It’s a five-alarm skeptic alert: medical genius and nose-picking Playboy model Jenny McCarthy has signed with the great-and-powerful-Oprah’s Harpo Productions to develop a talk show and other projects. Her blog has already debuted on Oprah.com, and will soon become regular reading for me. I’ll probably go there daily, right after I read Nobel-laureate Paul Krugman’s blog.
In case you don’t know, McCarthy, who is most famous now for having sex with Jim Carrey, is one of the most prominent voices in the anti-vaccination world. The BS that she spews is ignorant and dangerous.
As usual, Phil Plait of the Bad Astronomy blog (and President of the James Randi Educational Foundation) puts it best.
Oprah: you have screwed up on this one, and in a huge, huge way. Jenny McCarthy has loudly and publicly increased fears over vaccinations based on nonsense and bad science. By giving her a platform, you are virtually guaranteeing that vaccination rates will decline further, there will be more outbreaks of easily preventable diseases, and therefore we’ll see an increase in deaths of children all around the world. You have claimed to want to make the world a better place — and you have actually done so in many ways — but this one act will completely negate any good you’ve done in the past.
