Vaccines and Politicized Science
Jenny McCarthy knows the
credibility of science is a house of cards.
By Daniel Henninger in the Wall Street Journal
An important question that emerges
from the rise of the vaccine doubter movement is by what process of persuasion
did so many people come to believe what they do about vaccination? They believe
the risks of vaccination are much greater than the risk of the diseases it is
supposed to prevent.
Life without serious disease for the
majority is now taken for granted as the natural order. The young don’t sign up
for health insurance because they don’t need it.
Forgotten over time is the
extraordinary human effort and intelligence that produced the good life today.
The young women turning against vaccination, a decision that potentially
imperils the lives of others in their communities, have mothers or grandmothers
with personal experience of the last great pre-vaccine disease, which was
polio.
During the great polio epidemic of
the 1950s, most people knew a classmate or relative who caught this infectious
disease, which invaded the spinal column and often made them a paralytic for
life. Others, then in grade school, simply died.
So when Jonas Salk and Albert Sabin
developed their vaccines against polio, everyone stood in long lines to take
them. Everyone knew from experience there was no “cure” for polio. Today, with
life so good, many young parents believe that if their child gets a bad
disease, the doctors will be able to “do something” for them.
Put differently, how has it come to
pass that so many decently educated parents (assuming high-school biology still
mentions the immune system) believe that the medical community urging them to
vaccinate their children against measles, mumps, rubella or whooping cough is
lying to them, but that a third-tier celebrity named Jenny McCarthy is giving
them the facts when she says on an afternoon TV show that vaccinations can
cause autism in their children?
It’s easy to dismiss Jenny McCarthy
as an airhead, but maybe her airhead knows something the doctors don’t know.
Jenny McCarthy knows that if she can plug her celebrity into the electronic
torrent known as standard media and social media, her opinions will be hard to
stop. We know this is true, because two men who want to be president of the
United States, Gov. Chris Christie and Sen. Rand
Paul , thought Jenny’s misinformed minions were large enough in
number to warrant their obeisances.
The importance of the vaccination
mess is twofold.
The first is that progress in public
health, especially against infectious diseases that cause mass mortality, is
really, really hard. Acquiring the knowledge needed to fight bacteria and
viruses is a slog. Changing habits of behavior to accept new knowledge is
difficult. Losing these gains can be catastrophic.
The second problem, which can crush
such remarkable achievements, is the eroding credibility and authority of
science. If too many people think even scientists are lying to them, humanity
is headed toward the lemmings’ famous cliff.
Partisanship alert: If you believe
with all your being in the indisputable truth of climate-change science, turn
to the sports page now, because I’d hate to see anyone ripping up The Wall
Street Journal in rage or smashing an LCD screen.
For the purposes of the argument
here, what anyone thinks about climate change isn’t the issue. There was a
point in this combustible debate, though, when I began to think that science
and the people who do the work of science beyond climate were allowing the
credibility of their profession to be put at risk with the broader population.
That turning point was when the cause
changed its name from global warming to climate change. When the warming-only
argument became scientifically difficult and the subject became the irrefutable
“climate change,” it was clear that politics, not science, was running the
show.
The people doing basic science
should learn a well-proven truth about basic politics: Any cause taken up by
politicians today by definition will be doubted or opposed by nearly half the
population. When an Al Gore, John
Kerry or Europe’s Green parties become spokesmen for your ideas, and
are willing to accuse fellow scientists of bad faith or willful ignorance, then
science has made a Faustian bargain. The price paid, inevitably, will be the
institutional credibility of all scientists.
Many scientists believe their
authority is already on thin ice. An issue raging now through biomedical
research, arguably our most important scientific enterprise, is whether the
system that ensures the reproducibility of research experiments is failing.
That’s right, the foundation of science itself. The reason for the rise of
irreproducible science is that showy results produce grants, tenure and,
ironically, public belief in “breakthroughs” that in fact are merely conjecture
or hypothesis.
As with Jenny McCarthy, the word for
what too much of science purports now is half-baked.
The rise of the vaccine doubters
proves that, in the Internet age, all authority can be turned overnight into a
house of cards. Scientists ought to get back to the business of taming fire,
not playing with it.
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