Jenny McCarthy Gets Her Comeuppance

For nearly 14 years, many parents in the Western world have been wringing their hands about what to do about vaccinations – a formality taken for granted over the past half century.   Measles, mumps, chicken pox and small pox- killers of children in past centuries, were nearly wiped out in the latter half of the 20th Century by the advent of preventative vaccinations which injected antibodies  that impeded the spread of the diseases.

That was until an unfortunate article appeared in the U.K’s premiere medical journal The Lancet in July 1998.  A study then published by Dr. Andrew Wakefield concluded that the measles, mumps and rubella vaccine—a mainstay of public-health disease prevention efforts around the world—was linked to autism and gastrointestinal disorders in young children.

The study led to a highly charged campaign, led by such celebrities as former Playboy centerfold and television personality Jenny McCarthy, that called for the end of vaccinations.   At the same time, a parallel campaign was led by medical researchers who claimed that the original study had been based on a fraudulent and inaccurate data.

The Lancet finally withdrew the article in January of last year after concluding that “several elements” of the paper were incorrect. But the journal didn’t describe any of the discrepancies as fraud. A British regulator stripped Dr. Wakefield of his medical license last May, citing “serious professional misconduct” in the way he handled the research.

An article, published  a few days ago by journalist Brian Deer, found that important details of the cases of each of 12 children reported in the original study either misrepresented or altered the actual experiences of the children, the journal said. “In no single case could the medical records be fully reconciled with the descriptions, diagnoses, or histories published in the journal,” the editorial said. It called the study “an elaborate fraud.”

The damage done by the original article and the irresponsible advocacy of people like Jenny McCarthy and the organization Talk About Curing Autism is incalculable.   Hundreds of thousands of children in the West are now exposed to diseases that were already but wiped out by the mid 1960s. Much like the scare over DDT, fraudulently declared toxic to human beings by Rachel Carson in the mid- 1960s ( despite practically having wiped out malaria), the scare over vaccinations has proved again how politics has crept into science and how political correctness  has been used to assault the truth.

Jenny McCarthy and her supporters steadfastly cling to their version of the truth.   But her pseudo-science now deserves out right condemnation and a public backlash against her irresponsible advocacy and that of her claque  should be exposed as the posturing of a know nothing celebrity completely out of her depth.

Daily Blurb #1

The Battle Over Health Care Will Continue

The Obama Administration’s narrow victory over health care in March 2010 may now be in danger.   See today’s article in the New York Times.  It is has always been my position that the passage of this legislation, forced through against such popular resistance was a monumental mistake for the Administration, a pyrrhic victory that cast the President as both blind and unfeeling about public opinion.  With the Republican dominated House now vowing to take on the Administration on the issue of repeal, the stage is set for a titanic and historic struggle in Congress in 2011.  While many Democrats, charged by their apparent victories on Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell and the START Treaty, are preparing for a fight in the hopes of carrying it as a trophy into the 2012 election season, I firmly believe it will backfire and that Obamacare will in fact hang as an albatross around the party’s neck for years to come.

The Israeli-Palestinian Peace Talk Pantomime Opens its 2011 Season

If 2010 was a frustrating year for Middle East peace activists, wait until you experience 2011.  It will continue to be the Netanyahu Government’s strategy to push the Palestinians for unconditional negotiations while the Palestinian leadership will continue to demand a settlement freeze as a pre-condition for any future negotiations.  But the Palestinians clearly don’t want a simple settlement freeze; they had one from December 2009 through September 2010 and failed to come to the table.  They want Israel to agree to remove all settlements before negotiations even begin. The Palestinian leadership has clearly decided that it has enough international clout to apply pressure to the Israelis by doing nothing and letting other governments to do the talking – and perhaps even negotiating, for them.   The Obama Administration has looked helpless  in the face of such intransigence, choosing to apply pressure to Netanyahu rather than Abbas.  It has been a disastrous policy leading to deepening distrust between the U.S. and Israel and the  ever widening possibilities for the outbreak of violence.  Netanyahu’s statement today is only further evidence of this continuing pantomime.  I will have more to say on this in the coming weeks.

Muslim Abuse of Christians in Egypt

It is extraordinary how little is known about the persecution of the Christian Copts in Egypt.  Over the weekend, following the bombing of a church on New Year’s Eve in Alexandria in which 25 church goers were killed, our attention should be riveted on this issue.  It is representative of a wide scale assault on Christian communities throughout the Muslim world and while the Egyptian government might be wringing its hands over the death of the Copts, how many know that it is the secular Egyptian government itself which maintains an anti-Christian policy, with widespread discrimination legislated against the sect in many areas of daily life.  Even more appalling than this though, is the abject failure of Christian leaders  – most particularly the leaders of major Protestant denominations, to express their outrage and contempt for  the continued harassment of Christian minorities in both Egypt and elsewhere in the Muslim world.

