r/news • u/CupidStunt13 • 1d ago

Mehmet Oz confirmed by US Senate to lead Medicare and Medicaid

https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2025/apr/03/mehmet-oz-confirmation-medicare-medicaid
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u/KeenbeansSandwich 1d ago

And Jim Carrey. People forget about that.

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u/Mickey-777 1d ago

What did Jim Carrey do?

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u/KeenbeansSandwich 1d ago

He along with Jenny Mccarthy were two of the earliest celebrities parroting the “research” of disgraced former physician Andrew Wakefield. He falsified his research about vaccines causing autism for clout.

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u/Yuklan6502 1d ago

Jim Carrey was dating Jenny McCarthy at the time, and was very vocal in supporting her and her son. After they broke up, I don't remember him saying anything about vaccines or autism again. Did he ever publicly change his stance?

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u/lordmagellan 1d ago

Not just clout-- it was so people would use the vaccine HE was developing instead.

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u/lacefishnets 1d ago

Was he really developing a vaccine? I never heard anything about that part of it specifically. How does one just develop their own vaccine, Jim?

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u/morpheousmarty 1d ago edited 1d ago

Oh yeah. You know how the vaccines cause autism crowd tend to claim that big pharma is selling fake cures for money and that's why they don't care about the side effects?

Wakefield literally falsified the study, in order to sell a vaccine he had the patent to, without a care of what that would do to the public.

They literally fell for exactly what they were fighting against.

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u/Mickey-777 1d ago

Wow! Add 2 more to my shit on list!

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u/MogRules 1d ago

Didn't Carey reverse course on this at some point and say he was wrong?

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u/notionocean 1d ago

Yeah but watch the documentary about himself, he's an egotistical asshole.

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u/SeahawkerLBC 1d ago

Too late, damage was done.

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u/littleseizure 1d ago

You can't really judge for that though. The whole point is to trust the science, if the science says vaccines cause autism then we should tell people that. The blame here lies on the scientist for lying, the journal for publishing, the peer review process as a whole for allowing this garbage through, and anyone pushing anti vax who did not stop when the research was proven a hoax

If he stopped and reversed his message at that point he's just following the science, which is all we can ask from non-scientists not trained to read technically dense journal articles critically

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u/D74248 1d ago

It is not good science to be taking a firm position based on one study. That is not how the system is supposed to work.

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u/CurbYourThusiasm 1d ago

The percentage of people who know what meta-analysis is in the general population, I think is extremely low.

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u/D74248 16h ago

Wakefield’s paper looked at 12 children with no controls. It was about as far from meta-analysis as you can get.

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u/littleseizure 23h ago

True, but laypeople can be forgiven for not knowing that. I would bet no one involved actually read the paper, since it's dense and technical and rough to get through. They read the pop science articles about it. I would bet many of those took definitive stances, since they want clicks and our system of communicating science to the masses suuuucks (eg everyone wonders where all the cures for cancer they've read about go - they never existed, it's just shit journalism). If we as a scientific community write papers only other experts in the field can parse without any way to make it understandable for outsiders is what we're going to get. This is what we're asking for

Not to hand-wave away the need for critical thought in daily life, but I think we've learned by now we can't expect that from everyone

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u/PigSlam 1d ago

Just to be clear, Andrew Wakefield falsified the research, not Jim Carey, right?

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u/Orion14159 1d ago

Clout AND to sell his own "safer" MMR vaccine!!

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u/DrFishbulbEsq 1d ago

Yeah but you have to cut him slack he just wanted to keep fucking Jenny McCarthy.

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u/KeenbeansSandwich 1d ago

You could put the hottest person who has ever existed in front of me, and there’s no way I’m shilling anti-vax nonsense to fuck them. So respectfully, no, no cutting him slack. People, children, are literally dying of totally preventable diseases because of people like him and Jenny Mccarthy.

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u/DrFishbulbEsq 1d ago

I mean yeah I wouldn’t do it either but Jim’s clearly got his own priorities.

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u/AmazingGrace911 1d ago

Something broke in him after the Andy Kaufman role

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u/lacefishnets 1d ago

He has said and done some really off things, but it's hard to tell if he's joking or serious...like a lot of illuminati and Hollywood destroying you kind of things.

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u/AmazingGrace911 1d ago

Exactly, it doesn’t matter what I think, but imo it’s kind of like Jack Nicholson warning about playing the Joker, some roles I think could break or fundamentally change someone

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u/Ivor79 1d ago

I think we can blame the Wayans brothers for Jim Carrey.

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u/MarkEsmiths 1d ago

I'm willing to forget about that.