Late night TV host Bill Maher invited a controversial doctor, Jay N. Gordon, onto “Real Time with Bill Maher” Friday. Gordon is best known for signing hundreds of personal belief exemptions to school vaccine requirements, advocating for “balanced, moderate” vaccinations, and for calling measles a “benign childhood illness,” leading to his prominence in the anti-vaxxer community.
On the subject of whether vaccines can cause autism in children, a conspiracy theory that has never stood up to testing, Maher sided with Gordon, saying “there’s all these parents” who had a “normal child” before getting vaccinated.
Maher also said “it seems to be more realistic to me” that vaccines cause autism rarely, but that it scares people to know “I could be that millionth one.”
On the latest episode of “Real Time with Bill Maher,” the famously politically incorrect late-night TV host fielded comments from a doctor beloved by anti-vaxxers, only to agree with him that vaccines can cause activism.
Maher was joined on his show Friday night by Dr. Jay N. Gordon, a pediatrician based in Santa Monica, California, whose patients choose to abstain from vaccinations more than half the time. Gordon told CBS News that he has signed hundreds of personal belief exemptions to school vaccine requirements, and said measles was a “benign childhood illness” that parents don’t need to be concerned about.
On his own website, Gordon describes his approach to vaccines as “balanced” and “moderate,
“The autism issue, they certainly have studied it a million times […] but there’s all these parents who say ‘I had a normal child, got the vaccine,'” Maher said.
“It seems to be more realistic to me if we’re just gonna be realistic about it,” Maher said.” It probably happens so rarely but no one wants, you can’t say it happens one in a million times, because then somebody will think ‘Well, I could be that millionth one.’ And you see, you scare people. So you can’t say what might be the more realistic opinion.”
_________________ “Self Acceptance is a process not a performance” “You are autistic enough. And you always have been”
Professionally Identified and joined WP August 26, 2013 DSM 5: Autism Spectrum Disorder, DSM IV: Aspergers Moderate Severity.
03 Nov 2019, 2:52 pm
