When the anti-vaccination movement began to slip through the crevices of Hollywood, Pharmaceutical companies became terrified. For decades, they’d had Hollywood’s influence in their back pocket. Suddenly, however, Jenny McCarthy was upsetting the apple cart. But it wasn’t just McCarthy, many of Hollywood directors and actresses began to delay or even completely reject vaccines. In 2012, Amanda Peet rose from the ashes of her dead career and suddenly began advocating vaccines.
Peet’s central theme was that her brother-in-law, a “well-respected researcher at Children’s Hospital in Philadelphia” was more qualified to advise her on her children’s vaccinations. It was a slight to her Hollywood colleagues who, again, at the time, were skeptical. Peet was immediately and shamelessly convinced that being skeptical of, or questioning pharmaceutical companies, was a criminal act. So she acted at the command of her Researcher brother-in-law and made a video disparaging the anti-vaccination movement as a whole.
“all my friends weren’t vaccinating their children, so like with all things with my children, I would defer them to my brother-in-law,” Peet recalls of her time deciding if she should vaccinate her children. “It’s so bewildering and frustrating, that we have the medicine, and it’s just not getting to children,” she continues.
The problem isn’t with Peet making a personal decision for her children (that’s the right we all want). The issue is that Peet is really a cohort, or celebrity voice, to Pharmaceutical companies. That’s not