VACCINES

Last month actor Rob Schneider's State Farm TV commercial was pulled from rotation, the company catching on to the fact the guy's been promoting an anti-vaccine position for years now.

State Farm promotes vaccines as a matter of course, so the fit was found incompatible.

The flap inspired a movie title joke on The Late Late Show with Craig Ferguson: Deuce Bigalow Gets Polio.

(Actually, the wording was "contracts" polio, but that has too many syllables, so I "fixed" it.)

Rob Schneider's career-making appearances on Saturday Night Live were best known for his portrayal of an annoying character named Richard Laymer, who waxed poetical over office workers using the copy machine in his lonely corner of corporate America.

He apparently now claims he has proof the Centers for Disease Control have been lying about the efficacy and safety of vaccines.

Vaccines, of course, catch a lot of flack, for reasons that go way beyond whatever the vaccine might do or not do.

Some folks don't want to get their daughters immunized from human papillomavirus because they think it sends the message their kids should run out and have a crap-load of sex right away.

Flu vaccines are known to many to "give you the flu," which if true would be ironic. Also, if they get the strains wrong, the flu shot might not help that much against some outlier version of the virus that clobbers the nation. Can't every one of them be winners.

Vaccines against childhood diseases are thought by many to cause autism, though there is no evidence for that. Some versions of the vaccines contain a preservative called thimerosal, which breaks down into ethyl-mercury. This chemical is way different than the methyl-mercury that contaminates fish and by extension people, producing a variety of frightening and long-lasting disabilities.

In fact, it just might be that a revision in the criteria for the diagnosis of autism is mostly to blame for the explosion in cases. That and the idea of the Autism Spectrum, which widens the mouth of the net extensively.

This whole anti-vaccine movement can be seen as a combination of anti-government sentiment (we just know they're lying about stuff, right?) and the notion that Mothers possess a secret (and probably sacred) psychical connection to their offspring that goes far beyond mere space-time dimensions.

Mothers know when their children, however distant, are in trouble. What's more, this supernatural protective force is capable of activating in advance to prevent future troubles.

Mother knows best, they say. I mean, the mothers say.

But mothers are just a subset of all humans, and the fact is, humans tend to have a heightened notion of what they know. (Or what they think they know, which—in the human brain—turns out to be the same thing.)

The big problem is that humans take all this excellent knowledge and control the world with it, mostly through error.