of whose research was, in fact, sponsored by oil companies) who tell the climate deniers what they want to hear.

So, celebrity is not just a benign force for the propagation of ignorance in the twenty-first century: it is a slippery slope toward bringing uninformed individuals with an axe to grind into legitimate debates. There is nothing more pernicious than a charlatan, yet they are forever mistaken as experts.

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Andrew Rose’s Blog
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