However, talk show host Jimmy Kimmel of ABC’s “Jimmy Kimmel Live” recently gave the pro-science, pro-vaccination effort a boost with a segment titled “A Message for the Anti-Vaccination Movement,” in which he mocked parents who refuse to get their kids vaccinated (“Here in L.A. parents are more scared of gluten than they are of smallpox,” Kimmel noted) followed by a funny and poignant video segment featuring real doctors addressing the anti-vaccination claims and expressing their (often bleeped and surely sincere) exasperation with those who refuse to vaccinate their children despite overwhelming scientific consensus about their safety.
Kimmel’s shout-out to medical science on the subject of vaccines is important and especially timely given the recent news story about measles outbreaks in Disneyland caused by unvaccinated children. Last month, the Toronto Star, one of Canada’s most prestigious newspapers, published an article highlighting the dangers of the Gardasil anti-HPV vaccine.
The article told the stories of a dozen Canadian girls whose health failed after receiving the vaccine and suggested that it was dangerous. The high-profile article suggested -- contrary to the bulk of scientific evidence -- that the vaccines were dangerous. Medical doctors and epidemiologists were outraged and the newspaper later acknowledged that they had “failed” in their reporting and did not give proper weight to science. The newspaper eventually retracted the story and removed it from its website.
Science Popularizers
This sort of high-profile star power can be very effective. Bringing science literacy to popular culture is nothing new, of course; Carl Sagan and Bill Nye have done it for decades. Astrophysicist and “Cosmos” host Neil deGrasse Tyson, for example, appeared on Comedy Central’s “The Colbert Report” in 2011 to explain how the ocean’s tides work, a phenomena that evidently completely baffled Bill O’Reilly on his Fox show “The O’Reilly Factor.” Though the tone was humorous Tyson took the opportunity to give a science-based, factual explanation of the process.
Even real-life doctors give flawed and misleading medical information; a study published in the “British Medical Journal” in December 2014 examining the medical advice given on TV talk shows such as "The Dr. Oz Show" and "The Doctors" concluded that many of the scientific claims made on the shows are unproven or unsubstantiated. In fact there was adequate evidence for fewer than half of the medical statements appearing on "The Dr. Oz Show."
In 2011, a viral video titled “I’m a Climate Scientist” from a group called Hungry Beast took a similar approach as Kimmel. Beginning by noting that the vast majority of people in the news media who discuss climate change are not scientists, the video (available in both clean and slightly NSFW versions) features nearly a dozen real-life climate scientists who sing a catchy hip hop song about the reality of climate change and clueless critics (sample lyric: “We’re scientists, what we speak is true… Unlike (climate change denier) Andrew Bolt our work is peer reviewed!”).
Jimmy Kimmel’s introduction notes, “If you’re one of these anti-vaccine people you probably aren’t going to take medical advice from a talk show host. I wouldn’t expect you to, I wouldn’t either. But I would expect you to take medical advice from almost every doctor in the world… The thing about doctors is that they didn’t learn about the human body from their friend’s Facebook page -- they went to medical school.”
Read more at Discovery News
No comments:
Post a Comment