The Peak

I hate Jenny McCarthy

By Graham Templeton, Opinions Editor

Model/actress/“mother-warrior” Jenny McCarthy has spent the past several years doing her level best to convince new parents not to have their children vaccinated. To be fair, evaluating medical information using nothing but Jenny McCarthy’s brain must be a little like running an Olympic wind-sprint while dead, but excuses are meaningless; as I’ll note in a moment, the consequences of her intellectual dishonesty are simply far too high to forgive.

This all started in 2005, when McCarthy’s then three-year-old son was diagnosed with autism. Her reaction to this was fairly typical.

Many people are generally unwilling to accept that they’ve had no power over most of the major events in their lives; even blaming themselves is, in many cases, preferable to admitting a total lack of control. Those with lung cancer are likely to cast their minds to that one time they walked by this guy, and totally got a whiff of second-hand smoke.

This thinking is what happened to Jenny McCarthy. She saw an effect, and looked reflexively for a cause. And, as any searching mind will, she found one. Just a few months before her son’s diagnosis, he had been given his standard MMR (mumps, measles, rubella,) vaccines. And she was off.

She started mostly with magazine interviews, in which she claimed, among other things, that there were no adults with autism. She apparently had a lot of free time, what with all her avoidance of any of the hundreds of centres for autistic adults, and quickly ramped up her media presence to an all-time high.

By 2007, McCarthy was stomping the rounds from Oprah to Larry King Live, promoting a book which claimed not only that childhood vaccines had caused her son’s autism, but that she had in fact cured that autism herself. With what, you ask? Veggies, I answer. Yes, an organic, vegetable-based diet. That and, of course, chelation therapy.

Chelation is a method of treating heavy-metal toxicity, mentioned in this case because of the alleged dangers posed by vaccines containing the mercury-based Thiomersal preservative. Every study ever conducted on vaccines has concluded that no such toxicity is possible, of course, and even if they had, metal toxicity has nothing to do with autism.

Actually, I should admit that one study has found a link between the MMR vaccine and autism; it was run by “Doctor” Andrew Wakefield, who received large sums of money from anti-vaccination lawyers, right around the time he was conducting his research. He is currently facing charges.

When all this is coupled with the fact that chelation therapy itself can have non-trivial negative health effects, even in those who genuinely need it, its use here is absolutely indefensible. But McCarthy was undeterred. After all, hadn’t her son gotten better?

Again, we see the effects of this need to have had some measure of control over everything. Almost 19 per cent of children diagnosed with autism at such a young age will develop out of the disorder’s spectrum entirely, by age seven, and this has no association whatsoever with parental behaviour. Flush your kid with asparagus and chelating agents? 19 per cent. Stuff them with Hamburger Helper and chewing tobacco? 19 per cent.

McCarthy was one of the incredibly lucky few whose child was spared of a lifetime of this crippling disorder, and what did she do with this new lease on life? She turned it into an opportunity to not only spread further pseudoscientific nonsense, but to harm a very large number of people as well.

We tend to think of the mumps and measles as joke diseases; who gets those, right? And even if you did, what’s the big deal? Well, that’s a reality that was been created specifically by the universality of our vaccination practices.

As people like Jenny McCarthy go on their insane crusade against childhood vaccines, these seemingly innocuous diseases are becoming what they have not been for many, many years: Killers.

Disease rates in the U.K. have changed inverse to their vaccination rates; as ones goes up, the other goes down. The drop from 93 to 78 per cent vaccination rate over the period of 1996 to 2003 was accompanied by an unprecedented spike in infection rates, and this trend has continued.

In November of 2008, they had more cases of the measles than in the entirety of 1996. Even B.C. has been affected by the rejection of vaccines, as last year’s outbreak of mumps was traced to a northern religious community where vaccines are believed to display disrespect for God’s protection.

The U.S. is seeing similar numbers, as is any other area where we see a confluence of overactive parental imagination and staggering naivety.

There are positive examples, however. Actress and all-around dream-boat Amanda Peet has been an outspoken opponent of the anti-vaccination movement. She has been brave in her refusal to back down in the face of the thousands of shrilling harpies who swarm at anyone audacious enough to side with evidence over nonsense. She is a mother, yet she somehow doesn’t allow that to turn her brain into so much granola. She is what McCarthy should aspire to be.

I really shouldn’t pick on Jenny McCarthy too much, though. She is, I must admit, an easy target. While she brings a new level of notoriety to the movement, there are many others who have been doing just what she’s doing, and for far longer.

Religion, for instance, has been a huge contributing factor in vaccine avoidance. Christian churches have been speaking against the HPV vaccine, which can prevent cervical cancer, because they think cervical tumors are a great deterrent to teenage sex. African Islamic mullahs are the one and only reason that polio has not been globally exterminated, as they spread their lies about the vaccine being a Western ploy against Islam. This stuff is everywhere.

But I will use Jenny McCarthy as their emblem, because she is an easy target, and because she is so current and visible. But mostly, I will use her because she has tried to invalidate criticism by playing the wounded mother, whom only a true brute would pick upon.

Well, I would like her to respond to those who have truly lost, such as those parents naive enough to have been suckered by her self-serving lies, and who lost a child as a result.

I hate the anti-vaccination movement. I hate Jenny McCarthy. And you should, too.