We live in the information age, where the internet supplies answers for us from the simple (“what was that actor’s name?”) to the obscure (“what is Landau-Kleffner syndrome?”).  We also live in an age where misinformation spreads more quickly than ever before.  Mark Twain is attributed with saying “A lie can travel halfway around the world while the truth is putting on its shoes.”  That’s not the case anymore.  A lie can now travel twice around the world, be retweeted a hundred times, and have ten blog posts written on it before the truth even wakes up to get dressed.

Enter Jenny McCarthy.

If you will recall, Jenny McCarthy started her rise to stardom by being naked in Playboy Magazine.  She turned that into a celebrity career, but everything changed after her son Evan was born.  After first turning to New Age pseudoscience to declare herself an “indigo mom” and her son a “crystal child,” she then turned to a much more legitimate branch of pseudoscience and became an anti-vaccination proponent, convinced that her son was on the autism spectrum and that vaccines are the cause.  Seizing upon the now-discredited and debunked research of British doctor Andrew Wakefield, McCarthy began convincing legions of scared parents to not vaccinate their children, even while she claimed that she had “cured” her own son of his autism with chelation therapy (yet another piece of junk science) after trying multiple “alternative” therapies.

And because there are just enough people to believe anything if a celebrity says it, or if it is on the internet, the lie that vaccines cause autism caught wildfire.  And it is a lie.  There has never been a legitimate scientific study to support that theory.  And I happen to have a vested interest in what does cause autism, as I live with the effects of autism every single day.  My oldest son is approaching his eighth birthday.  Right before his fifth birthday, he was diagnosed with autism.  He has an older sister and two younger brothers.  My daughter is, as they say in the autism spectrum disorder world, “neurotypical” – meaning developmentally “normal.”  My two little boys are involved in a research study at one of our local universities that will watch them until they are five years old, measuring their cognitive and speech development, and even doing MRI scans on their developing brains.  What the study that my little sons are involved in is finding that it is all about brain development – specifically, white matter – that changes the wiring of the brain from a “neurotypical” one to an “autistic” one.

Conservatives, who have been wrongly stereotyped for years as “anti-science,” have gained steady ground over the years among those who respect science.  Conservatives aren’t winning the abortion debate on moral grounds – we’re winning it on scientific grounds.  Vaccination rates are slowly beginning to rise again, but only after devastating resurgences in diseases like whooping cough and measles.  These diseases, the scourge of my grandparents’ childhoods, have come back to try and claim their great-grandchildren’s generation, all because people heard a celebrity claim that it would give their child autism – insultingly claiming that an autism diagnosis was a fate worse than possible death by measles or whooping cough.

And why does Jenny McCarthy matter now, when science is turning so definitively against her?  Why, because she is now going to have a daily platform on network television from which to spread her loony ideas.  It was just announced that McCarthy will be joining “The View” now that Elisabeth Hasselbeck has left.  Will she continue to advocate her anti-vaccination dogma on the show?  If ABC is smart, they will ask her to avoid the subject, because if even one child should die because of her “advice,” I am sure that some enterprising lawyer will find a way to sue the network.

Oh, wait.

And if you happened to be wondering, “Well, what is Landau-Kleffner syndrome?”

It is the rare childhood neurological disorder that Jenny McCarthy’s son actually has, not autism.  But she says she still wants to be the “voice” of autism.

ASD parents don’t need you, Jenny.  We don’t need your pseudoscience, either.  And you don’t deserve a national platform from network television to spread your anti-vaccination lies.