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Tuesday, April 22, 2014

Is Jenny McCarthy "Pro-Vaccine"?

At The Ne w York Times, Frank Bruni takes down Jenny McCarthy:
[E]arlier this month, she said the craziest thing of all, in a column for The Chicago Sun-Times.
I am not ‘anti-vaccine,’ ” she wrote, going on to add, “For years, I have repeatedly stated that I am, in fact, ‘pro-vaccine’ and for years I have been wrongly branded.”
You can call this revisionism. Or you can call it “a complete and utter lie,” as the writer Michael Specter said to me. Specter’s 2009 book, “Denialism,”looks at irrational retorts to proven science like McCarthy’s long and undeniable campaign against vaccines.
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In 2007, she was invited on “Oprah” and said that when she took Evan to the doctor for the combined measles-mumps-rubella vaccine, she had “a very bad feeling” about what she recklessly termed “the autism shot.” She added that after the vaccination, “Boom! Soul, gone from his eyes.”
In an online Q. and A. after the show, she wrote: “If I had another child, I would not vaccinate.”
She also appeared on CNN in 2007 and said that when concerned pregnant women asked her what to do, “I am surely not going to tell anyone to vaccinate.”
Two years later, in Time magazine, she said, “If you ask a parent of an autistic child if they want the measles or the autism, we will stand in line for the measles.” I’ve deleted the expletive she used before the second “measles.”
And on The Huffington Post a year after that, she responded to experts who insisted that vaccines didn’t cause autism and were crucial to public health with this declaration: “That’s a lie, and we’re sick of it.”