Many millennia ago, back during my undergraduate years, Jenny McCarthy was a popular woman. Most notably for the positive response to her “huge tracts of land,” to steal a line from Monty Python.
Today, however, her twisted rhetoric against child vaccination triggers a much different response. It’s more like being stabbed in the ear repeatedly with a serrated fishing knife.
In a recent Huffington Post article, “Who’s Afraid of the Truth About Autism,” McCarthy suggested vaccines, which she called “injected toxins” cause autism. Strangely enough, however, her irreverence for those horrible vaccine toxins does not transfer to her love of injecting her face with botulinum toxin, aka botox, according to a 2009 Huffington Post article on her beauty secrets. Botulinum toxin is an extremely dangerous injected toxin itself.
Hypocrisy, it seems, knows no bounds.
McCarthy’s article includes several accusations against vaccines that have been questioned by many critics, including Yale University clinical neurologist, Steven Novella.
Among McCarthy’s accusations, she suggested that the United States mandates one-third more vaccines than other countries worldwide, and that this increase in vaccines correlates with a higher incidence of autism here at home.
Unfortunately for McCarthy, the numbers simply do not add up, wrote Novella on the blog Science Based Medicine. In fact, when Novella compared other western European nations, such as Germany, Iceland and France, the vaccine schedules were found to be comparable. This finding was also reported in Iris Erlingsdottir’s Huffington Post rebuttal to McCarthy, “Is Jenny McCarthy Afraid of the Truth About Autism?”
Additionally, Novella compared U.S. autism rates to European rates, and found no statistically significant evidence to suggest higher incident rates this side of the pond.
The intellectual dishonesty goes even further, as the entire anti-vaccine movement is based on the fraudulent 1998 Andrew Wakefield study that linked MMR vaccines to autism. Since being published, the study was shown to falsify data and has been retracted. As originally noted by journalist Brian Deer, there was a severe conflict of interest, as Wakefield “was paid more than 400,000 British pounds by lawyers trying to prove that the vaccine was unsafe.”
The damage from the Wakefield study, however, has already been done. In 2008 the CDC reported a substantial rise in the number of measles cases, which had previously been at such a low level it was thought to no longer be spreading. The cause for this increase cited by the CDC? Children not being vaccinated.
McCarthy still maintains that there is a link between vaccines and autism, even though the best evidence the anti-vaccine contingent could produce was found to be wanting by the Office of Special Masters of the U.S. Courts of Federal Claims, better known as the Vaccine Court, set up by the US government to settle vaccine injury claims as part of the 1986 National Childhood Vaccine Injury Act.
Clearly, for McCarthy, the matter of vaccines is not about evidence.
The anti-vaccination movement needs to be stopped. The increase in non-vaccinated children is bringing back diseases once eradicated due to the efficacy of vaccines. Perhaps, as a country, we should look to experts to disseminate vital information rather than hypocrites whose celebrity comes primarily from exposing themselves in nude magazines.
Noah loves needles. Reach him at noah.lewkowitz@asu.edu
