… and I wish it were the one you were thinking of when you clicked on this story. Alas. The erstwhile vixen of such memorable fare as MTV’s Singled Out, the Tony Danza Show, the Dennis Rodman World Tour, Playboy Wet and Wild: the Locker Room, and… um… well, I’m sure she’s done some other really classy projects (not counting Jim Carrey; can’t be “classy” with this on your resumé)… my point is that she’s not working in the industry anymore. Nope, she’s traded in the soft core porn for the soft core science. That’s right, my friends. Jenny McCarthy gave me the measles.
Measles, you say? Didn’t measles go out with with Al Capone and the speakeasies? Well, listen up you palookas and let ol’ Mr. Kotter here give you an earful, on the level. This lovely tomato’s got everyone all bottled up over this vaccine business. Says it gave her bouncing baby boy a bad case of the Autism and now she’s got a bunch of the other Janes zozzled on the same gin juice she’s been gurgling and I’m the one left holding the bag. The measles bag, that is.
Yes, it seems that Ms. McCarthy’s son was afflicted with autism. Nothing funny about that. I wouldn’t wish it on any parent or child. Struggling to find a reason for why her son became a victim of this tragic form of developmental disorder, this mother warrior latched onto what she believed to be the boogeyman responsible for her son’s illness: Common Childhood Vaccinations. This isn’t to say that Jenny came up with this notion on her own. The anti-vaccine movement was well in place before her son was born. Vaccines contain (or most of them used to) small amounts of nasty things like mercury and other toxins. Put enough of that in your kid’s system and what do you expect is going to happen? That’s the theory anyways. Never mind the fact that it doesn’t hold water when subjected to scientific scrutiny. Nevertheless, Jenny formed Generation Rescue a few years later. Mixed with the starpower of her beau, Jim Carrey, and her own gritty determination and considerable flair for straight talk, ka-pow, the anti-vaccination tipping point drew nigh. You’ve got an angry, desperate group of mothers (and fathers, too) who now have a convenient target to blame: the pharmaceutical companies. Big Pharma gave my kid autism, they scream. They make billions of dollars giving kids autism! Sick kids and rich corporations. Great headline, lousy premise. Lousier still is that Jenny and the witchdoctors with whom she associates now claim they can cure autism. Check out vaccine wunderkind Paul Offit’s book, Autism’s False Prophets. This will put the misdeeds of the Enron, Worldcom, and AIG in perspective. All they did was bankrupt your 401(k). These charlatans are giving false hope to parents of sick children.
Now we have a bunch of moms who outright refuse to get their kids vaccinated. The numbers grow every day. What’s the big deal, right? Let these idiots contract childhood killers like polio, diphtheria, and whooping cough. If they want to risk measles, mumps, and rubella, go ahead and let them. It’s America, they have the right to choose. If it were that simple, I’d be on their side. I’m generally OK with other people doing whatever they want, so long as it doesn’t hurt me (or make me wake up screaming every night). Trouble is, unvaccinated kids (adults, too) pose a threat to public welfare. Amy Wallace wrote a fantastic article on the topic in November’s Wired (some anti-vaccination folks wrote fantastic, and telling, comments, as well). Because vaccines are not 100% effective on every person, a small number of “vaccinated” people end up not being protected. In communities with high vaccination rates, that tends not to be a problem. Because most folks are vaccinated, the virus can’t get a toehold in the community and will likely die out before making its way to the unprotected. In relatively unvaccinated communities, however, this isn’t the case. The virus can perpetuate itself in hosts and continue to replicate, eventually making its way to the “vaccinated” person. It’s safer to be unvaccinated in a community with high vaccination rates than it is to be vaccinated in a unvaccinated community. In other words, little Billy stands a much better chance of not contracting a preventable, life-threatening childhood disease if the kids he shares boogers with in Mrs. Cornmussel’s kindergarten class happen to have mothers with enough common sense to not let their pride-and-joy run the risk of catching Hib meningitis.
As it stands, the anti-vaccination movement continues to gain steam. Because real science hasn’t yet figured out the real cause of autism, the pseudo-science shysters have stepped in. Kids are still getting autism and now they’re getting nasty preventable diseases. Vaccine-prevented birth defects are on the rise, too. In this germ-phobic society, is this really a problem? I practically have to lay an offering at the altar of Purell to gain access to my office building and these clowns are allowed to bring in small pox? These are all questions I will ponder as I spend the next two weeks coated in Jergen’s. Decidely not the first time Jenny McCarthy, lotion, and I were mentioned in the same sentence. But certainly the last.
