Jay Cutler's wife, Kristin Cavallari, was a recent guest on the Fox News program The Independents. During the segment, host Kennedy (Hi, Kennedy!), made a snide remark about Jenny McCarthy's dumb anti-vaccination crusade. That's when Cavallari revealed that she and Cutler did not vaccinate their first child.
She explains:
You know what, I've ready too many books about autism. There is a pediatric group called Homestead—Homestead or Homefront, now I have pregnancy brain I got them confused—they've never vaccinated any of their children, and they haven't had one case of autism. And now one in 88 boys is autistic. That's a really scary statistic. The vaccinations have changed over the years, there's more mercury and other...
This is a silly and destructive worldview (to her credit, Kennedy does her best to tell Cavallari how wrong she is) that is rooted in fraudulent science. The original study, published in 1998, that claimed there was a link between vaccines and autism has been thoroughly discredited. From ABC:
The scientific paper that once served as a the driving force behind the theory has long since been discredited and rejected by its original publisher, The Lancet, which wrote in 2010 that "it has become clear that several elements of the 1998 paper by [Andrew] Wakefield et al are incorrect.
"In particular, the claims in the original paper that children were 'consecutively referred' and that investigations were 'approved' by the local ethics committee have been proven to be false."
The British Medical Journal published an editorial in January 2011, calling the Wakefield report "fraudulent," adding that "clear evidence of falsification of data should now close the door on this damaging vaccine scare."
There is no scientifically proven link between vaccines and autism, and every attempt to revive the myth since Wakefield's discrediting has been nonsense. And yet, dumb people like Jenny McCarthy and Donald Trump continue to tell us that such a link exists. Anyone who buys into that myth is acting irresponsibly. As The New Republic's Julia Ioffe points out, when people stop vaccinating their kids, diseases like whooping cough, measles, and mumps make a resurgence.
So please, vaccinate your kids, Jay Cutler and Kristin Cavallari. It won't make them autistic, and it will prevent them from going around and giving everyone whooping cough.
[KSK]