My Opinion On Facts

Do owls exist?

If you have my goldfish-like attention span, skip to the 54-second mark for some unadulterated brilliance from my favorite comedian John Oliver.

"You don't need people's opinions on a fact," Oliver says in the above segment. "You might as well have a poll asking, 'Which number is bigger, 15 or 5?' Or, 'Do owls exist?'"

Owls do exist, and there's nothing you can do about it.

Science also figured out it's about 1,000 licks to the center of a Tootsie Pop.

Despite this truth, people vying to become the next president of the United States of America have repeated statements that have no basis in reality. There's no better example of this than Donald Trump once again touting the connection between vaccines and autism.

For you ADHD people, the short answer here is that vaccines are really good and really safe.

The long answer is that there is zero connection between autism and vaccinations. This is a fact. The only connection ever made was a medical study in 1998 that has been so thoroughly discredited that the only thing left to do is light it on fire and throw it into a pit, Sparta style.

The researcher overseeing the study was trying to profit off of discrediting the MMR vaccines. Eleven of the 12 co-authors, as well as the journal it was published in, have retracted the paper, and the conniving doctor lost his medical license. This is akin to 52 players on the Patriots accusing Tom Brady of deflating footballs. It's a closed case. Yet the misinformation lives on in people content to live in ignorance.

Thanks to morons personalities like Jim Carrey and Jenna McCarthy, the belief that vaccines are dangerous has gone mainstream. People are content to trust the "-er" from Dumb and Dumber over our collective global medical knowledge.

The anti-vaccine movement is a symptom of confirmation bias that seems to have only strengthened in the Internet age where like-minded people can always find each other without considering different opinions. People distrustful of medicine or big government will naturally be more inclined to believe vaccines are dangerous, even in the absence of evidence.

The election circus is just getting started, and we need to hold our politicians to a higher standard. If you want to be President of the United States, you need to accept the facts. Vaccines are safe. Global temperatures are rising. Owls exist.