He said that it is reasonable to assume that vaccines, like with any drug, are going to generate a negative reaction in a small minority of people, and that that small minority should have the freedom to choose not to do something that would be harmful to them because the majority says they have to. What exactly is unreasonable about that?
https://www.sciencebasedmedicine.or...an-antivaccine-crank-and-proves-it-yet-again/
It is with reluctance that I decided to write about this topic again, given how many times I’ve written about it over the last decade, both here and at my not-so-super-secret other blog and given how little his fans seems to care when I do. I’m referring to the antivaccine stylings of comedian and political pundit Bill Maher, something I’ve been
writing about for
over a decade now. Indeed, a little more than five years ago, I stirred up a bit of trouble in the skeptical community through some particularly harsh criticisms of Bill Maher, in particular of the Atheist Alliance International’s (AAI) decision to award Maher the Richard Dawkins Award. More than once,
I’ve likened giving Bill Maher an award that lists “advocates increased scientific knowledge” anywhere in its criteria, not to mention being named after Richard Dawkins, to giving Jenny McCarthy an award for public health, given that, at least when it comes to medicine, Maher is
anti-science to
the core. Along the way, I’ve ruffled the feathers of some of both Dawkins’ and Maher’s fans.
Arguably Maher reached his peak of antivaccine advocacy through his weekly HBO talk show,
Real Time With Bill Maher, five years ago, when the H1N1 pandemic was going on and public health officials were working hard to persuade people to get vaccinated against H1N1 influenza. Indeed, it got so bad that his own guests, such as
Bill Frist and
Bob Costas, were openly dissing him on his own show for his antivaccine views. Perhaps my favorite example came from Bob Costas, who in response to a wild claim by Maher that he doesn’t worry about getting the flu, even in the crowded confines of an airplane because of his superior lifestyle that apparently made him immune, blurted out, “
Oh, come on, Superman!” Even worse, a friend of Maher, Michael Shermer, published an “
Open Letter to Bill Maher on Vaccinations” in—of all places—The Huffington Post, which led Maher to respond, both
on his show (in which he referred to vaccination as a “risky medical procedure”) and in a post on HuffPo himself entitled “
Vaccination: A Conversation Worth Having“. It was, as a certain “friend of the blog” put it, a
pyre of stupidity.
