Jenny, Jenny, Who Can We Turn To?

The producers of ABC’s “The View” have decided that their latest hostess on their afternoon talk show will be Jenny McCarthy.

Ms. McCarthy has a couple of notable highlights to her career. She was a Playboy centerfold in 1993 and later Playmate of the Year. She has done some modeling. She has had some roles in some truly forgettable films and won a couple of Razzie Awards for them. She played a recurring character, a ditzy, buxom, blonde, on “Two & A Half Men”. (What a stretch of her acting chops!)

And she has become quite the spokesperson campaigning against childhood vaccinations, loudly and proudly pushing the completely false and discredited notion that vaccines cause autism.

Why is she now a hostess on a daily, mid-afternoon talk show aimed at the stay-at-home mom demographic? Her track record shows that she meets the definition of “pretty” used by Hugh Hefner and the mythical Charlie Harper. And…

That’s it. There is no second qualification that I can see.

But she is passionate, if ignorant and terribly misguided, about telling other parents to NOT let their pediatricians give their kids immunizations for measles, polio, chickenpox, diphtheria, hepatitis, flu, mumps, pertussis, rubella, tetanus, and so on.

Others have been making a fuss over this far more eloquently than I can. For example:

• The James Randi Educational Foundation in 2008 gave Ms. McCarthy a Pigasus Award for contributions to pseudoscience.
• Phil Plait (“The Bad Astronomer”) has a great article on his Slate blog here.
• Time magazine’s television critic James Poniewozik has an excellent article here.
• The Anti-Vaccine Body Count is keeping score.
• Google “Jenny McCarthy Vaccine” and just watch all of the news articles pop up.

Parents get to make choices every day on how their kids are going to be raised, and with a very few exceptions that’s the way it’s supposed to be and has to be. (Sorry, those exceptions – if you’re raising your toddlers with rattlesnakes as babysitters, for example, that’s probably over the line in my book.) Parents should always be trying to do their best to make informed decisions on behalf of their children, not just following anyone blindly.

But too many people can’t or won’t make a distinction between a medical expert that they see in the flesh every few months and a “celebrity” they see sitting next to Barbara Walters on an “entertainment” show every day. They take that celebrity’s word as fact, when it’s really 100% opinion, and an opinion that’s been repeatedly proven to be horribly, dangerously wrong.

In this case it’s even worse, because it’s not just the anti-vaxxers’ children who are going to get sick. When they get sick they spread the disease to others. Google for articles about the upswing in measles and whooping cough caused by the failure of parents to immunize in the past couple of decades, even though these diseases are almost entirely preventable. Judge for yourself the damage that has already been done throughout society by these misguided, inaccurate, discredited campaigns of fear and ignorance.

Do you think that having tens of thousands of kids with preventable diseases every year is helping to drive down the cost of health care for you and me and everyone else?

Who do you want to listen to when making life and death decisions for your children. Your doctor, who went to eight or ten years of medical school and is backed by tens of thousands of researchers and decades of data and clinical trials?

Or Miss October 1993?

What’s that old song by Tommy Tutone? “Jenny, I got your number… 8-6-7-5-3-0-9”

We always thought it was a phone number. Maybe it’s the number of children who are going to suffer and possibly die from completely preventable diseases now that ABC has given Jenny a pulpit.