Denialism (8 page)
The transcripts tell a starkly different story. It’s never hard to build a case with a partial quote; denialists do it every day, relying on fragmentary evidence and facts taken out of context. Here is what McCormick said: “I took away [from the previous day’s discussion] actually an issue that we may have to confront, and that is actually the definition of what we mean by safety. It is safety on a population basis, but it is also safety for the individual child. I am wondering, if we take this dual perspective, we may address more of the parent concerns, perhaps developing a better message if we think about what comes down the stream as opposed to CDC, which wants us to declare, well, these things are pretty safe on a population basis.”
As Harvey Feinberg, the former dean of the Harvard School of Public Health who is now head of the Institute of Medicine, pointed out at the time, the full quote was part of a discussion that focused on two issues: the need for parents to learn whether a vaccine was safe for an individual child who might be sick, and the public health community’s right to know if vaccines pose risks to a larger population. In fact, McCormick proposed that the committee consider addressing the parental concerns about the health of an individual child—in addition to the CDC’s concern about population-wide effects. McCormick’s approach, her intentions, and her
words
were the opposite of what Kennedy had implied. But Kennedy was just getting warmed up.
“The CDC and IOM base their defense of thimerosal on these flimsy studies, their own formidable reputations, and their faith that journalists won’t take the time to critically read the science,” Kennedy wrote in 2007 in the Huffington Post, which has emerged as the most prominent online home for cranks of all kinds, particularly people who find scientific research too heavily burdened by facts. “The bureaucrats are simultaneously using their influence, energies and clout to derail, defund and suppress any scientific study that may verify the link between thimerosal and brain disorders. . . . The federal agencies have refused to release the massive public health information accumulated in their Vaccine Safety Database apparently to keep independent scientists from reviewing evidence that could prove the link. They are also muzzling or blackballing scientists who want to conduct such studies.”
Kennedy has never explained why he thinks the public health leadership of the United States (not to mention its pediatricians) would wish to “poison an entire generation of American children.” He simply wrote that “if, as the evidence suggests,” they had, “their actions arguably constitute one of the biggest scandals in the annals of American medicine.” In his
Rolling Stone
article, Kennedy ignored the scores of other published reports, few of which were carried out by federal scientists, so that he could focus on the 2004 study produced by the Institute of Medicine, which he attacked mercilessly. Kennedy wrote that vaccines exposed infants to 187 times the daily limit of ethyl mercury determined by the Environmental Protection Agency to be safe. If true, they would all have died at once.
Rolling Stone
soon printed a correction—and then later corrected that correction. It is impossible to live on the earth and avoid exposure to mercury, but that amount would kill a grown man.
The actual figure was 187 micrograms, which is 40 percent higher than the levels recommended for methyl mercury by the EPA, a tiny fraction of the figure cited in Kennedy’s paper. Throughout the piece, Kennedy confused and conflated ethyl and methyl mercury, quoting as knowledgeable authorities the father-and-son team of Mark and David Geier, who have testified as expert witnesses in vaccine suits more than one hundred times—and who have been reprimanded repeatedly by judges who have dismissed them as unqualified to speak on the subject. (The father has an MD degree; David Geier holds an undergraduate degree in biology.) Their testimony has been tossed out of court on many occasions. One judge called Dr. Geier “intellectually dishonest,” and another referred to him as “a professional witness in areas for which he has no training, expertise, and experience.”
It is important to note that methyl mercury, the compound that is so dangerous when contained in fish and the product of industrial pollution, is
not
the mercury found in vaccines. The two forms differ by just one carbon molecule, which may seem insignificant. But as Paul A. Offit has pointed out in his indispensable book,
Autism’s False Prophets
, a single molecule can mean the difference between life and death. “An analogy can be made between ethyl alcohol, contained in wine and beer, and methyl alcohol, contained in wood alcohol,” Offit wrote. “Wine and beer can cause headaches and hangovers; wood alcohol causes blindness.”
Kennedy saw conspiracy everywhere he looked. He has attacked Offit himself, who along with colleagues invented a vaccine to combat rotavirus, which is responsible for killing two thousand children in the developing world every day. Those children typically die of diarrhea, and in June 2009 the World Health Organization recommended that the vaccine be made part of “all national immunization programs.” Kennedy, however, has referred to Offit, who is chief of infectious diseases at the Children’s Hospital of Pennsylvania, as “Dr. Proffit” and as a “biostitute” because he was paid for his research and received royalties from the sale of his invention. Offit, outspoken and unremitting in his support of vaccines, has become a figure of hatred to the many vaccine denialists and conspiracy theorists. He has been threatened with violence so often that congressional aides once warned him not to mention the names of his children in public. For several years, armed guards have followed him to meetings of federal health advisory committees (where he has been called a terrorist), and employees in the mail room at Children’s Hospital routinely check packages or letters addressed to him that look suspicious and might contain bombs.
Meanwhile, data becomes increasingly informative, particularly with regard to the difference between the effects of ethyl and methyl mercury. One of the biggest concerns researchers have always had about mercury was how long it took to be eliminated from a child’s body. In 2008, a team of scientists at the Ricardo Gutierrez Children’s Hospital in Buenos Aires published a report that examined the issue in detail. Kennedy had written that “truck-loads of studies have shown that mercury tends to accumulate in the brains of primates and other animals after they are injected with vaccines—and that the developing brains of infants are particularly susceptible.” It turns out that mercury in vaccines can be tolerated in far larger doses than was previously understood. More than two hundred children were studied after receiving vaccines that contained ethyl mercury, which is still used routinely in Argentina. The children excreted half the mercury within four days, and their levels returned to normal eleven days after vaccination. In contrast, it takes roughly seventy days for the body to flush half of a dose of methyl mercury.
