"People who juice don't vaccinate?" Sam Bee asks

While Jon Oliver departed The Daily Show his own HBO series and the imminent loss of Larry Wilmore to the new series Minority Report is also bittersweet, we still have our hero Samantha Bee on the Best F&*king News Team on Television. On Monday's show in a takedown of the anti-vaccination movement, Bee struck down the liberal, progressive base that has been denying the very real scientific evidence against the terrifying infections of measles, mumps and an added bonus of whooping cough, all of which are returning.

In the segment, Bee takes on the "The Outbreak of Fucking MisInformation," and she's surprised to learn that it's in "her" community: "People who juice?" she asks Paul Offit, the director of the Vaccine Education Center. Offit is, understandably, extremely frustrated that hard, empirical scientific evidence is being denied. "Good news about vaccines: they're not a belief system, they are an evidence based system," Offit says. It's shocking and surprising for Sam Bee to learn that this denial of science is not taking place in the right-wing nut-job enemy camps that she imagined, but rather, in communities of people that SHE herself knows: liberals! As Offit says, "They are groups of Caucasian, upper-middle class residents who are college and sometimes graduate-school educated who believe by simply googling the term 'vaccine' on the Internet they can know as much as an expert is telling them."

Cold burn, Offit!

Sam Bee goes to the source: lifestyle bloggers, whose knowledge of organic hair-gel recipes apparently also makes them experts on what exactly is poisonous about vaccines. "They have an amazing ability to ignore scientific consensus," Offit says. "What is consensus anyway?!" Bee counterpoints.

I love Sam Bee's take on of the difference between real, scientific data and the opinions of the self-proclaimed mom-bloggers/experts. Unfortunately, Pope's blog has more than 40,000 subscribers, so whatever she is writing on her blog travels as REAL information. And with something as delicate and vital as vaccinations, the power of a readership of that number could cause real damage and real-world effects.

It's a hilarious bit, true to Sam Bee's humor: she's the best at exposing when people are just being plain jackasses. But the heart of it is grim: why ARE these liberals, who are so staunch about climate change and will adhere to the science in that case, denying the scientific evidence when it comes to vaccinations? It's enough to frustrate someone so much they will foam at the mouth (the way Sam Bee does).