Jennifer Ann McCarthy (born November 1, 1972), sometimes credited as Jenny Wahlberg, is an American anti-vaccine activist, actress, model, television host, author, and screenwriter. 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 starting as a co-host on the MTV game show Singled Out, then some eponymous sitcoms, as well as films such as BASEketball, Diamonds, Scream 3, and Santa Baby. She is a former co-host of the ABC talk show The View.\n', '

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".\n', '

McCarthy was born on November 1, 1972 at Little Company of Mary Hospital located in the southwest Chicago suburb of Evergreen Park, Illinois. She was born to a working-class Catholic family, and has Irish, German, and Polish ancestry. She lived in the West Elsdon neighborhood of Chicago. She is the second of four daughters – her sisters are named Lynette, Joanne, and Amy; actress Melissa McCarthy is her cousin. McCarthy\'s mother, Linda, was a housewife and courtroom custodian, and her father, Dan McCarthy, was a steel mill foreman.\n', '

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