Actress says she was warned by a shadowy government agency for being vaccine skeptic
Actress Jenny McCarthy, former co-host of The View, recently revealed the warning she received after she began publicly speaking out against vaccines.
McCarthy’s skepticism about vaccines began after her normal, healthy toddler received the mumps, measles, and rubella (MMR) shot. The two-and-a-half-year-old suddenly began suffering life-threatening seizures that eventually culminated in an autism diagnosis. After researching the matter, McCarthy said she found that the MMR vaccine was “clinically in published science” linked to autism in some children.
“[M]y son was one of them,” she said on a podcast last month with Maria Menounos. “Because it was after his MMR, when his encephalitis . . . [led] to autism.” Encephalitis is inflammation of the brain tissue that can be caused by vaccination.
McCarthy became a vocal critic of vaccines and publicly pushed for more research into a possible link between vaccination and autism. She published a book called “Louder Than Words: A Mother’s Journey in Healing Autism” and appeared on “The Oprah Winfrey Show” in 2008 to discuss autism and vaccines, an issue she said many parents had been pressing Oprah to cover. McCarthy said the appearance was live because Oprah feared that, if it were taped, any criticism of vaccines would be censored. On the show, Oprah had to read a “giant long page disclaimer” defending vaccines.
McCarthy’s appearance brought mainstream attention to the possibility of vaccine-induced autism. “I had about six months of just enormous amounts of parents going, ‘Thank you. I’m looked at as not crazy now,’” McCarthy said.
But she also became a target.
The warning
One day, a man visited her at her nonprofit autism research organization, Generation Rescue.
“I had someone come to my organization . . . and say to me, ‘Listen, I was approached by, let’s just say a government agency to be hired.’” The visitor said his job was to create a smear campaign designed to discredit her. “‘What I do is I set up PR campaigns to go against the narrative. And I’m telling you privately because I turned them down, but I wanted to give you forewarning that it’s happening because they’re going to hire someone else.’”
The man said he had declined the job because his own child suffered a similar experience to McCarthy’s, and he did not want to silence someone who was seeking the truth. The actress and model said she was shocked by the man’s warning and asked him to repeat it.
“‘I basically am a PR agency, a very high echelon one, and I was approached by a government agency to create a narrative against you, and it’s going to be called you’re anti-vaccine,’” the man confirmed.
“How are they going to do that when I've clearly said in every interview I'm not anti-vaccine?” McCarthy asked the man. “I'm just telling the story of my child, of what happened, and how I'm getting him better.”
“‘It doesn’t matter,’” the man said. “‘They’re going to come after you with everything they’ve got. And they’ve got the media on their side.’”
McCarthy said she didn’t believe the warning at first, but then the attacks on her escalated until she became a pariah. Corporations pulled her from campaigns and she was denied opportunities.
“It didn’t really hurt me until it started taking jobs away from me,” she said. “I was a single mother still trying to heal my son.”
“I was the beginning of that cancel culture,” McCarthy added. “Cancel culture wasn’t even a phrase yet.”
