Executives at ABC should be ashamed of themselves for offering McCarthy a regular platform on which she can peddle denialism and fear to the parents of young children who may have legitimate questions about vaccine safety. Presumably, those executives have decided that the revenues Jenny McCarthy might generate are worth more than the truth.
Correction: An earlier version incorrectly stated the year Barbara Walters became the first female network-news anchor. Michael Specter is a staff writer at The New Yorker and an adjunct professor of bioengineering at Stanford University.
More: Elements techpages. The Daily The best of The New Yorker , every day, in your in-box, plus occasional alerts when we publish major stories. Enter your e-mail address. Why is measles, which was effectively eradicated in the United States in , on the march? Because so-called anti-vaxxer parents are refusing to use a vaccine that decades of research proves works while actually offering non-immunological benefits, including community immunity which protects people who cannot get vaccinated.
Who could have seen this coming? Over six years, Bartholomaus tallied , illnesses and 9, preventable deaths. He stopped because he became a father and because he gave up. Meanwhile, the anti-vaxxer movement gained momentum and Jenny McCarthy suffered no repercussions for providing debunked and discredited scientists with a massive platform. How did McCarthy reach her scientific conclusion?
Today, she hosts a regular radio show on SiriusXM and serves as a panelist on the hit show The Masked Singer — and children in Washington are suffering. McCarthy gave the anti-vax movement a very prominent face. How culpable do you think celebrities like her are for the deaths of children? Do I think people have responsibility for their words and actions? Autism has not declined since , thereby disproving this connection. However, this has not stopped anti-vaccination believers from claiming that it was the MMR vaccine itself that caused autism or that it was vaccines in general that caused autism.
All of these ideas have been disproven in multiple scientific and legal examinations of the evidence. But who in their right mind would deny their offspring proven protection against potentially fatal diseases like mumps and measles?
As many people watch The View as live in Iowa. Could it be that McCarthy is set to become the most dangerous person on American television? Her foray into medical scholarship followed the birth of her son, Evan, in and a subsequent diagnosis of autism. Any parent confronted with that sort of crisis is entitled to speculate on its source. But she described the tie between vaccinations and autism as fact and used her fame to peddle it, partly through her book, Mother Warrior. Her then partner, the actor Jim Carrey, lent his voice to her anti-inoculation quest.
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