Carrey calls out ‘fascist’ vaccine law
Canadian expat actor Jim Carrey has taken to social media to denounce a new California law requiring most children be vaccinated.
The Newmarket-born star dated Jenny McCarthy for about five years before they split in 2010. They were both vocal proponents of the discredited theory that vaccines and autism are linked after McCarthy’s son was found in 2005 to be on the autism spectrum.
Carrey, it seems, is still a believer. He slammed California Gov. Jerry Brown on Twitter for Brown’s decision to sign a bill that forces schoolchildren to be vaccinated regardless of their families’ religious or personal beliefs.
“California Gov says yes to poisoning more children with mercury and aluminum in manditory (sic) vaccines,” Carrey wrote. “This corporate fascist must be stopped.”
Carrey continued, “They say mercury in fish is dangerous but forcing all of our children to be injected with mercury in thimerosol is no risk. Make sense? I am not anti-vaccine. I am anti-thimerosal, anti-mercury.”
“The science is clear that vaccines dramatically protect children against a number of infectious and dangerous diseases,” Brown wrote in his signing message. “While it’s true that no medical intervention is without risk, the evidence shows that immunization powerfully benefits and protects the community.”
As vaccine critics, Carrey and McCarthy seemed unswayed by such arguments.
Even after the work of Andrew Wakefield, the doctor who created the myth that vaccines cause autism, was discredited, Carrey and McCarthy stood by their man — and were pilloried for it.
“What they’re really doing is irresponsibly using their disproportionately powerful media platform to spread misinformation about a condition for which there is no known cure, and rehabilitating the reputation of a doctor on whom history ought to turn the page,” Jim Edwards of Moneywatch wrote in 2010.