We all know that celebrities love to get behind a cause.  Jenny McCarthy is no different.  When her son was diagnosed with autism she made it her life’s work.  On the surface, it would seem that McCarthy was doing nothing but good by spreading autism awareness.  Unfortunately, this is not the case.  Instead, she formed an alliance with Andrew Wakefield based on a paper he published in the British medical journal, The Lancet, claiming a link between the MMR vaccine, inflammatory bowel disease and autism.  McCarthy made sure she spread the word, loud and clear, that vaccines are not safe and cause autism.  Unfortunately for her and everyone who listened, The Lancet retracted the study they published in 1998 in February 2010.  Then, just this week, it was announced that Andrew Wakefield was not only wrong; he has been found guilty of elaborate fraud.  Will McCarthy continue to support this charlatan or will she admit that she has been duped?

McCarthy is a conspiracy theorist and one of Wakefield’s biggest supporters.  She wrote the forward to his book Callous Disregard: Autism and Vaccines—The Truth Behind a Tragedy, where she states: 

“I believe history will be very kind to Andy Wakefield…For hundreds of thousands of parents around the world, myself included, Andy Wakefield is a symbol of strength and conviction that all parents of children with autism can use to fight for truth and the best lives possible for their kids.”  

I don’t have celebrity status that gives Jenny the ability to get her now debunked message across to an audience of millions like on Oprah, Larry King and in People Magazine.  I have to keep fighting one blog entry at a time (along with many others)—hoping that we can turn the tide around. There are many like me but no one with McCarthy’s appeal.  So even with all the evidence against her message, she is winning.  The mainstream media is beginning to report the fraud and will hopefully continue to push this message.  New generations of parents will hopefully never hear about Wakefield or McCarthy for that matter.  I can dream, can’t I?  (more…)

Jenny McCarthy has really done it this time.  This is much worse than pretending to eat her own vomit or faking orgasms.  When she became one of the most vocal opponents of the CDC, she became party to what amounts to biological terrorism. For decades, the childhood vaccination program has prevented children from contracting serious and sometimes deadly diseases. Yet, McCarthy believes that these vaccines are unsafe and the reason her son is autistic. 

In a Time Magazine article last year, she announced that she would rather her son contract a potentially life-threatening disease than be autistic (I apologize now to any autistic adults that may be reading this for I can imagine how offensive that is).  The problem is, there is no proof that vaccines cause autism. Celebrities mean well.  Whether they are trying to free Mumia or inform us that 9/11 was the first time in history that fire melted steel, they desperately want to “do good” so that we don’t stop paying attention to them.    

“I do believe sadly it’s going to take some diseases coming back to realize that we need to change and develop vaccines that are safe. If the vaccine companies are not listening to us, it’s their f___ing fault that the diseases are coming back. They’re making a product that’s s___. If you give us a safe vaccine, we’ll use it. It shouldn’t be polio versus autism…If you ask a parent of an autistic child if they want the measles or the autism, we will stand in line for the f___ing measles.” 

I don’t ever remember Jenny calling me, or any of my friends, to see if we’d rather have children with measles or autistic children.  Many of us would prefer she just stopped talking about autism altogether.  She is not brave, nor is she any kind of warrior mom. She is simply a misguided attention-seeker. Before she went public with her son being autistic, she announced that he was a “crystal child:”  (more…)

Some of Hollywood’s biggest environmentalist stars got together on Larry King last night, to rally the nation around helping the gulf crisis. A special two-hour show aired on the barely-watched CNN network, to raise money and awareness. The money they raised was a little short, and the awareness they raised was of celebrity ignorance. Much like Obama’s new energy commission, there were very few experts out last night.

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While most telethons are about helping people this one seemed more concerned about the oil soaked animals. In fact two thirds of the proceeds went to environmental activist groups, The Nature Conservancy and the National Wildlife Federation. The United Way was there for the human victims, although very few of the stars seemed concerned about that aspect of the tragedy. Robert Redford made a response so comical; that it looked like it was a SNL skit (I’m saving that for the end).

