I’ve often preached to friends and family that, if you want to have good relationships, you must reward good behavior, or at the very least not reward the bad stuff. Admittedly it’s always easier to tell others to do this than to consistently practice it yourself, but it’s not exactly controversial either. This is common sense we all learned by 1st grade and spend the rest of lives trying to unlearn with varying and often miserable consequences. I hope the latter happens to ABC network executives, who just signed vaxxer nut and former playmate Jenny McCarthy to cohost The View:

Boston.com — Jenny McCarthy believes that vaccines caused her son to be autistic. Never mind that it’s not clear that he was actually autistic, none of the claims she has made about vaccines and autism are backed up by, um, any medical evidence. But that doesn’t stop Jenny McCarthy from making those claims very publicly. She is a supporter of Andrew Wakefield, the British doctor whose study linking the MMR vaccine and autism was found to be based on fraudulent data. The fact that he has been discredited by the medical community and lost his license doesn’t stop her from supporting him.

Vaccination has probably saved more lives than anything we’ve ever done. It’s certainly prevented more childhood tragedies. But it works best when maxxed out, because not everyone can take vaccines, some fade over time, and many people will fight other diseases or undergo treatment that greatly weakens their immune system, making them susceptible. Those people depend on collective herd immunity, that enough people have working vaccinations that the local community won’t support raging epidemics. So, conversely, McCarthy’s anti-vaccination efforts could kill more people than a healthy war with a particular emphasis on the young, the sick, and the old. Way to go ABC … that’ll do pigs, that’ll do.