Defending Science Isn’t Always Pretty

This month’s issue of WIRED features a great story by Amy Wallace: “An Epidemic of Fear: How Panicked Parents Skipping Shots Endangers Us All.” It’s an overview of the anti-vaccination movement in the United States, a topic that should be very familiar to anyone who reads Discover‘s baddest astronomer. At ScienceBlogs, Orac and Abel Pharmboy gives big thumbs-up to the article.

The anti-vaccination movement is a little weird — they claim that vaccines, which are universally credited with wiping out smallpox and polio and other bad things, are responsible for causing autism and diabetes and other also-bad things, all just to make a buck for pharmaceutical companies. The underlying motivation seems to be a combination of the conviction that things must happen for a reason — if a child develops autism, there must be an enemy to blame — and a general distrust of science and technology. Certainly the pro-science point of view is fairly unequivocal; like any medicine, vaccines should be used properly, but they have done great good for the world and there are very real dangers of increased risk for epidemics if enough children stop receiving them. Good for WIRED for taking on the issue and publishing an uncompromisingly pro-science piece on it.

But the anti-vax movement is more than just committed; they’re pretty darn virulent. And since the article came out, author Amy Wallace has been subject to all sorts of attacks. She’s been documenting them on her Twitter feed, which I encourage you to check out. Some lowlights:

  • I’ve been called stupid, greedy, a whore, a prostitute, and a “fking lib.” I’ve been called the author of “heinous tripe.”
  • J.B. Handley, the founder of Generation Rescue, the anti-vaccine group that actress Jenny McCarthy helps promote, sent an essay titled “Paul Offit Rapes (intellectually) Amy Wallace and Wired Magazine.” In it, he implied that Offit had slipped me a date rape drug.
  • Just now, I got an email so sexually explicit that I can’t paraphrase it here. Except to say it contained the c-word. And a reference to dead fish.
  • In his book, Autism’s False Prophets, Dr. Offit writes about scientists who have been intimidated into staying silent about autism/vaccines. If scientists – who are armed with facts and trained to interpret them – are afraid, can it be any surprise that a lot of parents are, too?


It’s pretty horrifying stuff. But there is good news: Wallace also reports that the large majority of emails she has received were actually in favor of the piece, and expressed gratitude that she had written it. There are strong forces arrayed against science, but the truth is on our side, and a lot of people recognize it. It gives one a bit of hope.

93 Comments

93 thoughts on “Defending Science Isn’t Always Pretty”

  1. I receive more hate mail in a day than Ms. Wallace has probably gotten in her lifetime. Unlike Ms. Wallace an Paul Offit, I just don’t whine about it. The much larger question: what does Ms. Wallace say to the many specific criticisms of her piece, like the one I wrote here:

    http://www.ageofautism.com/2009/10/wired-magazine-and-amy-wallace-drink-paul-offits-kool-aid.html

    It seems to be a common misdirection ploy to focus on the insults, but never actually address the details.

    JB Handley

  2. It’s surprising for moral people to find themselves disliked for telling the truth about something important.

    Perhaps that fact has escaped you, since you’re not a moral person, having spent too much time lying about vaccines, causing significant amounts of suffering as a consequence.

  3. @ Jb Handley

    Your salvo shows how far off the mark you are – you mention “The 50+ ingredients that no one has considered”, but do not show any evidence that those alleged ingredients are implicated in any autism signals. Without that, you’ve got nothing more than the DMHO scare.

    Also, you need to deal with the moving goalposts – thimerisol was the demon, until the autism rates failed to fall after it was removed; then it was the 3 vaccines in the MMR jab, but then the autism rates did not fall as those fell out of favor.

    Face the facts – the evidence does not implicate vaccines. You also need to face thatfact that the woo-woo factor of your so-called supporters weighs against the validity – even if a blinfd pig find a truffle eventually, it does not mean you can trust every squeal from that pig.

  4. “It seems to be a common misdirection ploy to focus on the insults, but never actually address the details.”

    Sir, that’s a classic argument, but you might want to get your details correct:

    “Comment: If 1 in 100 kids have vaccine-induced autism, this may challenge your conclusion about “low-risk,” unless you like those odds. Few parents do, and your article is unlikely to change that.”

