Jenny McCarthy is an aggressive force of stupidity and evil who has somehow has had her looney and destructive views heard by millions, probably because the media is also often stupid and evil.
She’s the celebrity spokesperson for the anti-vaccination movement that is currently threatning to bring back otherwise nearly eradicated diseases. The movement started with a small study conducted by Dr. Andrew Wakefield that was fundamentally flawed with fixed data. He was funded by lawyers representing people who intended to sue vaccine manufacturers. He was charged with 11 counts of professional misconduct.
After Dr. Wakefield’s cooked findings, vaccination rates (especially in Britain) dropped significantly due to the fear his findings spread. Because of that, since then, several major studies with far larger sample sizes have been conducted and have found no causitive or correlative link between autism and vaccines. Thiomersal, the mercury-containing antiseptic/antifungal used in vaccines, which was suggested as the potential cause of autism, was removed as a precautionary measure from most vaccines by 2001 - and there were no changes to autism diagnosis rates after it had fallen out of common use.
There is nothing to support the idea that there is a link between autism and vaccines. The one small, flawed, manipulated study that was funded by litigants suing a vaccine manufacturer was designed to show some weak correlation, but multiple legitimate studies later showed no correlation. Even then, Thiomersal, the agent that the antivax movement blamed, was removed from vaccines (with predictably no change in autism rates) and they still weren’t happy, still advocating that people not use vaccines.
That certainly didn’t stop Jenny McCarthy, who knew that her “mommy instinct” was far more valid than things like “peer reviewed double blind studies” and other such scientific nonsense that’s only designed to enrich the evil pharmaceutic corporations! Oprah, who will entertain any psuedoscientific nonsense, and treat celebrities and victims as if they were experts, gave her plenty of air time and even called her a “mommy warrior”, buying into the idea that she’s fighting a noble fight against evil big pharma.
Some kids can’t be vaccinated due to medical conditions, and some aren’t vaccinated due to irresponsible parents - so your typcial vaccination rates have been in the 90-95% range. This is acceptable because herd immunity prevents the outbreak of diseases if the vast majority of a population is immunized. The problem is now that because idiots aren’t vaccinating their kids because they listen to people like McCarthy, in some areas the immunization rates are dropping below the herd immunity threshold, leading to outbreaks of diseases that were eradicted in the US. The antivaccination movement is killing kids. The Jenny McCarthy body count tracks cases of preventable illness and deaths that stem from lack of vaccination. I don’t think McCarthy is directly responsible for those deaths - ultimately it falls on the shoulders of idiot parents - but she does bear some culpability.
She even accepts her role in this and acknowledges what she advocates will result in people getting diseases. She considers it to be acceptable losses. She said:
She claims that she cured her son with diet, vitamins, chelation, shoving a unicorn horn up his ass, and sprinkling him with fairy dust. I don’t know much about her kid specifically - it’s not terribly relevant to the damage she’s causing in general. But from perusing various sources, it seems that there’s some disagreement whether or not her kid is actually autistic - he may be afflicted with other disorders that have autistic-like symptoms. It’s also unclear that he has actually improved in any meaningful way or if he’s been trained to respond better to certain tests or if she’s just making up his progress entirely. It’s possible that he has indeed improved - many children with autism-like symptoms in early childhood spontaneously improve as they get older.
If I may play amateur psychologist, I suspect this stems from the fact that it’s hard to accept that shit happens. Some kids develop autism. It sucks. We have no reason to think there’s anything we can do about it. But if your kid is a victim, it may be hard to simply accept that you’re powerless. So you invent something you can attempt to control, that you can attempt to fight. Something to blame, something where, even if you can’t help your kid, you feel like you can fight the good fight and help others and in some way that gives you a degree of control over the situation.
So she latched onto the idea that evil pharmaceutical corporations are poisoning our kids (how this benefits them, I don’t know). It gave her a cause to fight against. It to some degree took away her powerlessness.
But the problem is - once you buy into this conspiracy mindset - and this happens with any True Believers - then you’re unwilling to consider contrary evidence. You build an entire psychological house of cards on this premise and you can’t risk letting anything knock it over. So when you see scientific studies that prove that there’s no link between vaccines and autism, you decide that any evidence that contradicts your view point is part of the conspiracy. You set up this shield of stubbornness and irrationality that protects your beliefs from scrutiny.
Because what’s the alternative for her? She has so much invested in the idea that autism is caused by vaccines that if she were to change her mind she would realize that the last years of her life have been not only based on a false premise but actively spreading harm throughout society. She would not only have to accept “shit happens” and relinquish her sense of control, but she would have to acknowledge that she’s been advocating to people a course of action that results in the death of kids. She can’t stop now, she’s fully invested in this idea. So no amount of evidence can possibly change her view - she just digs in deeper.
Not only does the media give her plenty of totally unjustified coverage (why? because she’s a D-list celebrity and former porn star?), but now Oprah has arranged for Jenny to have her own talk show. Undoubtedly she will use this as a platform to get even more coverage for her cause, and probably will be watched by the same sort of audience that Oprah gets with their manatee-like intelligence who gobble up and sort of psuedoscientific or new age bullshit that spews from her rectum.
This is causing, and will continue to cause, real harm. And not harm to the idiots who buy into it (who are already immunized) - but harm to innocent kids who have no control over how dumb their parents are.
Fuck Jenny McCarthy. Fuck Oprah. Fuck the media that gives this shit coverage. Fuck the antivaccination movement. Fuck ungrateful assholes who don’t realize that modern medicine has eradicated diseases that have caused so much suffering.
It’s too bad we can’t counteract their immunizations and make them dive into an olympic swimming pool filled with polio and measles.