My Letter in the Los Angeles Times

Please see my letter, published in the Los Angeles Times on January 1.   It was written in response to an  oped by Neal Gabler on December 26 which claimed that the Democratic party was not quite progressive or bold enough for his tastes and that the current President is just another Democratic cop out.  Naturally, the letter was edited.  Here is the full text:

Worry no more about the fate of poor Planet Pluto.  It is the terrestrial sphere where Democratic pundits such as Neal Gablereath ( Compromised to Death 12/26 ) have taken up residence. Gabler’s understanding of American politics and the American electorate are so bizarrely out of focus that it is natural to believe he is indeed living on another planet. It is plainly absurd to suggest that Barack Obama has changed course simply because that is the nature of modern Democrats in power.  That is the nature of American politics, period. All of the Democratic presidents he mentions, FDR, Truman and LBJ, moved to compromise when their agendas ran into resistance. The presidential ship regularly founders on the shoals of such political realities and it matters little whether it is helmed by a Democrat or a Republican.

Gabler also seems not to have heard of the Tea Party movement, (not mentioned once in his piece), a grass roots resistance to the ideological purity exemplified by Obama in his first first two years in power and which led the charge in ruthlessly repudiating his agenda in November.  Obama has demonstrated that he is enough of a pragmatist to gauge the direction of the political winds.   It is a skill, sadly, which completely evades pundits such as Gabler.

Avi Davis
Westwood

A Pyrrhic Victory

Bells rang out across the land.   The people, freed from centuries of oppression by a feudal system of health care, rushed into village streets, banging drums and shaking timbrels.  Thirty- two million people, in one voice, wept with gratitude as their redemptive leader read them the new order.  No longer would they be at the mercy of avaricious insurance companies.  No longer would anyone reject them for a prior medical condition or their age;  no longer would a citizen’s income dictate whether or not he or she could see a doctor.

That certainly is the reaction for which Barack Obama is longing as he sets his pen to the most important change to national health care since Lyndon Johnson’s landmark Medicare legislation 45 years ago.

There are plenty of people around the world who are declaring that its about time.  After all, Germany had introduced government sanctioned  sickness and accident insurance  as long ago as 1883 when Otto von Bismarck was Chancellor and most European countries have enjoyed some variety of nationalized health for at least 60 years.

Yet, there were always good reasons the United States did not have a universal health care system.  For all their claims of success, the Europeans, Canadians and other Western nations’ systems have operated as notorious drains on their treasuries, reducing the overall quality of care and consigning many aged, terminally ill individuals to wait lists that sometimes extend years.

But more important than this is the notion that a Government managed health care system vitiated against the country’s bedrock belief in free enterprise and the efficacy of market mechanisms in regulating the application of a service vital service to the public.  Health care, for generations of Americans, was never regarded so much as a  right, as much as it was a privilege to which one worked hard to obtain – and then maintain.

Yesterday, that changed.  Health care has now become an entitlement in the United States of America which will almost certainly bring with it most of the other ills that have attached to similar systems. Who will pay for it in an era when government is already heaving under a merciless burden of debt, is still anyone’s guess.

For all the euphoria, it is not certain that anyone has a comprehensive understanding  of what is in this health bill.  From its earlier incarnations, pages  been ripped out, amendments slapped on to politically sensitive sections, whole chapters eviscerated – it has begun to resemble one of those study guides high school students carry into their open book exams with sections pasted in from assigned texts, yellow post-its dangling from its edges and hundreds of dog-eared pages marking important areas of concentration.     It may take many months for the final version to be published and even then there is no certainty that anyone willl be able to get a handle on its Byzantine complexity. Obamacare enters history as a modern day version of the Rosetta Stone, to be interpreted and reinterpreted by our judges and legislators for many generations into the future.

What then of the political maneuvering to took to get this bird in the air?   The Obama flight plan, which only two months ago, damaged by incessant flak with its engines on fire and billowing smoke, was in a tailspin, its future grim.  It now appears now to have pulled out of it of its death dive, albeit with its  fuselage singed and rattling away at low altitude.

But that might not be for long.  The extra cargo this administration has taken on in passing the legislation, with pet projects of representatives now demanding be fed, will be a heavy burden that it will only unload at great expense to its future.

And at least one thing is for certain.  Gone is any pretense of Barack Obama as this century’s first post-partisan president, having repudiated his election night promise that he would be the president of   “all Americans”.   We should not forget the other historical first achieved last night – the health care bill  legislation passed the House with not even one Republican vote.   Never in this country’s history has so important a piece of legislation failed to win any bi-partisan support.

The effect of this reality may be seismic.  Popular opinion in the country may be stirred in outrage, leading to a devastating rout for Democrats at the polls in only eight months time.  In that event, Obama’s great victory will have wilted into a tragic mistake that might have been avoided with the application of restraint and moderation.

The Obama  administration should therefore not forget  Plutarch’s retelling to Dionysis of the Pyrrhic Wars:

“The armies separated; and, it is said, Pyrrhus replied to one that gave him joy of his victory that one more such victory would utterly undo him. For he had lost a great part of the forces he brought with him, and almost all his particular friends and principal commanders and there were no others there to make recruits.  On the other hand, as from a fountain continually flowing out of the city, the Roman camp was quickly and plentifully filled up with fresh men, not at all abating in courage for the loss they sustained, but even from their very anger gaining new force and resolution to go on with the war.^“.

The Obamaites would do well to heed Pyrrhus’ historical lesson.