If you would have told the average person 20 years ago that there would be a group of people who would take medical advice from a former Playboy model with no formal science education, they would have laughed and said it was ridiculous. Unfortunately, that age of dis-enlightenment is upon us: there are a group of people who are against vaccinating their children -- causing a resurgence in diseases that were once eradicated, such as measles -- because they heard from Jenny McCarthy that vaccines cause autism. 

But now, in a new op-ed piece, the former Playboy model is claiming that her words have been taken out of context -- and, in fact, she's NOT "anti-vaccine." She wrote a piece for the Chicago Sun-Times, where she explained her position.

"I am not 'anti-vaccine,'" McCarthy, 41, wrote. "This is not a change in my stance nor is it a new position that I have recently adopted. For years, I have repeatedly stated that I am, in fact, 'pro-vaccine' and for years I have been wrongly branded as 'anti-vaccine.'"

This is a complete about-face from her previous proclamations -- most notably, she went on Larry King Live in 2008, where she argued that certain early childhood vaccines against disease cause autism in children. At the time, she said that she came to this conclusion after her son, Evan (who is now 11), was diagnosed with autism shortly after receiving a vaccine. (If she'd received any sort of scientific training, she'd know that correlation does not imply causation: just because the two events happened in the same time frame, it doesn't mean that one caused the other. If, for example, I fall down while eating an ice cream cone, it doesn't mean that eating ice cream cones causes people to fall down; it means I'm clumsy, it means I tripped over a rock, or it means my dog wandered between my legs and tripped me. But it's irresponsible, and scientifically bogus, to conclude that ice cream cones caused me to fall down -- and that's basically what Jenny McCarthy has done when it comes to vaccines...)

Slate, of course, is quick to point out Jenny's hypocrisy about "toxins" (which she claims that vaccines have, though various studies have concluded that there are more toxins in the average apple you buy at a supermarket than there are in a vaccine), considering she's enthusiastic about Botox, made from one of the most deadly viruses on Earth (the botulinum toxin, which causes fatal paralysis).

And Jeffrey Kluger of TIME Magazine -- who was one of the first to give Jenny McCarthy an interview wherein she explained her anti-vaccine stance -- had the best quote about her hypocrisy. "Jenny, as outbreaks of measles, mumps and whooping cough continue to appear in the U.S. -- most the result of parents refusing to vaccinate their children because of the scare stories passed around by anti-vaxxers like you -- it's just too late to play cute with the things you've said. You are either floridly, loudly, uninformedly anti-vaccine or you are the most grievously misunderstood celebrity of the modern era. Science almost always prefers the simple answer, because that's the one that's usually correct. Your quote trail is far too long -- and you have been far too wrong -- for the truth not to be obvious," he wrote.