Sorry someone had to say it. She has essentially created a scare in parents. She claims to have done research on the topic of vaccines and autism. Last time I checked research involved case studies, the scientific method, years of R&D, scientists, DOCTORS, and oh I don't know KNOWLEDGE.
Anyone who has taken any type of college level Bio class will see straight through her idiocy and ridiculousness. My personal favorite is how her son was "cured" of autism. Autism is a disorder that is evaluated on a spectrum and can't be attributed to any one cause. This blog entry does an awesome job of breaking down the antivax camp.
Did I mention Jenny has no license, degree, certification, or anything? But yeah... go ahead and listen to her. Don't vaccinate. Just keep your little kid away from me please. I like not having shingles and lockjaw.
I am going to quote a piece of a blog that I came across that states this much better than I could:
"The only question is how much damage will she do in the meantime.
It is concern over this damage (which is already underway in the form of an increase in vaccine-preventable diseases, as well as the use of many dangerous quack treatments like chelation) that motivates me and other science bloggers to take such a hard line with McCarthy. Orac has also taken her down nicely. Even Phil Plait, an astronomer, thought it necessary to call shinanigans on McCarthy.
Her crusade is destructive. It seeks to divide, rather than find common ground. It is dedicated not to a cause (children or autism) but to a conclusion (it’s the vaccines) that happens to be wrong. Along the way she seeks to burn down any institution that gets in her way – sowing public distrust in the medical community, in scientific medicine, in the vaccine program, and regulatory agencies. She believes the system has failed her, so now she advocates for medical anarchy – parents taking medical care into their own hands and not trusting their doctors.
To her all of this is better than to entertain, even for a moment, that perhaps she has not properly interpreted the complex scientific evidence – that maybe, just maybe, she might be wrong and the experts right."
McCarthy is creating an environment where no good can come. No one is doubting that sometimes kids have bad reactions to vaccines. People also have bad reactions to food, the air, light, and other people. Are we going to stop interacting with the world now?
PS. McCarthy also glosses over the fact that she smoke, drank, and had Botox all before she knew she was preggos. But yeah, its the vaccines.
