Jenny McCarthy

Jennifer Ann "Jenny" Wahlberg (née McCarthy; born November 1, 1972) is an American actress, model, television host, comedian, author, screenwriter, and anti-vaccine activist. She began her career in 1993 as a nude model for Playboy magazine and was later named their Playmate of the Year. McCarthy then parlayed her Playboy fame into a television and film acting career. She is a former co-host of the ABC talk show The View. McCarthy has written books about parenting and has become an activist promoting research into environmental causes and alternative medical treatments for autism. She has promoted the idea that vaccines cause autism and that chelation therapy helped cure her son of autism. Both claims are unsupported by medical consensus, and her son's autism diagnosis has been questioned. McCarthy has been described as "the nation's most prominent purveyor of anti-vaxxer ideology", but she has denied the charge, stating: "I am not anti-vaccine". 2Early life McCarthy grew up in Evergreen Park, Illinois (a suburb of Chicago) and South West Chicago. She was born to a working-class Catholic family, and has Irish, German, and Polish ancestr