JREF Swift Blog

Jenny McCarthy, Doing Time

Opinions are like teeth. Most of us have a mouth full of them, and some are prone to rot.

An opinion is merely an opinion. Without some underlying fact, even the most reasonable assertions of belief — such as: “Jet airplanes are powered by Bette Midler songs!” — are just so many words and have very little value. An oft quoted corollary of this — one you usually hear just before losing an argument — is that while you are entitled to your own opinion, you are not entitled to your own facts. There is some disagreement about who originated the axiom, but whoever it was never took the time to explain things to Jenny McCarthy.

McCarthy is a former model who seems to be famous for her naked buxomity. More recently, she has become a very loud (and presumably sincere) proponent of the opinion that vaccines cause autism. In fact, Jenny McCarthy is probably the most famous person in the world when it comes to the topic of vaccines and autism. Jenny McCarthy has the recognition and agreement of more people on this topic than any other single person alive today.

McCarthy was recently featured in Time magazine, and her mantra that vaccines cause autism was writ large, albeit in crayon. The article is awash in soft and middling arguments that effectively exclude no point of view, and have all the intellectual rigor of a tender-hearted school teacher who doesn’t want to hurt your feelings by saying your toddler sucks at math.

To its credit, the article does mention the unequivocal findings of science in the autism and vaccine debate. It even cites the Autism Science Foundation, which states that there have been 22 studies into the matter with no causal relationship ever being found. However, in a rare feat of passive-aggressive journalism, the article ends on this vomitous note:

…as I was driving out to the San Fernando Valley to see McCarthy and realized she was right: parents will never stop hoping.

Thus does the article explain why the anti-vaccine movement is so popular. In a further, drool-inducing act of equivocation, the writer leaves unquestioned McCarthy’s assertion that she “recovered” her own child from autism, and does not need real science because she has her own.

Jenny’s homegrown version of science is derived from her subjective experience of her son’s horrible illness and recovery. While none of us should reduce or belittle this experience, it is a colossal disservice to equate it with science. Understanding that McCarthy’s motivation derives from the parental nightmare of a seriously ill child, we are nevertheless responsible for our fidelity to the hard-won facts of very difficult and meticulous research.

In an apparent supplement to the piece in Time, McCarthy penned a column for The Huffington Post, an organ as open-minded as a person recently struck in the forehead with an axe. In it, McCarthy asserts that vaccines must be toxic and dangerous, or else the federal government of the United States would not have paid out over 1.9 billion dollars in damages as a result of vaccine related illness and death. She is even so helpful as to provide a link to the site that reports these awful and damning numbers. She wants you to fear these numbers.

Here’s some fact checking:

In the last 22 years, the US government has paid out on 2,428 claims at an average cost of about eight hundred thousand dollars per claim, and none of these claims were autism-related. In the same period, at an average of 4 million per year, 88 million children have been born in the United Sates and about 67 million of these have been vaccinated. This means that the US federal government has paid out a vaccine claim for less than 0.004% of all vaccinated children.

That’s 1 in about 27,950. By comparison, about 1 in 2000 people die from complications arising from having their gall bladder removed.

The real problem is that none of these numbers actually matter; they are like the license plate of an oncoming car. They ought to matter but they don’t, and this is why Jenny is both not even wrong and all but unassailable. Jenny McCarthy does not espouse a position, but rather an identity. It’s easy to debunk her facts because they are anything but, but she never really needs to defend them: She is a suffering parent, and to question her is to question that. That is Jenny’s science.