Bill Maher attacks U.S. vaccination program because of pharma, government interests. But he usually supports science and evidence, not unsubstantiated belief.

Bill Maher -- who is sometimes funny and insightful, and sometimes insulting and vulgar -- is questioning U.S. vaccination programs, saying he doesn't want to trust the government, and wondering aloud whether there are forces who want people to stay sick in the interest of corporate profits. Hmmm... he sounds like one of the crazy types he's made a career of mocking.

Is Maher just messing with us, playing this for ratings? Maybe. If he is, he should say so. The evidence shows that vaccination programs typically offer benefits far outweighing their risks. Michael Shermer wrote an interesting Open Letter to Maher, examining many of the contradictions in his statements. I recommend it -- Shermer expresses his points quite effectively. 

By the way, the U.S. government has an interesting site at flu.gov. They're also on Twitter and Facebook.

Comments

[Patrick]

"Vaccination programs typically offer benefits far outweighing their risks"... well, yes, but this doesn't mean that skepticism is unwarranted in particular cases. Sometimes vaccination is a no-brainer* and sometimes it's... well, a no-brainer**. There has been a series of prominent public health scares that have amounted to nothing***, and at some point it's worth wondering whether the effort spent combating these possibly illusory threats is warranted.

Of course, we have a severe problem of evidence here. If the efforts to prevent a health crisis are successful, there will be no crisis; and if the efforts to prevent a health crisis were unnecessary because there was no threat to begin with, there will be no crisis. It's difficult to be certain the threat was real unless the dire scenarios predicted do, in fact, come to pass.

With H1N1 flu, I remain among the skeptics. It's new, but I suspect it is merely our cognitive biases that lead us to confuse novelty with medical significance.

* meaning no particular intelligence is required to come to the conclusion in question.
** meaning an absence of intelligence is in fact an aid in arriving at the conclusion in quesiton.
*** the West Nile virus is the local favorite in southern New Mexico; despite the hype when it arrived, it's been here for a few years and... well, yes, a few elderly residents whose health was already poor have died, but that's about it.