I don’t want to excuse her stupidity or anything, but I’m trying to imagine: what kind of person would be on the fence about vaccinating his/her children, and Jenny McCarthy (of all people) is the persuasive voice that pulled them over to the dark side?
She has defended anti-vax, discredit Andrew Wakefield.
Oh, okay. I haven’t lived in America for a while and was unaware she had a forum on The View, or much else beyond being in Playboy a bunch of times.
I tend not to be particularly well-informed about the personal lives or antics of celebrities, so yes, I can enjoy things done by people I would otherwise despise.
There are exceptions. Stand-up comics put so much of their own lives into their work, that they can make me hate them with their own material. It’s just the nature of the beast.
And then there are people like Jenny McCarthy. First, she hasn’t really done anything noteworthy, so I don’t know that there’s anything out there for me to “enjoy” in the first place, but at any rate, her anti-vaccine BS was so unavoidable, that it’s basically all I know about her. I can’t name one thing she’s done, other than get people not to vaccinate their children. I know more about the career of Paris Hilton.
If something came on TV, say, an episode of a TV show I regularly watch, like The Big Bang Theory, and McCarthy was guest-starring, I think it would bug me. But maybe it wouldn’t. Maybe I wouldn’t even recognize her.
Which brings up another point: Mayim Bialik also went on record as questioning the need for vaccines once. But from what I have read, and admittedly, it’s not much, she never urged other people not to vaccinate, and she later recanted, and said she had had her children vaccinated. She certainly, whatever else she did, never did anything on the scale of what McCarthy did, and never deliberately threw her celebrity behind the “cause” of anti-vax.