Jenny McCarthy is Wrong On Vaccines — So Let Her Join 'The View' and Grab the Popcorn

Culture

Quite frankly, with everything going on this week near and far (and especially near, like Florida near), I find the anti-vaccination issue to be a petty use of anyone’s’ time. But maybe everyone is looking for a reason to not have to think about the fact that in 2013 a group of white people acquitted a half-white man of the murder of an unarmed black child, so now they’ve decided to fight over this bone instead. It was all sparked by Wednesday’s announcement that Jenny McCarthy will be a co-host on The View next season, and more than anything I’ve just been surprised by how many men give a rat’s ass about who’s entertaining our country’s housewives.

If you’ve been snoozing on your “news” recently, McCarthy is a supporter of the anti-vaccination movement, because she believes that childhood vaccines caused her son’s autism. Now let me say before we get any further, I do NOT agree with McCarthy and neither does anyone with a brain or medical degree. But perhaps I don’t have a proper understanding of the breadth and consequences of McCarthy’s anti-vaccine crusade, because I also see no way that one can attribute every vaccine-preventable death and illness since 2007 (as this website does) to her and other followers of the small movement. There are a lot of factors other than Jenny McCarthy that contribute to some children unfortunately not being immunized. I believe strongly in vaccinations, and I do think that it’s irresponsible of her to promote ideas that endanger the lives of children, but I guess I just never considered her a woman with significant reach.

Which brings us back to The View, a platform that will now give McCarthy significantly more reach. But if you put the show into the perspective of other "news" shows, it's relatively innocuous with about 3.3 million people tuning in daily, roughly the population of Iowa. Yes that’s a pretty big number, but there are shows with a much larger viewership. What is even more obvious, and shockingly omitted by everyone who is up in arms about ABC’s decision, is that in no way does anyone involved with the show want that ratings number to decrease. Call me crazy, but I’m pretty close to positive that an anti-vaccination-View-filibuster would jeopardize that number. Also, the high priestess of women in news, Barbara Walters (who is also a producer of the show), would never let McCarthy use the show as a platform for her beliefs. If anything I foresee an episode where Walters & co. shut McCarthy down for spewing nonsensical farces.

And now we’ve reached the part of our program where I might overreach. It’s the part where I bring up Fox News and friends, and all of the outrageous hate speech and ignorance-blasting that they do. And if you want to get into as much of a gray area as the numbers of deaths that McCarthy has caused, why don’t we attribute all of the gay teen suicides, hate crimes, and medical compilations in women due to the war on reproductive health care, to the people on TV who promote those atrocities? And those people are on television right at this very moment. McCarthy hasn’t even sat in that cushy View throne yet, and everyone pretty much is insisting she go find a nice rock to live under. If you take one look at how quickly Rosie O’Donnell got shipped off that show, I would put money on McCarthy being swiftly kicked off as well if she doesn’t fall in line once taping begins.

It kind of comes back to that opening episode of The Newsroom’s first season, you know, when Jeff Daniels' character calls liberals losers. And he calls us (because I include myself in that group) losers because we are entirely bi-polar on what battles we come out of the gate snarling on, or slowly meander through. The GOP might be terrible, but at least they’re consistently aggressive. We on the other hand barely batted an eyelash when Glenn Beck compared Paula Deen to Martin Luther King Jr. Sarah Palin had a freaking reality show, and there weren’t countless articles on why that was dangerous.

At least Jenny McCarthy isn’t a member of the GOP. And if anything this will be an excellent opportunity for her views to be questioned on national television. Also Barbara Walters kind of/definitely said she and the other producers picked McCarthy because she likes to talk about sex on TV because housewives love that kind of sh*t. So like I said, I don’t think promoting the anti-vaccination movement will even be an option for McCarthy. Everyone should get their kids vaccinated and calm the hell down.