John Oliver has an extraordinary ability to use humor to completely destroy a false but widely held belief about childhood vaccinations. Some of Trump's acolytes include anti-vaxxers, and these science-allergics have wreaked havoc on immunization safety, especially on those with the inability to withstand vaccinations due to a compromised immune system.
Oliver points out the Somali community in Minnesota which has been hit with a Measles epidemic; they have reported 78 cases already in 2017 just in that one state, thanks to just a 42% vaccination rate among those in this ethnic subset. The entire U.S. reported 70 cases total for the whole year of 2016, so this is extremely alarming. Measles vaccines are only effective in a population that is at least 95% vaccinated against the dreadful disease that suburban Trump moms would never balk at if they saw a live case of the illness.
As he so richly deserves, the former 'doctor,' Andrew Wakefield is exposed for his 1997 published Lancet study that linked the MMR vaccine to autism with just TWELVE children in the study.
Follow-up studies of hundreds of thousands of children could not find any evidence that the MMR vaccine causes autism and investigations into Wakefield's original paper revealed he distorted the data and acted unethically he's lost his medical license The Lancet paper has been retracted it's true Wakefield's made a big splash before having his legacy tarnished and his title revoked he's basically the Lance Armstrong of doctors.
--- but but but even though Wakefield conclusions have been debunked many times he not only denies wrongdoing he actually still gives talks about the supposed dangers of the MMR vaccine.
He shows this disgraced former physician still giving lectures, to Somalis in Minnesota, no less, on his discredited and debunked theories. So helpful. To drive the point home further, Oliver shows us the idiotic opinions of the anti-vaxxer Rob Schneider: the once semi-funny guy who has drifted off into the Alex-Jones-Right-Wing-comedy-abyss.
SCHNEIDER: You can't make people do procedures that they don't want. The parents have to be the ones to make the decisions for what's best for our kids. It can't be the government saying that. It's against the Nuremberg Laws
OLIVER: Yes that is Rob Schneider performing an impromptu rendition of his famous character the annoying guy who is wrong.
He calls attention to the 'doctors' who profess to worried parents that the vaccines should be spread out over time, increasing the likelihood of the manifestation of these once-eradicated diseases. Like Wakefield, these charlatans are acting greedily and unethically to make a buck. Sounds like a few folks in the House and Senate, doesn't it?
The former Daily Show correspondent mentions his own fear of essentially everything and even he knows that vaccines must be administered on a specific schedule to guarantee their effectiveness. As a new parent, John Oliver will happily vaccinate his child on schedule and not subscribe to junk inductive reasoning. The segment is almost a half-hour long, but it's worth every second, especially if you know one of these anti-vaxxers.
