Jenny McCarthy

What if there were a vaccine to prevent wrinkles? Then what, Jenny McCarthy? Jenny McCarthy is an American celebrity who has, since around 2005, become the poster model for the anti-vaccination movement. While she rose to fame as a Playboy model and actress, as well as the ex-girlfriend of actor Jim Carrey, she is now most prominently known for this vigorous opposition to vaccinations, attributing rising autism rates and other illnesses to the practice. And in turn, rising rates of preventable diseases (such as measles and hepatitis A) have been attributed, in part, to her activism.

To all appearances, McCarthy is a sincere, hard-working, and very upset mother who has the IQ of soap and difficulty with coherent lines of thought. This sincere, deeply-held wrongness leads to tragedy all round.

In 2013, she gained a substantial audience for her crank views when she became a host on the popular ABC television show The View, where she contributed with the benefit of her self-proclaimed "degree" in autism from the "University of Google." Unsurprisingly, McCarthy was fired in less than a year.

In addition to her unscientific scaremongering on vaccines, she has also made disturbing comments about HIV following the revelation in 2015 that her former co-star Charlie Sheen suffers from the condition. McCarthy's comments suggest that she thinks HIV can be transmitted by kissing (though she later denied this) or that people interacting with an HIV-positive individual have a 'right to know'.

Vaccines are Satan
Her involvement in publicly creating hysterics around vaccines began with her son, Evan. At first she opined that she was an indigo and her son was of the crystal persuasion after being told this by a random stranger, but then she discovered the vaccine hysteria and latched on to that instead. She later claimed that her son's autism was caused by the mumps, measles, rubella vaccine but that it was cured through chelation therapy. She wrote a book Louder than Words: A Mother's Journey in Healing Autism and has appeared on Oprah and Larry King Live advocating quackery and marketing false hope.

Years later, TIME revealed that her son had probably never had autism to begin with but which is commonly mistaken for autism. Despite this, McCarthy has not backed down from her anti-vaccine position.

On April 2014, in a Chicago Sun-Times column, she denied ever having been against vaccination:

Then, in that same column, she said: Which basically means she still is completely clueless.

Although Jim Carrey has split from McCarthy, he still is a big promoter of the anti-vax position. His concoction of a conspiracy theory against Andrew Wakefield is no less mind-boggling.