Mayim Bialik did not enjoy being labelled as an anti-vaxxer by some readers.
Bialik addressed the readers’ response to a New York Times piece titled, Mayim Bialik Wants the ‘Jeopardy!’ Job. Is She Neutral Enough? The story touched on some of Bialik’s vaccine views over the years.
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“After the New York Times did a piece on me which I found really kind of like, neutral,” she told former Nation Basketball Association (NBA) star Jalen Rose for his “Renaissance Man” podcast, per Yahoo! “I can’t tell you the number of people who were like, ‘she’s an anti-vaxxer.'”
The New York Times article pointed to Bialik’s book Beyond the Sling (2012) in which she wrote that she was not vaccinating her two young sons. Additionally, Bialik said in a 2020 video that she would vaccinate her sons against COVID-19 but noted that “we give way too many vaccines.”
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“And it’s like, ‘Did you not read the article?’ That upsets me just as a human,” she said. “It doesn’t upset me as a celebrity so much because, like, I’m grateful to my publicist for reminding me not to read comments. I had a little slip… But the fact is, like, when people say things about you that aren’t true, that hurts.”
“And that hurts, whether it’s between you and your girlfriend or, you and your lover or, you know, on the New York Times comments section… I really just wanted to be like, ‘I’m not an anti-vaxxer.’ Like, my kids were vaccinated late. That’s true. And we were vaccinated.”
