Dear ABC: Putting Jenny McCarthy on ‘The View’ Will Kill Children
She devotes a great deal of energy to promoting the untrue belief that vaccines lead to autism, and it seems possible that she now views her career as a television personality and prominent celebrity as a means of carrying out her mission to spread what she believes is the truth about autism.
Vaccines don’t cause autism. Vaccines, instead, prevent disease. Vaccines have wiped out a score of formerly deadly childhood diseases. Vaccine skepticism has helped to bring some of those diseases back from near extinction. Children have actually died as a result. Vaccine skepticism isn’t just some “alternative viewpoint” that is stupid but ultimately harmless, like “detoxing” or 9/11 trutherism. Parents have been convinced by McCarthy and the people she works with and promotes. They have forgone vaccination for their children. The result has been the recurrence and spread of preventable diseases. It’s incredibly irresponsible for a broadcast television network to think Jenny McCarthy should be on television — in a position where her job is to share her opinions — every day. It should seriously be a major scandal.
The cynicism and contempt of this hiring is almost funny: In replacing the widely hated Hasselbeck with McCarthy, Walters and company didn’t select a new conservative, to maintain the panel’s political balance. They just went with someone who says dumb, inflammatory things. It’s basically a tacit admission that they were simply casting for “the pretty idiot one.” McCarthy ought to be insulted, if if weren’t for the fact that she’s probably incredibly grateful to be on network TV at all, after flailing through a series of poorly conceived late-night cable talk show launches.
But McCarthy’s idiocy is of a very different, and much more damaging nature than the standard-issue right-wing idiocy of Elisabeth Hasselbeck. McCarthy is not expressing a disagreeable political position, she is spreading misinformation that has actual, tangible health risks. America’s public health authorities should be sounding the alarm.
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