No scientific report has seemed able to temper Kennedy’s ardor or that of people like the actress Jenny McCarthy and her boy-friend, Jim Carrey, who have become America’s marquee vaccine protestors. Like Kennedy, McCarthy knows how to wield her celebrity; in the fall of 2007 she appeared on Oprah Winfrey’s television show, unleashing what she referred to as her “mommy instinct” in search of the cause of autism. “What number will it take for people just to start listening to what the mothers of children with autism have been saying for years—which is we vaccinated our babies and something happened. That’s it,” she said. When confronted with data from the Centers for Disease Control that seemed to provide scientific refutation of her claims, McCarthy responded, “My science is named Evan [her son] and he’s at home. That’s my science.” McCarthy says that she “fixed” Evan by changing his diet, and recommends that other “warrior moms” do the same. She is fond of saying that she acquired her knowledge of vaccinations and their risks at “the University of Google.”
Like Kennedy, McCarthy and Carrey contend that the federal government and pharmaceutical companies have conspired to keep the evidence that thimerosal-containing vaccines cause autism a secret. “In this growing crisis,” Carrey wrote in the Huffington Post in April 2009, “we cannot afford to blindly trumpet the agenda of the CDC, the American Academy of Pediatrics (AAP) or vaccine makers. Now more than ever, we must resist the urge to close this book before it’s been written. The anecdotal evidence of millions of parents who’ve seen their totally normal kids regress into sickness and mental isolation after a trip to the pediatrician’s office must be seriously considered.”
He had a point: every parent with an autistic child has the right to demand that federal researchers seriously consider anecdotal evidence. Anything less would be disgraceful. And that is why it has been considered in dozens of studies over more than a decade. Continuing to encourage false hope in this way, however, is an approach that Kathleen Seidel, whose blog Neurodiversity is the most complete and accessible collection of useful information about autism, has described quite accurately as nonsense, a litigation-driven hypothesis that autism is a consequence of vaccine injury.
Conspiracy theories are like untreated wounds. They fester and deepen—and the autism-vaccine conspiracy is no exception. Within days of Carrey’s article, thousands of people had responded with comments on the Huffington Post Web site. Most were positive. Barbara Loe Fisher of the National Vaccine Information Center refers to the Public Health Service’s insistence that the benefits of vaccines outweigh their risks as the “great denial”: “It is only after a quarter century of witnessing the Great Denial of vaccine risks,” she wrote, “which has produced millions of vaccine damaged children flooding special education classrooms and doctors offices, that the magnitude of that unchecked power has been fully revealed.” Clearly, she is right about the powerful strain of denialism that the struggle over vaccines has exposed. She has the denialists and realists confused, however. That is one of the problems with conspiracy theories. After enough distortions seep into conventional thought, “the facts” look as they would in a funhouse mirror. Just tune in to YouTube and check out Robert F. Kennedy Jr. on the subject of vaccines. In June 2008, at a rally on Capitol Hill to “Green Our Vaccines”—in other words, to make them environmentally safe—Kennedy delivered his most inflammatory speech on the subject, saying that the “thimerosal generation is the sickest generation in the history of this country.” It is not clear how he arrived at that conclusion, since life expectancy for newborns in the United States has increased dramatically over the past seventy years, from 57.1 for babies born in 1929 to 77.8 for babies born in 2004.
The change has been significant even during the past fifteen years—when Kennedy argues children have suffered the most. The trend is the same with regard to DALYs, or disability-adjusted life years, which measure healthy life expectancy—the number of years a child is likely to live without losing time to disability and sickness. In addition, during the period between 1990 and 2004, Kennedy’s key danger years, childhood cancer death rates fell sharply (among both sexes, all ethnic groups except American Indians, and in every census region of the United States). It would be difficult to argue that any generation of children in the history of the world has ever been as healthy as the “thimerosal generation.”
Yet, that sunny day in June, more than a thousand activists, most from groups like Talk About Curing Autism (TACA), Generation Rescue, Healing Every Autistic Life, Moms Against Mercury, and Safe Minds, a nonprofit organization that falsely characterizes autism as “a novel form of mercury poisoning,” listened as Kennedy described the vaccination polices of the United States government as the “worst crime since the cover-up of the Iraq war,” and added that the “the treatment of these children and the cost to our society” would far exceed the cost of the war itself.
DOES KNOWLEDGE SIMPLY disappear over time? After centuries of scientific progress have we not constructed pyramids of information solid enough to withstand periodic waves of doubt and anxiety? Human history has repeatedly suggested that the answer is no, but it isn’t ignorance that makes people run from the past or shun the future. It’s fear.
In 1421, China was far ahead of the rest of the world in sophistication, in learning, and particularly in scientific knowledge. It was the least ignorant society on earth. Then the newly completed Forbidden City was struck by a lightning bolt just as it opened, and the emperor reacted with horror. He interpreted the lightning as a sign from the gods that the people of the Middle Kingdom had become too dependent on technology—and were not paying enough attention to tradition or to the deities. So, as Gavin Menzies describes in his book
1421: The Year China Discovered America
, the Chinese burned every library, dismantled their fleets, stopped exploring the globe, and essentially shut themselves off from the outside world. The result? A downward spiral that lasted for five centuries. Japan, too, recoiled at progress by giving up the gun in the seventeenth century. Until they did, they were better at making steel than any Western country, and their weapons were more accurate, too. The samurai despised firearms. To them, they were nothing more than killing machines with the potential to destroy an enduring way of life. When somebody pulls a gun, it no longer matters how honorable you are or how many years you have trained with a sword. Guns put the social order in jeopardy, so Japan banned and eventually melted them all. The gears of social mobility were jammed into reverse. Again, it took centuries for Japan to regain its technological supremacy.