Health, Risk and News: the MMR Vaccine and the Media by Tammy Boyce

I want to take a quick look at the role of the media in the anti-vaccine movement. Thankfully, over the past year, the mainstream media has provided increasing coverage to the scientific refutation of the vaccine-autism link. Over the course of the previous decade, however, the balance of coverage went to the claims of the anti-vaccine movement.

Tammy Boyce was one of the first to examine the role of the media in the vaccine-autism debate. Her book Health, Risk and News: the MMR Vaccine and the Media, published in 2007, looks at media reports during the height of the movement, centering around 2002. She also examines other pieces of data, such as audience surveys and focus groups, which provide a comprehensive examination of how media coverage influenced parents' opinions.

Boyce's conclusion is that the media had a major impact on public opinion and that coverage favored the anti-vaccine advocates. She asks important questions, such as why this type of coverage predominated, and why counterclaims had relatively little effect. Boyce's book is a great way to develop a perspective on how media coverage can follow trends and become incredibly biased, even when journalists mean well.

Today, medical researchers are unanimous in their support for the MMR vaccine and vaccination in general. Some, such as Paul Offit, have even called for anti-vaccine theories to be relegated to the scientific fringe by the journalistic community, in the same category as AIDS denialism and other politically based, anti-scientific claims.

I think this is a good idea. As much as the anti-MMR scare was a wake-up call for the general public to treat all sources of information with a healthy dose of skepticism, it served more so as an indictment against sloppy scientific journalism. Those covering science stories in the media have an ethical responsibility to provide information as balanced to both sides of an issue as possible. Health, Risk and News clearly shows what happens when this responsibility isn't upheld.

Do Vaccines Cause That?! A Guide for Evaluating Vaccine Safety Concerns

Today I want to take a look at Martin Myers' 2008 book, Do Vaccines Cause That?! A Guide for Evaluating Vaccine Safety Concerns. A more practical discussion than what either Mnookin or Offit provided, Myers' book is a great primer for busy parents trying to sort out the vaccine-autism story. Consider this book if you're a parent-to-be or a new parent and want to know the facts about vaccines.

Myers designs his book to give parents a sense of reassurance about vaccines. He provides information on many of the anti-vaccine movement's claims and how scientific fact has refuted them. For instance, Myers talks about thimerosal, a mercury-based additive in vaccines, which has received a good deal of attention by anti-vaccine activists. Study after study has shown that no connection exists between thimerosal and any childhood illness, much less autism, and Myers explains why.

In addition, Myers addresses many of the consequences of not having your children vaccinated. Put into perspective with the risks, vaccines clearly make the better choice for protecting your children. The information presented in this section of the book is similar to that found in other sources, but having everything collected in one, easy reference is valuable.

Another great aspect of this book is that Myers provides parents with ways to find legitimate information on vaccines. Instead of simply asking you to believe him and the sources he has collected, he offers resources for further information, so that parents end up basing their decisions on the latest scientific fact.

The main drawback of Myers' approach is that it can get technical at times. Still, it is better for parents to struggle to understand a few complex medical facts than to get sucked in by pseudoscientific claims that could end up severely harming their children. Myers definitely makes my recommendation list.

Deadly Choices: How the Anti-Vaccine Movement Threatens Us All

In my last post, I looked at Paul Offit's 2008 book, Autism's False Prophets. He wrote a follow-up to that book, which was just released this January. It falls into the cultural category, like Mnookin's The Panic Virus. The narrative of Deadly Choices examines the anti-vaccine movement and its origins in America.

Most interesting to me were the historical discussions of past anti-vaccine scares going back all the way to smallpox, the very first vaccine to be developed. For some reason, generation after generation, parents place the blame for childhood misfortunes on vaccines.

Looking at more recent history, Offit examines how legitimate problems with polio and rotavirus vaccines, starting in the 1980s, led to the current round of anti-vaccine sentiment. It is noteworthy, however, that the medical community has always responded quickly and promptly to these problems. Both of the vaccines listed above have since been replaced with safer alternatives.