    The actual statistics 1 in 100 children between 3 and 17 may be diagnosed with autism, but there are no statistics that state all (let alone any) cases of autism are caused by vaccines. If you are indeed implying that, please post a link to your reference, but I expect that to be a great exaggeration or deliberate fabrication. And if it’s not too much to ask, leave out the ad hominid attacks as your reply demonstrates your skill in dealing them out like a deck of cards.

  5. Because I won’t take the time to respond to each and every insult, along with the occasional good question, I will simply provide this link, which is a website I wrote, which fully and completely refutes the idea that science has truly studied the link between “vaccines and autism” since it hasn’t remotely:

    http://www.14studies.org

    Read it, really, I dare you. This issue has never been seriously explored by mainstream scientists, almost all of whom are intertwined with either CDC or big pharma.

    The “goalposts” argument, a very tired one, I tried to respond to here:

    http://www.ageofautism.com/2009/05/goalposts.html

    JB Handley

  6. Ah, JB Handley himself! That’s a nice set of links there, Lou, but do you care to respond at all to what she said you sent her? I think rape, even when parenthetically modified as intellectual, is a pretty harsh thing to write.

    And your article about goalposts is loaded with logical fallacies. You try to connect vaccines to autism, but you fail to do so, noting only the coincidental timing between the two, and then the non sequitur about the number of vaccines growing over the years. But you failed to make a causal connection.

    And instead of moving the goalposts — which you may deny the antivax movement has done all you want, but that doesn’t make it untrue — why not address the actual science, like the study that showed no link between mercury and autism, or the one that shows that autism rates are the same across all age groups, meaning it is not more prevalent now nor that there has been an increase in some sort of trigger?

    Note that I have used no insults, no name calling: just cold facts.

    Have a care answering these, assuming you do. A lot of folks are reading what you write, and there are a lot of us who will not let you get away with equivocation or spin.

  7. I think it’s more distrust of corporations-government complex than distrust of science and technology. If government mandate something it should be bad, especially if someone making money from it.

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  9. I’m always confused about what to think of people who “defend science” with dogma and insults. Wallace’s article was a good read, but I do think it seemed very one-sided.

  10. I taught a physics class out of Giancoli once. I found it very one-sided, though – no Ptolemy, no Anaximander, no Hermes Trismegistus.

  11. A poll at the Guardian’s Comment is Free section is confusingly phrased and the results are pretty discouraging:

    As innoculation becomes more widely available, will you get your shot?
    Yes. A jab now beats flu later (31%)
    No. I won’t follow the herd immunity (69%)

  12. The particular debate is simply the side-effect of a much bigger issue. Scientists do not speak out as much as they should. They do not do enough to educate the public, to highlight and disprove false claims, to help people develop their critical thinking skills. Scientists need to step down from their pedestals and find ways to reach out to people they wouldn’t deign speak to.

    Just stop for a moment and consider how average Joe thinks. Joe will watch a 2-minute piece on TV, with someone claiming that the vaccine causes autism. Joe does not read Wired. In fact, Joe never reads anything, except maybe the sports page. If he’s lucky, Joe may see another 2-minute piece with some scientist, politician or other official, claiming that the vaccine is not dangerous. In Joe’s mind, there are two sides to the issue. Both are on TV, so both are acceptable. It’s simply a matter of who he chooses to trust.

    So the first option, is to gain Joe’s trust. Remotely controlling giant beetles with implanted chips and reprogramming flies’ memories does not help there. Joe is very skeptical of scientists and rightly so. The rate of scientific development has far surpassed society’s capacity to adapt, legally and morally. ‘Anathem’ by Neal Stephenson has very good illustrations of the various ways people respond to scientists. In the novel, scientists end up enclosed in cloisters, cut off from the world, so as not to endanger it with their strange toys. If scientists can not explain to Joe what they’re doing and why they’re doing it, if scientists do not care about whether the society cares for, or is ready for their work, then they willingly operate outside society and are not entitled to demand that society respects and trusts them.

    Another option is to help Joe develop critical thinking. How better would the world be if the scientific method found its way into Joe’s everyday thinking processes? Question, investigate, analyze, compare, synthesize… A much more ambitious, but uncomparably more rewarding goal.

