By Daily Mail (U.S.) | Created at 2025-04-02 21:06:45 | Updated at 2025-04-03 18:58:11
21 hours ago
Jenny McCarthy has claimed a government agency tried to smear her after she suggested her son's autism was caused by a vaccine.
The Hollywood actress, now 52, revealed her son Evan's diagnosis in 2007, saying it came after he received the Measles, Mumps and Rubella (MMR) vaccine and then suffered from seizures that left him unable to breathe.
She went on Oprah Winfrey's show with the claims in 2008, and has written four books on battling her son's condition — which causes trouble communicating with others.
But now, McCarthy has said that after making the claims she was approached by a public relations worker warning that an unnamed US government agency wanted to hire him as part of a campaign to try to discredit her allegations.
Speaking on Maria Menounos' podcast, McCarthy said the man warned the agency would 'come after you with everything they've got.' He added he couldn't accept the job because his own child suffered complications from a vaccine.
In the months following the interaction, McCarthy said she was dropped by companies and taken off of advertising campaigns.
McCarthy didn't name the person who approached her with the warning or reveal what company they worked for.
Despite the warning, she continued to speak out about her son's diagnosis — and still says now she believes his autism is linked to the vaccine.
Despite her claims, the CDC and several major meta-analyses have failed to establish a link between the MMR vaccine and autism.
But Human and Health Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Junior has previously claimed there is a link, and has now tasked the CDC with investigating it once again.
Jenny McCarthy, 52, is pictured above with her son Evan. She believes his autism was caused by the MMR vaccine
Speaking on the podcast, McCarthy said that after she began speaking out she 'had about six months of just enormous amounts of parents going, "thank you, I am looked at not crazy now, people kept saying I was crazy".
'And then I had someone come to my organization, Generation Rescue, and say to me, "Listen, I was approached by, let's just say a Government agency, to be hired, and what I do is set up PR campaigns to go against the narrative.
'[He added]: "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 only reason I said no is because my child went through the same thing and I didn't want to be part of it."'
'And I said, "Well how are they going to do that when I've clearly said in every interview that I'm not anti-vaccine? Like, I'm just telling the story of my child [and] of what happened."
'And he said, "It doesn't matter, they're going to come after you with everything they've got — and they've got the media on their side, so this is just a heads up.'
She said following this, she found herself being pulled off jobs and campaigns amid public controversy over her claims.
McCarthy has previously said her son was healthy but that after receiving the MMR vaccine, which is given to protect against measles, he started to suffer from seizures, stop breathing and turn blue.
Jenny McCarthy, now 52, is shown above speaking on Maria Menounos' podcast
He was rushed to the hospital and diagnosed with encephalitis — a type of brain inflammation.
McCarthy is convinced the vaccine caused the brain inflammation, which she says later led to her son's autism diagnosis.
Concerns were raised that the MMR vaccine could cause autism in February 1998, after the Lancet paper published a study by discredited scientist Andrew Wakefield suggesting a link.
It took 12 years before the journal finally retracted the paper in February 2010, saying the children studied in the paper were 'carefully selected' and not the result of a random sample.
The research was also found to have been partly-funded by lawyers acting for parents involved in lawsuits against vaccine manufacturers.
More than 20 major studies involving more than 10million children across multiple countries have been carried out since the claims emerged, but none have linked the MMR vaccine to a higher risk of autism.
There have been three published reports of encephalitis emerging in people about four to nine months after their MMR vaccination, with one linked to the measles strain used in the vaccine.
People who catch measles are known to be at risk of developing this complication.
Dr Jess Steier, a public health expert in Massachusetts who reviewed the studies, said: 'Parents can be confident that vaccinating their children protects them from serious diseases without increasing the risk of autism.
'The scientific evidence on this question is not merely suggestive — it is overwhelming and conclusive.'
It comes amid a major measles outbreak in West Texas where 422 people have been infected and the state saw its first measles death in a decade in a six-year-old girl.
The measles vaccine is 97 percent effective at preventing an infection with the disease, which is one of the most infectious in the world.
About one to three infections with the virus in every 1,000 children who are unvaccinated is fatal, estimates suggest.
