Seth McFarlane Drags Anti-Vaxxer Parents on Twitter

The man behind “Family Guy,” “American Dad,” “The Cleveland Show,” “The Orville,” and the reboot of Carl Sagan’s “Cosmos” program used his Twitter account and its 14+ million followers to drag people who don’t vaccinate their children.

Sharing a story from The New York Times about an unvaccinated child getting tetanus and the harrowing ordeal he went through to save his life, McFarlane blasted people who don’t “get educated” and told them to “stop consuming misinformation.” It’s a story that Dan actually covered for this website just a couple days ago. The boy’s brush with tetanus not only nearly cost him his life, it cost nearly a million dollars to treat him.

In a case report released by the Centers for Disease Control today, the CDC shares the story of a young boy who spent 57 days in the hospital – 47 of which were in intensive care – and racked up $811,929 in costs (excluding air transportation, inpatient rehabilitation, and ambulatory follow-up costs). (ASE)

Vaccines and the anti-vaxxer movement have come to the fore lately due to no less than three states dealing with active measles outbreaks. Measles is a deadly disease that has been kept under control in thanks to the MMR vaccine, which also guards against mumps and rubella. Just last week, I wrote about a man who got measles in 2016 and didn’t even know he was raised in an anti-vaxxer household until his doctor asked him if he’d been vaccinated.

…a few years back, Josh went to the doctors with a high fever and rash. After antibiotics didn’t work, his condition consistently worsened. So that’s when he went to the emergency room and a doctor diagnosed him with measles. The doctor then asked Joshua if he was vaccinated as a child.

The truly sickening part of all of this is that anti-vaxxerism is on the rise largely because of disinformation about the link between them and autism. To be clear, there is no link between autism and vaccination, and we just reported on that fact a few days ago. Yet, we still read case after case of kids who don’t vaccinated because their parents are terrified they’ll later be diagnosed with autism. In fact, one of the kids at the center of a measles outbreak was confirmed to have anti-vaxxer parents who didn’t vaccinate specifically because of concerns over autism.

Of course, the “link” between the MMR vaccine and autism was “made” by former “doctor” Andrew Wakefield and his now-infamously debunked vaccine “study”. I’m using quotation marks because I’m using all those terms extremely lightly. Wakefield created the anti-vaccine movement and is directly responsible for the needless suffering and deaths of countless children who have contracted measles or other preventable diseases. Andrew Wakefield is also behind the conspiracy theory film Vaxxed. (ASE)

As McFarlane tweeted, anti-vaxxer parents not only put their kids live at risk, they endanger people who can’t actually be vaccinated. Herd immunity is vital, but when people start willfully ignoring good, sound, proven medical science based on bad junk research and debunked data, its put in dangerous peril.

https://twitter.com/SethMacFarlane/status/1104543847193985024

Writer/comedian James Schlarmann is the founder of The Political Garbage Chute and his work has been featured on The Huffington Post. You can follow James on Facebook and Instagram, but not Twitter because he has a potty mouth.