    So I ask you, do you believe scientists care enough for Joe? If your answer is yes, I have only one word for you: Scientology.

  13. You know, when I read those arguments about the autism-vaccine links, I get some déjà-vu.

    The same arguments are regularly used in every scientific “controversy” which is usually the controversy of a couple scientists holding a contrary opinion against 99% of the rest of their peers. When those scientists are actually specialists of the field in question, which is sometimes not the case.

    In almost all cases, you get some Conspiracy Theory dominating the field. The idea that, somehow, thousands of scientists, everywhere, in every country, employed by dozens of universities, are somehow dedicated to propagating a dogma for reason X (usually “getting money”, “securing tenure”). And they all keep their mouths shut on that conspiracy, except for a pitiful handful of Brave Souls who breach the Covenant and dare tell the Truth.

    Anyone who thinks thousands of people of completely different places, venues, who merely happen to work in the same field in different people can be involved in some world-wide conspiracy to keep Things Secret need to do some serious self examination.

  14. And Phil Plait weighs in with excellent questions. Handley, let’s hear your responses (not your deflections).

  15. “Just stop for a moment and consider how average Joe thinks. Joe will watch a 2-minute piece on TV, with someone claiming that the vaccine causes autism. Joe does not read Wired. In fact, Joe never reads anything, except maybe the sports page. If he’s lucky, Joe may see another 2-minute piece with some scientist, politician or other official, claiming that the vaccine is not dangerous. In Joe’s mind, there are two sides to the issue. Both are on TV, so both are acceptable. It’s simply a matter of who he chooses to trust.”
    That’s how you “intellectuals” screw up everything. I can already see the educational piece you’re directing: naked chick on the hood of NASCAR machine drinks beer and explains the goodness of the vaccine”.

  16. I know someone who is against vaccinations (he was the one who first let me know that they were now vaccinating children for chicken pox… which, honestly, I do find a bit strange, since everyone I know who’s my age or older got chicken pox and survived quite nicely… but anyway). From listening to him, it has very little to do with an “anti-intellectual” or anti-science view. He is a scientist himself, in fact. His distrust comes from the fact that the government is so shady about its reasons and tends to put out a lot of misinformation, which makes him question the real necessity of such vaccinations. It’s not that he thinks all vaccines are bad, but that he needs a very convincing reason before he starts injecting things into his kids.

    For instance, CBS did a report recently on the H1N1 virus, in which they asked the CDC for the actual numbers of cases in the U.S. When the CDC refused to provide the information, CBS went to each state individually, and it turns out that the CDC had ordered states to stop testing for the virus BACK IN JULY, when it had already declared the swine flu an epidemic. Most states told CBS that, even at that time, their own numbers were actually startlingly low, lower even than the expected rate of normal flu for that season, but they assumed the CDC must have information from other states that they found worrying. The truth is, the CDC just decided to declare it an epidemic with absolutely no data to back it up, and has since discouraged people from testing to confirm the presence of the virus (since even in normal flu cases, only about 20% of people presenting the symptoms actually have the virus).

    So that does make me wonder. It’s not being anti-intellectual to ask for actual information, is it? I mean, it certainly makes sense to me when I hear that people over fifty in this country have stronger immune systems precisely because they didn’t grow up receiving a flu vaccination every year, and so their bodies learned how to fight such infections off. To me, it seems anti-intellectual and anti-science to lump all vaccines together, simply because those for polo and smallpox were effective. It may be annoying, but I’d like to see information about a vaccine’s effectiveness and necessity every time.

    It also seems anti-intellectual to lump all people together who challenge the necessity of vaccinations, and then accuse them of base ignorance and disgusting rudeness, just because there happen to be a few very vocal individuals out there who are ignorant and rude.

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  18. “Another option is to help Joe develop critical thinking.”

    No one can make Joe want to learn about science or learn critical thinking. This is a personal choice and a personal responsibility. While, yes, I agree science and its study and application need to be introduced and accessible to everyone, not everyone will go for it. Especially if it induces tension among one’s political or religious bias.

    I remember while in college there was a continuous push to increase requirements for language, literature, and technical writing. I don’t recall the same increased requirement for math, physics, biology, and chemistry among the general student population, which I was in disagreement with. I would have like to seen that at the university level, and even high school. Though, I don’t think we can require calculus of anyone working at the mall, or anyone shopping for groceries. Those who really want to understand the details can find the resources to do so, but there are those who want to learn enough to support a particular point of view, and those who just don’t care at all.

