Mayim Bialik Insists ‘I’m Not Anti-Vaccine’ — But Is She?
By Anne Cohen February 11, 2015
Mayim Bialik really, really wants you to know that she is not anti-vaccine. The actress took to Facebook on Tuesday to dispel what she called the “hysteria and anger” around her stance on the controversial subject.
The “Big Bang Theory” star and proud science nerd (she has a Ph.D. in neuroscience) has been accused to be rooting for the anti-vaxxer camp. In a post for Sisterhood published last week, Bethany Mandel pointed out that the Bialik had posted an angry rebuttal to a pro-vaccination piece on her Facebook page. The post was deleted only hours later.
Did pressure from the Jewish community, her biggest and most loyal fan base, make Mayim change her mind? Or is she, as she claims, genuinly not an anti-vaxxer and just objecting to the black and white categorization of what is Jewish and un-Jewish? Given what she posted on Tuesday, one could give her the benefit of the doubt.
But a second statement, posted to Facebook on Wednesday morning, waffles once again:
Ok. I get the whole “don’t tell me what to do with my kid” attitude when it comes to daycare. Or breastfeeding. Or attachment parenting. But vaccines? That’s just a cop-out. You either think vaccines are a necessary and vital part of keeping your kid (and the rest of us) safe or you don’t. As a woman, choice is a word I value — and don’t use lightly. But choice doesn’t really come into this equation.
A message from our CEO & publisher Rachel Fishman Feddersen
I hope you appreciated this article. Before you move on, I wanted to ask you to support the Forward’s award-winning journalism during our High Holiday Monthly Donor Drive.
If you’ve turned to the Forward in the past 12 months to better understand the world around you, we hope you will support us with a gift now. Your support has a direct impact, giving us the resources we need to report from Israel and around the U.S., across college campuses, and wherever there is news of importance to American Jews.
Make a monthly or one-time gift and support Jewish journalism throughout 5785. The first six months of your monthly gift will be matched for twice the investment in independent Jewish journalism.
— Rachel Fishman Feddersen, Publisher and CEO
