With the growing epidemic of measles amid anti-vaccination campaigns, a star from "The Brady Brunch" is concerned her likeness was used by anti-vaxxers to mock the illness' severity using a 1969 episode of the show.
"I was really concerned with that and wanted to get to the bottom of that, because I was never contacted," Maureen McCormick, who played Marcia Brady, told NPR.
"I think it's really wrong when people use people's images today to promote whatever they want to promote and the person's image they're using they haven't asked or they have no idea where they stand on the issue.
"As a mother, my daughter was vaccinated."
The "Is There a Doctor in the House?" episode featured a line where Marcia says "If you have to get sick, sure can't beat the measles," because the illness meant time off from school and was manageable in 1969 – although there were more than 25,000 measles cases and 41 deaths, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
"You stayed home like the Brady Bunch show; you stayed home; you didn't go to the doctor," Dr. Toni Bark, an anti-vaccination activist, told NPR. "We never said, 'Oh my God, your kid could die. Oh my God, this is a deadly disease.' It's become that."
Still, McCormick told NPR she is furious she has unwittingly become the face of anti-vaccination campaigns on social media.
"Having the measles was not a fun thing," she said, per NPR. "I remember it spread through my family."
Context matters from 1969 to 2019, though, according to University of California-Berkeley associate professor Elena Conis.
"In 1969, we had less control over infectious diseases," she told NPR. "Smallpox was still a reality. There were far more cases of polio. In that context, it made sense to think of measles as a lesser threat. . . .
"They were saying, 'Well, hold on. There's this rate of complications; there's this number of hospitalizations; there's this number of deaths. We really have to shift our thinking about the threat that measles poses.'"
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