In an Oct. 4 column headlined “Left Hates Science and Children,” the Media Research Center’s Dan Gainor portrays questions about vaccines as a partisan issue, suggesting that only liberals such as Robert Kennedy Jr. and Jenny McCarthy are promoting the discredited theory that vaccines cause autism. (Gainor never actually proves that McCarthy is liberal; he lumps her in because she’s a “Hollywood celeb” who is a “former Playboy model and TV personality.”)
But Gainor is ignoring one of the biggest promoters of anti-vaccine scaremongering: the most-definitely-not-liberal WorldNetDaily.
As we’ve detailed, WND has repeatedly pushed the vaccine-autism link and touting the anti-vaccine American Physicians and Surgeons (also not a liberal group). When the 1998 Lancet article making a vaccine article link was retracted earlier this year, WND did no original article on it; when WND columnist Phil Elmore wrote a column highlighting the retraction, it also published a letter to the editor calling Elmore’s column “not convincing” and railing against “filling my babies with pharmaceutical junk.”
If only Gainor was as concerned about what his fellow right-wingers are saying as he is about isolated liberals — especially when they’re saying the same exact thing. One might even call that a double standard.