Quack of the Day: Jenny McCarthy

Just remember... she wants to be known for her brain.

If anyone has spent more than ten minutes researching autism, they are bound to come across Jenny McCarthy during their searches.  It isn't because McCarthy is influential or educated.  It isn't because she has done research on the subject nor is it because she has contributed to the field of knowledge that surrounds autism.  Rather the reason McCarthy's name seems to go hand in hand with autism is because she is a celebrity... and as such that gives her access to people like Oprah Winfrey or Larry King, and it also allows her to get her "story" published in People magazine or various supermarket tabloids.

The reality is if McCarthy wasn't a famous Playboy Playmate or B-list actress, nobody would bother to listen, but because she is rather well known, that (for whatever reason) has convinced certain media figures that her story is worth repeating.

So what is the story she is so willing to tell?  Well essentially McCarthy claims vaccines cause autism and these same vaccines in turn harmed her son Evan.  She also claims she was able to reverse Evan's condition and "cure" his autism via a mixture of good old fashioned hard work, truckloads of love, and some miracle biomedical treatments.  Of course McCarthy has zero scientific evidence to support her theory that vaccines cause autism, and in fact when she originally published her book and started going around the country trying to convince others that she was more knowledgeable on the subject than any of the thousands of doctors and scientists who work in the field every day.... there were no less than ten different published studies that had tried to examine the supposed link between vaccines and autism and not a single one of them had ever found even so much as a casual link.

Oh well... science really isn't that important right?  Surely a former Playmate knows more about complex scientific subjects like vaccines than those who spend their entire careers studying them.  We should just accept the fact that McCarthy is right and that all of the experts are simply out of touch.

The irony in this entire situation is that Jenny McCarthy is very much anti-science, yet science is responsible for her most famous assets (her silicone enhanced chesticles).  So apparently she trusts science when it comes to such important matters as enlarging her breasts, but science goes out the door when it comes to her son.  Check.

It is probably worth noting that many experts believe that Evan was actually misdiagnosed in the first place and that he never actually had autism.  As it turns out, some of Evan's initial symptoms were tied to seizures he experienced, and after those seizures were treated his condition improved.  It has been stated that Evan's symptoms were actually more reflective of Landau-Kleffner Syndrome rather than autism and therefore any "cure" that Jenny McCarthy claims to have used has nothing to do with autism.  Other doctors have even suggested Evan had no medical condition at all and was merely developmentally delayed in comparison to his peers.

No matter what McCarthy seems to believe, it seems rather odd that her miracle cure hasn't translated so well.  We don't hear of hundreds or even thousands of autistic kids being cured, so it would seem slightly odd that her magic only happened to apply to her son and nobody else.  So aside from scaring parents away from vaccines, what else has Jenny McCarthy done with all of her anti-vaccination crusading? Go to this website to find out and read the sources...it is very interesting.

Jenny McCarthy Body Count

The basic premise is that as of the time this post was written, McCarthy has indirectly led to the deaths of 738 children which could have been prevented with proper vaccinations, and she has indirectly led to over 85,000 children contracting preventable diseases.  And in all that time what is the number of autism diagnoses scientifically linked to vaccinations???

ZERO.

Yes.... ZERO.

These are the ramifications when people ignore science, and while Jenny McCarthy could have chose to use her celebrity status to educate people about vaccinations and/or to help parents of autistic children come to grips with the diagnoses, she instead decided it was better to scare parents based upon personal opinion which has no scientific backing whatsoever.  Amazing.