Free Denialism by Michael Specter Page A

possible thing you could imagine. . . . Somehow we all got the flu every single year. Somehow everyone in my family is chronically ill. And amazingly, when the people in my family reach 50 they are all old and deteriorated. In my husband’s family they are all vibrant into their late 90’s. My children will not be vaccinated.”
    This particular epidemic of doubt began in Britain, when the Lancet published a 1998 study led by Dr. Andrew Wakefield in which he connected the symptoms of autism directly to the MMR vaccine. The study was severely flawed, has been thoroughly discredited, and eventually ten of its thirteen authors retracted their contributions. Yet the panic that swept through Britain was breath-taking: vaccination rates fell from 92 percent to 73 percent and in parts of London to nearly 50 percent. Prime Minister Tony Blair refused repeatedly to respond to questions about whether his youngest child, Leo, born the year after Wakefield’s study, received the standard MMR vaccination. Blair said at the time that medical treatment was a personal matter and that inquiries about his children were unfair and intrusive. No virus respects privacy, however, so public health is never solely personal, as the impact on Britain has shown. England and Wales had more cases of measles in 2006 and 2007 than in the previous ten years combined. In 2008, the caseload grew again—this time by nearly 50 percent. The numbers in the United States have risen steadily as well, and the World Health Organization has concluded that Europe, which had been on track to eliminate measles by 2010, is no longer likely to succeed. Vaccination rates just aren’t high enough.
    Fear is more infectious than any virus, and it has permitted politics, not science, to turn one of the signature achievements of modern medicine into fodder for talk show debates and marches on Washington. Celebrities like Jenny McCarthy, who oppose the need for a standard vaccination schedule, denounce celebrities like Amanda Peet who are willing to say publicly that the benefits of vaccines greatly outweigh the risks. Peet represents Every Child by Two, a nonprofit organization that supports universal vaccination. Not long after she began speaking for the group, Peet and McCarthy began to clash. At one point, McCarthy reminded Peet that she was right because “there is an angry mob on my side.” When three physicians, appearing on Larry King Live , disagreed with McCarthy, she simply shouted “Bullshit!” in response. When that didn’t shut them up, she shouted louder. Data, no matter how solid or frequently replicated, seems beside the point.
    What does it say about the relative roles that denialism and reason play in a society when a man like Blair, one of the democratic world’s best-known and most enlightened leaders, refused at first to speak in favor of the MMR vaccine, or when a complete lack of expertise can be considered a requirement for participation in America’s most prominent vaccine advisory commission? “Politically, there is simply no other way to do it,” Anthony S. Fauci explained. “Experts are often considered tainted. It is an extremely frustrating fact of modern scientific life.” Fauci has for many years run the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, where at the beginning of the AIDS epidemic he emerged as one of the public health establishment’s most eloquent and reliably honest voices. He shook his head in resignation when asked about the need for such a qualification, but noted that it has become difficult to place specialists on committees where politics and science might clash. “You bring people with histories to the table and they are going to get pummeled,” he said. “It would simply be war.”
    War is exactly what the vaccine commission got. During McCormick’s tenure, the National Academy of Sciences published several reports of its findings. In a 2001 study, Measles-Mumps-Rubella Vaccine and Autism , the