In 2007, Oprah Winfrey featured Jenny McCarthy, the former Playboy model turned anti-vaccine activist, on her show to talk about her son Evan’s autism diagnosis. “The University of Google is where I got my degree from,” she said during that appearance. McCarthy would go on to become one of the most visible purveyors of disinformation around vaccines and autism, encouraging countless parents to believe that vaccines give children developmental disabilities.
Before she embarked on this dangerous new path, McCarthy was like other moms — and a majority of caregivers for autistic people are women, particularly moms — trying to figure out how to help their children through the diagnosis. The medical community has a history of marginalizing and discrediting women’s health concerns, and for many years, scientists blamed autism on unloving mothers. So it’s understandable that women like McCarthy went online to try to learn more about the complex, largely misunderstood condition.
McCarthy is an easy target given her large media profile. But throughout the 2000s and through the 2010s, scores of less famous families and solo bloggers spread misinformation through their smaller platforms. These so-called “mommy bloggers” frequently focused on autism and vaccines, even as scientists repeatedly debunked the theory that vaccines played a role in autism. All of this made mainstream media efforts to push back against the lies around vaccines and autism all the more difficult.