Mercury, Winged God of Fallibilism

In case anyone cares, I am now boycotting Jim Carey movies. He is on my list with Tom Cruise, Oliver Stone, Shirley McClain and a host of others I have identified as promoters of junk science, conspiracy theories, channeling, colon detox and fad diets. Why Jim Carey you ask? Well, Mr. Carey and his intellectually accomplished wife, Jenny McCarthy, are at the forefront of promoting the scientifically unsupportable idea that certain childhood vaccines cause autism and the also scientifically unsupportable claim that autism can be successfully treated by removing accumulations of heavy metals, such as mercury, from the body. Ms. McCarthy, who initially came to the attention of the public by showing us her ample bosom in numerous Playboy editions, has a son (not with Jim Carey) who has been diagnosed with autism. In all fairness to Jim Carey, if I were sleeping with Jenny McCarthy on a regular basis and she said the Earth was flat, I would probably also go all over the country positively extolling the flatness of the Earth, but that still wouldn't make it true.

Without digressing into a Doctoral dissertation on the efficacy of thimerosal (a mercury based preservative in some vaccines) and the evolution of the diagnosis of autism (which is also pretty eye-opening), suffice it to say that these are complex subjects which have been given great attention by government, industry, academia and regular people affected by the issues. I will be the first to concede that "scientifically unsupportable" does not mean "wrong"; it simply means that use of the scientific method does not support a causal link between, in this instance, mercury and autism. Science does not know what causes autism, but with the current knowledge base it would be just as valid to propose that milk, strained carrots or sex during pregnancy (or some combination thereof?) causes autism. Since the standard definition of autism represents a range of neurological and behavioral conditions, it is possible that these various elements have separate causation and that a complex web of environmental and genetic factors are in play, as with many other human afflictions. I would simply point out that it is unlikely those most burdened with the financial, emotional and physical costs of dealing with autism would be the ones to most objectively adjudicate these complex questions. Anecdotal evidence and the flawed science of those seeking to exploit the hope, fear, frustration, anger and desperation of the parents of children affected by autism cannot be substituted for reason, logic and mathematics.

But let me follow another train of thought in addressing why Mr. Carey will no longer receive my financial support for his artistic endeavors (even though I have thoroughly enjoyed many of his movies and almost all appearances on In Living Color). One of the things that troubles me the most about Mr. Carey's crusade is that he actively advises parents not to have certain vaccinations for their children, apparently due to what he perceives as the possibility of the child being harmed by the vaccine. While I believe his concerns are not well founded and are clearly not supported by a substantial majority of the scientific community, I am willing to accept that he is earnestly trying to protect the interests of other families and spare them the heartbreak that he and Ms. McCarthy have suffered with their son Evan, but good intentions, in, and of, themselves, accomplish nothing. Having said that, what if Mr. Carey were right and there was a real, statistically verifiable risk of developing autism associated with certain childhood vaccinations? Would that justify a campaign to discourage getting the MMR or other vaccines?

Easily available information (because if I have it, it must be easily available) indicates that in the last 150 years an estimated 200 million people world-wide have died from complications related to the measles. The death rate from measles in developed nations is well less than one-half of one percent of all cases, but in poorer parts of the world as many of one-quarter of those infected can die. Mumps is rarely fatal, but can infrequently cause sterility and other serious complications. Rubella is generally a mild disease but can cause miscarriages and severe and life-threatening birth defects. So how many cases of autism each year would be worth eliminating these diseases? It is currently estimated that approximately 1.5 of every 1,000 persons born annually will develop autism, and approximately six per thousand will develop some related condition of varying severity. Even those who believe thimerosal may cause autism can't estimate the percentage of cases that could be the result of other causation, so it would be some unspecified number of autism cases theoretically resulting from the use of thimerosal as a preservative in some vaccines, but other cases of autism are clearly not the result of thimerosal poisoning since children who are not vaccinated also are sometimes diagnosed as autistic. The point is, in allowing for Mr. Carey's logic, there is no way to conduct a cost/benefit analysis on the use of the MMR vaccine with a thimerosal preservative since there is not even theoretically the necessary empirical data to compare disease prevented with diseased caused.

While such a comparison may seem callous and mercenary, it is in fact the same analysis we make, consciously or not, for virtually every action we take. We feed our children into the jaws of war fully understanding that some will not return, but trusting that there is some greater good that will justify the random sacrifice of the few. We each have an approximately one in 4,000 chance that an automobile accident will be the cause of our death, but we all continue to drive and ride virtually every single day of our lives. We accept these risks with the implicit determination that what we get in return is worth the risks we are taking. Preservatives, thimerosal and others, are used in virtually all vaccines in order to prevent the introduction of harmful microbes into the vaccine and to extend the shelf-life of the product. There are both safety and economic concerns associated with this practice, and the interplay between the two dictates the availability of the vaccine and, therefore, the number of children who are able to be protected. It appears to me that Mr. Carey and Ms. McCarthy are encouraging other parents to take the risk of exposing their children to harmful, or even fatal, childhood diseases simply because their son got the short end of the probability stick. I have not heard anything from Ms. McCarthy on the dangers of breast augmentation procedures, but, of course, that would not fit within her model of reality.

The biggest problem with the anti-vaccine crusade being waged by Mr. Carey and others is that it confuses people with speculation and allegation without informing them. Parents are afraid to give their children vaccines for polio and meningitis, things that can kill them, because of concerns about the MMR vaccine. Many vaccines have never contained thimerosal and should, therefore, not be on the list of suspected autism agents. The Centers for Disease Control have established requirements for the elimination of thimerosal as a vaccine preservative, not because there is science to support it, but because people like Mr. Carey, who have no scientific background, have created a public fear campaign which has become a public health issue in and of itself. Killed virus flu vaccines are one of the few remaining that still are primarily preserved with thimerosal, and flu and flu-related complications like pneumonia kill an approximate average of 40,000 people in the U.S. alone each year. At least some of these deaths are children. There are people who are not allowing their children to receive the flu vaccine because of the non-scientific suppositions of people like Mr. Carey and Ms. McCarthy.

One of humanity's greatest intellectual strengths, the ability to recognize patterns in seemingly random events, can also be a great weakness when nonexistent patterns are discerned, and acted upon. We can all empathize with Mr. Carey's desire to understand what has happened to his adoptive son and why. We can feel for Ms. McCarthy as she struggles to provide support to a child to whom normal rules of communication and conduct are alien. We can understand the general desire to have all the answers be simple and clear and to feel all we have to do is hit upon the right explanation for things and the boogie-man will go away. Unfortunately we also have to understand that people's judgment can be clouded by grief and fear and that some people will promote certain explanations for political or financial reasons unrelated to the true nature of the issue. Science is not politics; it is not about the popularity or psychological comfort of an idea; it is not about one person's personal experience or the shared pain of an unfortunate few. It is about meticulous and detailed analysis, review and repeatable and verifiable experimentation, and an honest ability to admit and correct error. Science is, of course, flawed, as is all human endeavor, but it is still only a vehicle that takes us where our human urges drive us, much like art and religion. The difference is that science is understood to be subject to change as new facts reveal themselves, whether it be concerning global warming or the health consequences of thimerosal. Right now, science says Jim Carey is wrong, and doing the wrong thing for the right reasons is still just plain, old wrong.