Mike Rowe JAQs off on Xitter
Everyone loved Mike Rowe on Dirty Jobs... and then he exemplified why you should never meet your heroes.
So Mike Rowe is an anti-vaxxer. 🙁
On Tuesday, Mike Rowe posted a 1,246-word megatweet (!!) on Xitter. It starts as his response to another tweet critical of him, and quickly disintegrates into praise for the book Forbidden Facts: Government Deceit & Suppression About Brain Damage from Childhood Vaccines, which is, as its title screams, an anti-vaccine screed — a book self-discrediting even in the few lying words of its title (there is no evidence that vaccines cause brain damage; and there is evidence from hundreds of billions of vaccine doses administered that they do not). Its author is Gavin de Becker, a billionaire and security consultant with no background in medicine, immunology, any science field, or any related field.
Rowe’s post is largely a defense of JAQing off — “Just Asking Questions,” the process favored by many who are hostile to science findings. It’s a way to deny anything and everything, but by hiding behind “I’m just asking questions, what’s wrong with that??” It implies that asking questions is always valid, and if you have a problem with it, it’s you who is in the wrong. “Why can’t I ask questions about the shape of the Earth?”
He spends his whole post “just asking questions” about the safety and efficacy of vaccines, to hide that he’s actually vigorously promoting De Becker’s false claims.
Rowe charges his critic:
You believe, like so many others who actually spelled it out for me (often in CAPS and with multiple exclamation points,) that with respect to all things vaccine-related, “THE SCIENCE HAS BEEN SETTLED!!!”
Today, being anti-vaccine is intellectually indistinguishable from being a Flat Earther. That the Earth is round is settled science, like a lot of things. 2 + 2 = 4 is also settled science. Gravity makes things fall, and that’s settled science too. Vaccines have saved hundreds of millions of lives, with a statistically insignificant rate of adverse reactions and deaths that don’t even approach the background noise (probably fewer than 100 across all vaccines in the past century — a rate around 0.0000000xx%). Vaccines are widely considered the greatest public health achievement in human history. And that is settled science.
Yet, in his passionate screed encouraging people to throw data and expertise to the wind and instead “do their own research,” Rowe pulls out every tired old argument of the charlatan.
He even has the audacity to employ the laughable Galileo Gambit:
