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Gift Ideas for the Unvaccinated

Before this cartoon appeared many places, I began hearing from anti-vaccine people. More are sure to follow in the coming days. It’s almost laughable for me to have to type this, but let me say up front: I have absolutely no ties to Big Pharma. In general, I find pharmaceutical companies to be morally skeevy, but this does not mean vaccinations are some sort of conspiracy. Nor does it disprove the science supporting vaccination as an essential part of public health.

When all reputable medical organizations — the World Health Organization, the Center for Disease Control, etc. –- tell us that that any link between autism and vaccines has been thoroughly refuted, it takes a hefty dose of paranoia to think that you know better. What is fascinating about this issue is that it parallels global warming denial, but with a large lefty contingent. It’s a bit depressing, actually. But if progressives want to continue calling themselves “reality-based,” they have to take on pseudoscience wherever it appears.

This all started with a fraudulent paper in a prominent medical journal, long since retracted and refuted. It then took on a life of its own, fed by celebrities such as Jenny McCarthy and even Robert Kennedy Jr. Nowadays it mostly boils down to the idea that Big Pharma is engaged in a huge cover-up in order to sell vaccines. I’m the first to note the many evils of many big corporations, but you cannot simply dismiss an overwhelming scientific consensus that there is no connection between vaccines and autism, based on many subsequent studies. There is a difference between healthy skepticism and anti-intellectual paranoia, and this clearly crosses that line.

This wouldn’t matter so much if it wasn’t vaccines we are talking about here, one of the most important life-saving inventions of all time. Experts in the U.S. say we are already getting small-scale outbreaks because of the anti-vaccine movement, and experts outside the U.S. are getting increasingly worried about the potentially catastrophic consequences if these ideas get entrenched in the developing world. A recent Center for Disease Control study estimates that vaccines in the U.S. from 1994-2013 will save 732,000 lives. We are talking about untold numbers of lives at stake here.

Here are just a few useful links:

http://www.cdc.gov/vaccinesafety/concerns/autism/

http://www.who.int/features/qa/84/en/

http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/wonkblog/wp/2014/05/05/how-the-anti-vaccine-movement-is-endangering-lives/

http://www.slate.com/articles/double_x/doublex/2011/02/how_sane_parents_got_paranoid_about_vaccines.2.html

http://thechart.blogs.cnn.com/2013/03/29/vaccine-autism-connection-debunked-again/

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MMR_vaccine_controversy

http://www.theatlantic.com/national/archive/2009/10/the-new-pandemic-of-vaccine-phobia/28703/

http://news.nationalgeographic.com/news/2013/07/130716-autism-vaccines-mccarthy-view-medicine-science/

Illustration

Jen Sorensen’s illustrations have appeared in a variety of publications, including Nickelodeon Magazine, University of Virginia Alumni Magazine, C-VILLE Weekly, Dallas Observer, and other altweeklies.

For examples of Jen’s longer-form comics and graphic journalism work, please visit here.

Follow me at the DNC

I’m in Charlotte, where I’ve begun my dual-pronged coverage of the Democratic National Convention for C-VILLE Weekly and the Austin Chronicle. Here are the links for following along:

http://www.austinchronicle.com/authors/jen-sorensen/

http://www.c-ville.com/author/jensorensen/

If you’re in a city other than Austin or Charlottesville, pick one; posts will be more or less the same. I’m hoping to integrate my tweets and photos before too long. Go ahead, leave a comment on either site!

Subscribe

A NOTE ABOUT RENEWING SUBSCRIPTIONS: If you need to update your credit card info, you can manage your subscription at https://manage.campaignzee.com/forgot by typing in the email address you use to receive the cartoon. Alternatively, if you still have the original email from Campaignzee when you signed up for the service, that should contain a link to your subscription management page. Please note subscriptions renew automatically, though you may unsubscribe at any time. If you did not wish to renew, please contact me. If you encounter any technical difficulties, please contact [email protected] (and feel free to contact me as I like to know about any issues).

Side project: Illustrations for Book of Jezebel

One thing I’ve been working on in addition to my political cartoons is a bunch of illustrations for the Book of Jezebel, which was officially released this week. The book is laid out like a dictionary, filled with humorous entries on a variety of subjects (this illo is for “Perm”). It feels a lot like America: The Book; it’s from the same publisher (Grand Central). A number of women illustrators and writers contributed, and I’m honored to be among them.

More info at http://bookofjezebel.com/

Old Blog Archives

To read SlowpokeBlog posts prior to our switch to WordPress in April 2010, see the old blog home page at https://jensorensen.com/blog.html.

This Week’s Cartoon: “World War III: In It For the Money!”

