Fuck you, Andrew Wakefield. And Jenny McCarthy too, while we’re at it.

I’ve blogged about this before, but every so often, this particular rage bubble boils back to the surface like a poorly treated infection. And I get it—truly, I do. Finding out your child is autistic is life-altering. It brings grief, confusion, and the desperate need to find answers. But that doesn’t excuse what came next.

Jenny McCarthy, like many before her (and after) , fell into the trap of confirmation bias and “Google University.” I imagine her descent into the anti-vax rabbit hole started when she typed MMR and autism into a search bar and landed squarely on *that* study—Andrew Wakefield’s fraudulent trash fire of a research paper.

Here’s the link to the Wikipedia article on Wakefield, which covers this circus more thoroughly than I care to:

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Andrew_Wakefield

But let me highlight the key takeaway: his now-retracted study caused a significant decrease in vaccination rates. That’s not a footnote—that’s a catastrophe.

Most of us reading this had the MMR vaccine as a standard part of childhood. For decades, it was a non-issue. Safe. Routine. Protective. And then along came one disgraced doctor and one desperate celebrity, armed with pseudoscience, a camera crew, and zero credentials in immunology.

Wakefield’s “research” had a sample size of twelve. Twelve. There was no control group. No internal validity. It couldn’t be replicated. That’s not science; that’s a high school science fair project gone rogue—except this one got published in The Lancet and promptly weaponized by fame.

Enter Jenny McCarthy, who I’m guessing barely passed high school biology. She took that garbage study and turned it into a movement. Because when you’re blonde, telegenic, and grieving, people don’t always fact-check you. They just listen.

And that’s the real danger: when media access trumps scientific integrity. When loud replaces correct. When “I read somewhere” holds more weight than, “Here’s what a decade of peer-reviewed, reproducible data says.”

The anti-vax movement overlaps disturbingly with every flavor of conspiracy theory. Flat Earth. Moon landing denial. Holocaust denial. Chemtrails. Pick your poison. It’s the same formula: distrust + ego + internet rabbit hole = public health disaster.

It’s no longer just annoying—it’s dangerous.

We’ve already seen the consequences: vaccine hesitancy contributed to the re-emergence of diseases that were nearly eradicated. Measles outbreaks. Pertussis.

 

 

 

 

Polio cases. Remember polio? That paralytic horror that used to land people in iron lungs? In the modern age, the only remaining wild cases are extremely rare and largely vaccine-preventable. Smallpox? Eradicated, thanks to vaccines. There are only two known samples left—frozen, secured, and monitored under high-security conditions. The CDC has one. The other is in Russia. Both are locked up in a vault some folks affectionately call “the devil’s fridge.”

But sure, Jenny, tell me more about your essential oils.

Even Nancy Reagan—queen of the “Just Say No” campaign—came around on stem cell research when Ronnie got Alzheimer’s. Turns out personal tragedy can make a person do a hard pivot on scientific principles.

I’ve said this before, and I’ll keep saying it louder for the people in the back: if you are anti-vaccine and anti-science, and you hold a position of influence or authority, you are a liability to public health.

Vaccines became a thing because people were sick and tired of watching loved ones die from preventable illness. We don’t need your “alternative facts.” We need herd immunity. We need trust in science. We need fewer Facebook doctors and more epidemiologists on the evening news.

I’ll be honest: it’s weird for me, a Gen Xer raised on The Terminator, to be using AI to help write this. But between SkyNet and Jenny McCarthy, I’m starting to think SkyNet might actually be the safer bet.

So no, I don’t have Jenny’s platform. I don’t have a TV show or a glam squad. But I do have a few decades of medical experience, a functioning bullshit detector, and this little soapbox of a blog. And from where I stand?

Jenny McCarthy should stop trying to be a scientist and go back to being a mom—an advocate for her child, not a mouthpiece for misinformation. Grief does not give you the right to endanger others.

As always, be the kind of person your dog and your mom think you are.