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.