It’s remarkable how little the self-proclaimed deficit hawks seem to talk about trimming our pork-encrusted military expenditures.  I see on CostofWar.com that the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan have surpassed a trillion dollars. I’m not sure I feel a trillion dollars safer. For a trillion dollars, I expect the nation to be covered in a climate-controlled biodome that vaporizes terrorists upon entry. Given that we can’t even get Star Wars right, and it took us nearly three months to plug a hole in the ground, I’m guessing a biodome is not in the cards.

Despite all that outlay of lucre, the economy still sucks, so it’s time for full-scale mobilization! And I mean mobilization, right down to the last able-bodied American. I want to see toddlers plugging rivets into tanks! Dogs hauling bags of bullets! That, my friends, is how to get things moving again. And it’s a hell of a lot more acceptable to the pundit class than, I don’t know, stimulus spending that helps people keep their jobs. Or letting the Bush tax cuts for six-figure earners expire as scheduled. Or helping the unemployed.  No, in the immortal words of The Exploited, LET’S START A WAR! But no nukes, please. That would kind of defeat the purpose.

Color Blind

Reference material for this cartoon: this ThinkProgress post detailing the “Top 12 Conservative Freakouts After Obama’s Race Speech.” The tweet in the first panel is real; the tweet in the second panel is taken verbatim from former Rep. Joe Walsh (R-IL), substituting “MLK” for “President Obama.” The other two I made up, but frankly it’s hard to get more extreme than this marvel of vacuousness from Breitbart.com’s John Nolte:

“I like living in a country where a black president elected twice complains about racism.”

I read these comments before I got around to watching the actual video of Obama’s remarks. Far from being inflammatory, the speech was sober and circumspect. There’s simply no hope for anyone who found it “racist” — they are lost at sea. And anyone trying to twist this sad story around to make Trayvon the aggressor: really? I guess only certain people are allowed to stand their ground when they feel threatened.

Big-Bucks Trucks

Given the extreme droughts, wildfires, and other assorted weather oddities over the past few years, you might think some sort of inkling about climate change would be permeating the public consciousness, causing at least a few more Americans to pause before purchasing a whale-sized vehicle. And yet here we are, with full-sized luxury pickup truck sales booming and sedan sales sinking, making the SUV heyday of the early aughts look almost quaint. As WaPo’s Wonkblog notes, affluent buyers are snapping up plush $60,000-and-up land barges with heated leather seats and, yes, fiddleback eucalyptus wood trim (I did not make that up). Apparently our brief period of recession-induced humility is over:

“During the recession, if you could afford to buy a fancy new truck, it was not socially acceptable to flaunt it,” said Michelle Krebs, a senior analyst at AutoTrader.com. But “the acceptance of conspicuous consumption is back.”

For those who think these overappointed behemoths have utilitarian value, I will let Mr. Money Mustache set the record straight on their usefulness as work trucks.

Reprints

With a hard-hitting yet whimsical take on politics, technology, and cultural trends, Jen Sorensen’s comics have won numerous Association of Alternative Newsweeklies awards, including First Place in 2005, 2012, and 2014. Sorensen was also named a Pulitzer finalist in 2017.

The comic is sent every week by email, and is available in both B&W and color. Rates depend on your publication’s circulation. Contact jensoren at gmail dot com for more info!

This Week’s Cartoon: Ron Paul’s Muffin-care

The more I think about Ron Paul’s solution to the plight of the uninsured, the more baffled I become. So, churches are going to come to the rescue? That would seem to leave an awful lot of non-churchgoers to die, but maybe that’s the point. And what about, as the Beatles put it, all the lonely people? These same politicians calling for communities to pitch in together are the ones pushing the myth of the radically-atomized individual. They are the party of American alienation: inhuman-scale corporate bureaucracies, big-box stores, unchecked sprawl, barricaded McMansions, and oversized vehicles with outside-world-avoiding names like “Enclave.” (I generalize, but only slightly.) These are the people who crush attempts at fostering community through urban planning and the creation of public space. For these ideologues to lecture anyone about neighborliness takes a lot of chutzpah.

Not even Ron Paul’s muffin-based health care plan could help his former campaign manager who died with $400,000 in medical bills. He was reportedly ineligible for health insurance due to a pre-existing condition. (For an eloquent statement on this, and general Republican cruelty regarding health care, I recommend this Daily Kos diary).

A note about the Kickstarter joke in the fourth panel: I had a nagging feeling that I’d seen a tweet about Kickstarter-funded health care somewhere, but a rather lengthy search turned up nothing. In any case, I apologize if I’m not the first person to think of that.

Follow Daily Kos Comics at http://comics.dailykos.com

What’s Up With This Site?

I find myself in the curious position of being “in between websites” at the moment. Rather than wait to unveil my new site (this one) in all its perfect, finished glory, I’m going to be polishing it up publicly. Of course, I intended to do this a couple weeks ago, but found myself suddenly slammed with freelance work. So if you’re looking for anything beyond my current strips and blog posts right now, please visit slowpokecomics.com. And one of these days, I’ll get things fixed up around here.