Jenny McCarthy (AKA Jenny McCarthy Wahlberg) is an actress, comedian, host, best-selling author, entrepreneur, and mother of a boy named Evan who was diagnosed with autism in 2005.
After hitting his normal developmental milestones during his infancy, Evan suffered a major seizure after he received an MMR vaccine. So began Jenny’s journey to heal her child—as well as her journey through the impenetrable jungle of the obtuse and venal U.S. healthcare system.
Jenny recounted her inspiring and disturbing story in her 2007 New York Times best seller, Louder Than Words: A Mother's Journey in Healing Autism, which we highly recommend to all women facing the difficult decisions of motherhood.
Here at the Focal Points, we love stories about individual women and men showing courage under the crushing pressure to conform. The American entertainment industry is infamous for grinding up young women, but Jenny refused to be intimidated and ridiculed into silence when she expressed her concern that there is indeed a link between childhood vaccination and autism.
As I have learned in my work as a nonfiction author, there is no more fearless, formidable, and dogged force on earth than a mother protecting her child. Most of us can be silenced by the exertion of power, but it’s virtually impossible to shut up a determined mom.
In 2021, Jenny founded Formless Beauty, a vegan, cruelty-free beauty company. Please click on the icon below to visit the company website.
Postscript: During the interview, I suddenly remembered an ancient Saturday Night Live skit in which Martin Short plays a laughably defensive executive. Because we were discussing the entertainment industry, it popped into my head that he was lampooning a studio boss who is guilty of some atrocity. In fact, he was playing an attorney representing the American tobacco industry. As Dr. McCullough has frequently pointed out, the pharmaceutical industry has employed many of the same tactics developed by the tobacco industry.