The best example of the Telethon’s focus was voiced by Chelsea Handler:

“Everybody now is thinking about the animals, and and it’s really scary, especially for anybody, you know, espec… for-for a mill…  a bevy of reasons I mean we have to think about the animals out there. Everybody needs to be thinking about animals.”

Perhaps victims of the Nashville flood could have activated Hollywood behind their disaster had they shown pictures of drowning possums. (more…)

For three years now the autism community has declared April Autism Awareness Month and Friday, April 2nd was World Autism Day.  I turned on the TV to see how the mainstream media would advance the autism conversation. To my disappointment there has been very little progress.

Matt Lauer and NBC seemed to make a conscious decision to lend support by promoting celebrities’ wares rather than providing much needed information to the autism community.  The Today Show featured an interview with actress Holly Robinson Peete and her former pro-football player husband, Rodney, promoting their two new books about autism.  They told the story of how depressed they were when they received the diagnosis and how tough it was on their marriage.  At the time, they were informed that their child wouldn’t speak, be social or play organized sports.  

Then, I turned to the Internet and saw Jenny McCarthy begging people to vote for her anti-vaccination charity, Generation Rescue, to win $250K from the “Pepsi Refresh Everything Project.” In a somewhat crazed plea, McCarthy promises that she will spend everyday for the rest of her life helping raise money for these autistic kids.  And then I heard something from way out in left field.  Yoko Ono was named the first-ever “World Autism Ambassador” by Autism Speaks.   Huh?  (more…)

I had all but given up on Hollywood and the media understanding the real issues in the autism community and then last week, something happened.  Andrew Wakefield’s study was retracted from The Lancet.  Full disclosure, Wakefield’s study never actually claimed that vaccines cause autism.  However, it did set into motion a series of events that would eventually lead to Jenny McCarthy being able to debate the American Academy of Pediatrics. 

And how does the former Playmate turned warrior mother feel, now that the basis of her argument has yet again been debunked?  She and boyfriend Jim Carrey released this statement:  “It is our most sincere belief that Dr. Wakefield and parents of children with autism around the world are being subjected to a remarkable media campaign engineered by vaccine manufacturers…”  It is clear to me that anyone who holds “mommy instinct” in higher regard than years of vaccine research is irrational and dangerous.  Yes, McCarthy and Carrey are dangerous on many levels.  They don’t know when to stop.  Unfortunately, people will continue to listen to their tales of diets curing autism and how Big Pharma is poisoning our children.  (more…)

So the Lancet, a British medical journal named after a really sharp object, retracted a horrible study attempting to link measle vaccines to autism.

Now this would really be great news, if the study had not come out, oh, 12 years ago. It’s really scary that it took a medical journal over a decade to admit what nearly everyone else with a working brain knew: the study had more gaping holes in it than Tom Sizemore’s septum.

But sadly, although the study author has also been discredited for this harmful crud, it doesn’t matter. People who believe in junk science will continue to believe in junk science, because their egos won’t allow any other option. And so they will continue preaching to parents a dangerous and false belief that ends up killing kids.

I speak of Jenny McCarthy, Jim Carrey, and all the saps at the Huffington Post who by their own earnest idiocy, misled the public into skipping vaccinations. The potential result: measles outbreaks all over the globe – and ultimately, dead kids.

It’s hard to make jokes about that, so I won’t. (more…)

You are realizing your age today if you grew up in the 1970s or ’80s. Farrah Fawcett, whose iconic image was as ubiquitous on the bedroom walls of American teenage boys as Kim Il Sung’s was in the homes of North Koreans, died of cancer at 62 yesterday. Age is the cruel fate of all sex symbols. In Fawcett’s case, she not only contended with Father Time but with the public’s changing tastes that dated what once symbolized sex. Demographics, and Sir Mix-a-Lot, killed the pin-up girl monopoly of bleach-blond anorexics. But even twenty years after her heyday, ’70s postergirl Fawcett so symbolized sex that her 1995 appearance in Playboy became the bestselling issue of the 1990s. To put this in perspective, an over-the-hill Farah Fawcett beat Pamela Anderson, Jenny McCarthy, and Denise Richards in their primes. (more…)