We came across an interesting meme about the movie . The plot of the movie tells the story of Charlie and Raymond. Raymond is portrayed as autistic, and inherited his father’s wealth. Charlie, a troubled businessman, is Raymond’s brother. Charlie was unaware of Raymond’s existence until their father dies. When Charlie learns Raymond inherits millions of dollars, Charlie launches a scheme to try and gain custody of Raymond. . The movie also set stereotypes about autistic people into popular culture, like the mistaken stereotype that all autistic people are savants or that all autistic people require a high degree of care.
The meme had a screen capture from the movie and was captioned: “In 1998, the movie Rain Man was rolled out to the public to normalize autism, just in time for a roll out of a measles vaccine that would give autism to children.” The person who posted the meme then mentions . While those rates have increased from 1 in 150 children in 2000 to 1 in 36 children in 2020, the scientific and evidence-based explanations for this rise do not include vaccines. Better diagnostic tools for identifying people on the autism spectrum, better access to health care for those diagnostics, and better public health surveillance of mental health conditions all contributed to this rise in identified cases. The definition of autism has also changed over time, leading to erroneous comparisons from one birth cohort 25 years ago to today.
Then there is the fact that the measles vaccine was not “rolled out” in 1998. , and was combined with the mumps and rubella vaccines in 1971. Millions of children have since received the MMR (or “triple viral”) vaccine around the world. The vaccine has shown an excellent safety track record. A found it to be highly effective in preventing measles, and safer in terms of adverse events than acquiring measles. While some people may experience significant adverse events from the MMR vaccine, the rate of adverse events from vaccination is lower than adverse events from acquiring measles “naturally.”
The meme and the people on social media who spread it and support it seem to be using the “” to attack vaccination. The fallacy is explained in an example: A sharpshooter shoots a firearm into the side of a barn. They then walk up to the bullet holes and draw the targets, making sure the bullseye lines up with each hole. In other words, the fallacy is going back in time to find or manufacture supportive evidence of one’s assertions. This creates a false association between cause and effect, and that association may not be noticeable at first. In the example of the meme, someone went back to find a movie about autism and then manipulated the timeline of measles vaccine events.
This is not the first time someone retroactively finds false evidence of a conspiracy in a movie, a scene within a movie, or the promotional material for the movie. Someone found a scene in Captain America from 2011, and they associate it with the COVID-19 pandemic because of a poster of Corona beer, something that looks like a coronavirus, and a mask. , that brand of beer is one of the most common in the United States, what looks like a virus is actually a ball of pasta, and the mask is a mask from The Phantom of the Opera, which was playing on Broadway at the time. The character in the film stood on Times Square when those three elements were there, and that coincidence is enough to convince people that the whole movie is a “” conspiracy to warn or acclimate the public to the possibility of a coronavirus pandemic.
It would be easier to say Laurie Garrett’s book, The Coming Plague, , was a warning of the COVID-19 pandemic. But that would require reading a well-researched, well-written book over watching a Hollywood movie.
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