Over the past year (especially), California has faced several outbreaks of utterly preventable diseases. Diseases like measles, polio, mumps, rubella, all of which are completely preventable if you vaccinate your children. The anti-Vax people have found a home in California and they’ve grown and grown to the point where old diseases are now flourishing and causing major public health crises. So, California Governor Jerry Brown just signed a new mandatory vaccination bill, meaning it is no longer “optional” to vaccinate your children.

Why bring this up? As it turns out, Jenny McCarthy’s ex-boyfriend Jim Carrey is something of a true believer. Even McCarthy has distanced herself from her previous anti-Vax statements (that vaccines cause autism), but Carrey still believes. And Carrey went OFF on Twitter Tuesday night. Here are his tweets in order:

California Gov says yes to poisoning more children with mercury and aluminum in manditory vaccines. This corporate fascist must be stopped.

They say mercury in fish is dangerous but forcing all of our children to be injected with mercury in thimerosol is no risk. Make sense?

I am not anti-vaccine. I am anti-thimerosal, anti-mercury. They have taken some of the mercury laden thimerosal out of vaccines. NOT ALL!

The CDC can’t solve a problem they helped start. It’s too risky to admit they have been wrong about mercury/thimerasol. They are corrupt.

Go to http://traceamounts.com watch the documentary and judge for yourselves. If you really care about the kids you will. It’s shocking!

[From Jim Carrey]

The thing is… years ago, I did sometimes wonder if the anti-Vax crowd had a point simply about the mercury. Not that the vaccines “caused” autism (vaccines do not cause autism), but that the vaccine schedule might be too hardcore, and that the mercury levels might be dangerous. But in the years since then, I’ve been convinced by the real scientists who have assured the public that vaccines are perfectly safe, and the risk to public health is greater if you refuse to vaccinate your kids. It does feel like Jim Carrey and the anti-Vax crowd are clinging to their bad science and half-truths and it feels like the sooner we can make the anti-Vax people into a radical fringe larger ignored by the general public, the better off we’ll be.

Photos courtesy of WENN.