  19. I mean, it certainly makes sense to me when I hear that people over fifty in this country have stronger immune systems precisely because they didn’t grow up receiving a flu vaccination every year, and so their bodies learned how to fight such infections off.

    Ali, it doesn’t work that way: when you are vaccinated, your immune system learns about the disease in the vaccine, just like for a non-vaccinated person. It just doesn’t make you sick (or at least very rarely). Moreover, it does not affect how the immune system tackles new diseases.

    Also, you are asking (rhetorically, I’m sure) whether one is being anti-intellectual for requesting actual information. That depends: it is not when one genuinely wants know the answer, but it is dishonest when that request is aimed to derail and call into question a practice that has proven beneficial beyond any scientific doubt.

  20. John Phillips, FCD

    Ali: People over fifty haven’t a stronger immune system in general than those under fifty, it is just that they may have greater immunity to this particular strain of flu simply because a very similar strain was around in the 1940s and 1950s and so many already have antibodies capable of dealing with it. I.e. catching a similar strain to H1N1 gave those individuals over 50 the necessary antibodies to cope with future attacks from that or similar strains. Which is exactly what a vaccine does and the reason vaccines need to be changed periodically is that the flu virus evolves or mutates and if different enough then existing vaccines won’t produce the appropriate antibodies.

    Hence the reason that this strain is more dangerous to young people is that, unlike the over 50s, they won’t have the antibodies for defending against this or similar strains.

    As to the relevance of the strength of the immune system, I suggest you read up on the Spanish Flu Outbreak at the end of WWI. For it is thought that the reason that it was so deadly in young fit people was precisely because their strong immune system went into such an overdrive to combat the effects of the infection that it basically overloaded their systems in a cytokine storm. One of the effects of this storm caused so much fluid to form in the lungs that the sufferer effectively drowned. Apparently this strain is also capable of initiating such a response from the immune system.

  21. This anti-vaccine “movement” is one of the most bizarre things I found in the US. How the hell did it become such virulent (pun unintended)??

  22. They stopped testing for H1N1 earlier for a very good reason. Infection rates increase exponentially, and it rapidly becomes untenable to continue testing everyone with the flu to see what strain it is. Preliminary testing showed that the vast majority of influenza A cases are being caused by the H1N1 strain. Testing to determine if you have influenza A or B is easy and can get done in regular medical labs – that’s a good enough proxy for public health purposes. It is also true that in a normal flu season, infections don’t become widespread until later than October. The fact that the flu is already swamping the country is strong evidence that the novel strain is most of what is behind it.

  23. Mr. Kok, I really don’t see how this “vaccination” process involved with [insert trendy outbreak here] is a “practice that has proven beneficial beyond any scientific doubt.” First off, there are plenty of problems involved with receiving vaccinations and potential risks that one must compare to the risk associated with getting the common flu or even this “H1N1” variety. As of right now, the numbers and “threat” of the “new” flu are being drastically exaggerated giving everyone the impression that the new black plague is in effect. I find it a bit strange because if you look at the information from those reports that came out quite some time ago, you’d realize that this whole thing started as a result of some pretty shady practices (improper farming habits, refusal to act accordingly before the problem had spread, refusal to “vaccinate” near the point of origin, etc.). Also, consider that the one’s who are making out here are certainly the pharmaceutical companies because now they have to mass produce a drug/vaccine to use on the public, so in order to get more money for the drug/vaccine they have to establish a demand and a continued demand for their product. This is easily done if you establish a state of crisis or fear or declare an “epidemic” for something so that an antidote can continuously be developed and so on and so forth. I’m not saying that this is a conspiracy or any of that because this is been common practice for decades now. So I would urge people to be very careful when touting off about “defending science” and making claims that “the truth is on our side” because this current situation has as much to do with science as it has to do with ethics, social behavior, trends in group behavior, the power of institutions and traditions, etc. Science might give a person a number of “facts,” figures, and information to work with, but at the end of the day an individual has to make a choice about what to do with that information. And say what you will, but that choice is not limited to scientists alone.

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