In the past decade Seth Mnookin has become a chronicler of someof the icons of American popular culture. He wrote a popular book,"Feeding the Monster," on the ascent of the Red Sox, and acontroversial book, "Hard News," on the scandals of The New YorkTimes. Now he is taking on another modern phenomenon, the movementagainst vaccinations.
"The Panic Virus" is sure to attract attention - and thevirulent criticism of one of contemporary life's most ardentinsurgencies, those who believe inoculations possess the power toinjure. Specifically the book focuses on the scare triggered by aflawed 1998 scientific paper suggesting that the measles-mumps-rubella vaccine could cause autism. The paper, by Andrew Wakefield,has since been discredited, most recently in a report Thursdaysaying that Wakefield had altered facts in his study. In his book,Mnookin traces the spread of the panic and the role of the media init.
A new parent himself, Mnookin admits a certain fear of vaccines -but an even greater fear that his child might encounter someone withmeasles or whooping cough before he gets all his shots. Heunderstands the panic and passion of parents with sick children -but fears that waves of "self-righteous hysteria" have the power ofovercoming "critical thinking." He knows the limits of science -but believes it should be regarded "not as an ideology but as thebest tool we have for understanding the universe."
Mnookin's book is an unsparing brief against the vaccineskeptics. But in a larger sense, this volume is less about theinsurrection against inoculations than it is about thedemocratization of information. It is less about the movement tobattle the medical establishment than it is about the ability ofsocial networks to mobilize for what Mnookin and most mainstreamscientists and doctors believe is a bad cause. It is less aboutreasoned debate than about the free flow of information through theInternet. It is less about the contagion of ideas than about thecontagion of misinformation and mistrust that metastasizes in thenew technology.
And in some ways it is less about the modern autism wars thanabout cultural resistance to vaccines over the centuries, for insetting forth his argument he provides a history of disease andvaccines that is one of the high points of this volume. We've come along way from the early methods used to combat smallpox, which in1717 included spreading pus from an infected person onto the openwound of an uninfected person.
But these asides involving medical history are more than acuriosity. They underline the power of humans' distrust ofinoculation, the roots of which Mnookin sees in the AmericanColonists' "hair-trigger resistance to anything that was perceivedas infringing upon individual liberties." Resistance to inoculationis as American as resistance to oppression - often the rationalesummoned in these battles, which combine science and ideology in atoxic brew.
In time, freedom from disease has become an important Americanfreedom. But skepticism of the American medical establishment became(and remains) an important part of the civic landscape, ofteninflamed, Mnookin contends, by shoddy shock-seeking journalism.
This is Mnookin's argument: The evidence for the conviction thatvaccines are dangerous is sketchy - a medical problem. Theparoxysms and panics were appealing to document - a journalisticproblem. Journalists - not all, but enough - are drawn to thedramatic, to the romance of lone-wolf skeptics tilting against well-established assumptions taught in well-established institutions bywell-established practitioners.
Plus this: Science has not exactly been infallible. These codewords speak volumes - Bhopal. The Challenger. Love Canal. ThreeMile Island.
The notion that autism is a form of mercury poisoning has beenpersistent in recent years, and proponents of this view have taken aposition with a built-in defense mechanism:
"Instead of trying to collaborate with the scientific community,their real goal was to get officials to admit they'd been wrong -and when they didn't, that refusal only served to confirm theirsuspicions of a broad, international conspiracy."
Fueled by activists and parents convinced of "the dangers ofvaccines and the venality of the medical establishment," themovement of vaccine skeptics produced "a growing sense of distrustand paranoia." One of Mnookin's chapter titles summarizes hisargument: "How to Turn a Lack of Evidence into Evidence of Harm."
One important result was a merger of vaccine skeptics and autismactivists and the growth of a narrative and conspiracy theory thatconsidered inoculations a threat to the public health rather than ameans of protecting the public health. "By 2005," Mnookin writes, "apreoccupation with vaccine safety and an opposition to traditionalinstitutions were viewed by an ever-growing number of `autismadvocates' as prerequisites for membership in their community."
Another result is the decline in vaccinations in manycommunities, especially those with a liberal orientation and highincomes. Ashland, Ore., has a vaccine exemption rate of about 30percent. The rate of people not vaccinated in California's MarinCounty, one of the wealthiest in the nation, is three times greaterthan that of the rest of the state.
Mnookin compares the vaccination opponents to those who don'tbelieve in global warming or evolution. And he blames the media fortolerating misinformation and validating "the notion that ourfeelings are a more reliable barometer of reality than the facts."The ironic thing about Mnookin's book is that he implicitly summonshis profession to the admonition from the Book of Luke addressed tophysicians: Heal thyself. This book is Mnookin's effort to begin thehealing process.
David M. Shribman, executive editor of the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, can be reached at dshribman@post-gazette.com.
THE PANIC VIRUS:
A True Story of Medicine, Science, and Fear
By Seth Mnookin
Simon & Schuster, 448 pp., $26.99
09mnookin.ART
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