These incidents provided an initial reason for recent generations of parents to be skeptical, but they don't fully explain why vaccines continue to get a bad rap. Medications are forever being recalled for safety concerns, and we put up with a wide range of less-than-safe treatments to diseases when there are no other options. Yet with vaccines, parents seem to lose sight of this.

By the end of the book, Paul Offit shows how the anti-vaccine movement is largely the result of propaganda and superstitious beliefs. Individuals with agendas entirely unrelated to the health of children promoted the fraudulent claims that vaccines can cause autism, preying upon the fears of parents. Kudos to Dr. Offit for continuing to stand up against misinformation for the sake of all our children.

In late January, Dr. Offit appeared on the Colbert Report to talk about his new book. The video is worth checking out:

Paul Offit believes the visibility of the smallpox vaccination scar during swimsuit season is a small price to pay for better health.

Autism's False Prophets: Bad Science, Risky Medicine, and the Search for a Cure

For the second and third posts to my autism and vaccines blog, I wanted to take a look at a couple of seminal books by Paul Offit. An expert on vaccines who in fact has developed a couple of his own, Offit was one of the first scientific authors to provide a critical view of anti-vaccine claims in a format appropriate for the general public.

Autism's False Prophets was released in 2008 and received overall positive reviews in the press. Paul Offit was one of the first to explain the problems with the arguments of the anti-vaccine camp, as well as to demonstrate some of the risks involved in foregoing childhood vaccinations. He also spelled out the financial interests behind the anti-vaccine movement, reversing the claims that vaccines were simply a money-maker for the pharmaceutical industry.

Another interesting aspect of Offit's first book is his description of the political aspect of the anti-vaccine debate. He describes how he received death threats and hate mail from angry parents. That kind of vitriol against the medical community historically has been reserved for abortion providers and stem cell researchers. How odd that it should be aimed against physicians whose primary concern is the prevention of devastating childhood illnesses through sound, proven, and uncontroversial medical science.

In this video, you can see Paul Offit giving an interview, shortly following the release of Autism's False Prophets:

In the interview, he talks about how vaccines have often served as scapegoats for unsolved medical issues, not just now but throughout history. It's an interesting introduction to his book.

The Real Deal with Vaccines and Autism

By: Christophe Lamontagne

I'm going to begin my exploration of good vaccine-autism books with a book in the cultural camp, Seth Mnookin's The Panic Virus: A True Story of Medicine, Science, and Fear. Mnookin is an editor for Vanity Fair, and his look at the anti-vaccination movement came out in early 2011.

Taking a broader view of the issue, Mnookin discusses how our Internet habits, both for surfing and publishing, can lend an air of false authority to sources. Intellectually, we all know that stuff published on someone's blog or website (including my own) isn't always guaranteed to be right. Yet when the message touches something within us, when it seems somehow to "make sense," then we're much more likely to believe it. We're also much less likely to go out and rigorously confirm the claims. Just the fact that someone else believes that same thing is vindication enough.

The problem isn't entirely limited to the Internet either; it's just more obvious there. Scholarly journals have faced this same issue historically, which is why the system of peer review and duplication of research evolved. Yet verification can take time, as it did with Wakefield's research. In the Internet age, the results of unproven research or even outright fraud can end up published online in a convincing form that members of the public are willing to believe.

In Mnookin's view, that was the main problem behind the MMR vaccine-autism scare. Add to that an intellectual climate in which celebrity endorsement and the feelings of parents receive greater credence than scientific fact, and we end up with a scenario like the anti-vaccine movement that has led to the deaths of young children across the country.

Mnookin's The Panic Virus is hard to put down. In addition to exploring the issue of how credibility is built up online, Seth Mnookin provides compelling anecdotes about real families and how the anti-vaccine movement affected them. You can hear Mnookin read an excerpt of that type in this video:

If you only chose one book to read on the anti-vaccine issue, Mnookin's is probably the best one. It covers all the bases, from the scientific problems with the anti-vaccine camp's claims to the culture phenomena underpinning their success.