Vaccines in the Media: Emotion Trumping Reason?
February 1, 2008 by Kristina Chew, PhD
Filed under Health
Dr. Michael Fitzpatrick, the author of MMR and Autism: What Parents Need to Know, charts the rise and fall of anti-MMR mania in a book review of Health, Risk and News: The MMR Vaccine and the Media by Tammy Boyce, a research fellow in Risk, Science, and Health Communication at Cardiff University.
Dr. Boyce’s book tells the story of media coverage of the scare over the MMR vaccine in Britain after Dr. Andrew Wakefield, the primary author of the first paper suggesting an MMR-autism link (a paper that has since been retracted by journal that published it most of the paper’s authors, but not Wakefield); Dr. Fitzpatrick also offers a concise history of the controversy of the MMR and what happened after Dr. Wakefield “launched” it. Dr. Boyce’s book looks specifically at the media’s role—which “had a major impact and …… tended to favour the anti-MMR cause”—in the controversy. In considering the question of why the media was so sympathetic to the anti-MMR cause, Dr. Boyce focuses on the media’s own principles of balance, of the need to “tell both sides of a story” and to present “a controversy in terms of a contest between two positions of more or less equivalent substance.” The media’s very effort to maintain “balance” on the issue had the effect of making it seem more sympathetic to the anti-vaccine advocates. Says Dr. Fitzgerald:
As [Dr.Boyce] observes, this sort of ritualised balance is ‘not always the most effective or honest way of reporting a story’. Thus an objective account of the MMR controversy ‘would not have been balanced, because, in reality, the evidence was not balanced’. An objective account would have been obliged to indicate that, on the one hand, there was a vast amount of evidence confirming the safety and efficacy of the MMR vaccine, while on the other, there was much speculation, but very little evidence (and that highly contested), for the MMR-autism link. Dr Boyce found much ‘over-balancing’ of stories, giving the misleading impression of an equivalence of evidence, and creating ‘a charade of objectivity’. She also found ‘under-balancing’, where partisan journalists simply reported one side of the story.
There was a similar problem of balancing sources. Journalists and newspapers sympathetic to the Wakefield cause tended to quote anti-MMR scientists and health professionals, though these were a tiny minority, either exclusively or on equal terms to pro-MMR experts. Furthermore anti-MMR reporters often counterposed pro-MMR experts to parents who blamed MMR for making their children autistic, confusing expertise and experience, and elevating emotion over reason in their presentation of the debate [my emphasis].
The medical establishment, Dr. Boyce suggests, was altogether less savvy and generally “fragmented” about getting [its] message out to the media and was “always in the position of reacting to the latest initiative from the Wakefield campaign.” Researchers, scientists, and doctors have often tended to state, in reasoned and respectful language and without rhetoric, that the vast majority of the scientific evidence disputes a link between autism and vaccines and something in vaccines. Conversely, anti-vaccine advocacy groups such as JABS and Allergy Induced Autism (and, in the US, Safe Minds and Generation Rescue) have made great efforts (such as Generation Rescue’s full-page ads in major newspapers) to communicate a simple and focused message stating that “mercury causes autism” and asking the same rhetorical question again and again, “how can we inject a known neurotoxin into young children?”. Dr. Fitzgerald notes that anti-vaccine groups in the UK have sought celebrity endorsement (Nick Hornby and Juliet Stephenson), just as, in the US, autism groups such as TACA and the NAA, have gotten behind Jenny McCarthy and Deirdre Imus.
Dr. Boyce’s analysis of the media’s role in perpetuating public suspicion about giving vaccines to children can be readily applied to the situation in the US. The recent furor of ABC’s new comedic legal drama, Eli Stone—in which a lawyer wins a $5.2 million verdict for a mother who believes that a substance called “mercuritol” made her son autistic— who has autism would be an interesting chapter in such an analysis. Similar to the British medical establishment, the American Academy of Pediatrics (AAP) has been on the defensive, sending a letter to ABC asking for the show to be cancelled, and lifting the embargo early on a new study in Pediatrics which shows that the ethyl mercury previously used in vaccines as a preservative, is excreted much faster from infants’ bodies than other forms of mercury in the environment.
Proponents of the hypothesis that vaccines or something in vaccines can be linked to autism are proclaiming Eli Stone the “new patron saint of autism” which is a little puzzling since Stone is, after all, a fictional TV character. Thoughtful and reasonable appeals to science may well not be heard too well by parents who are firm in their beliefs about what caused their child to be come autistic, and not afraid—indeed hell-bent—-to get this simple message out. The result is, as Dr. Fitzgerald notes, that emotion gets put on a far higher pedestal than reason, and science, and health, left out.
I rarely laugh out loud reading some of this stuff, but I could not believe the posturing at Age of Autism about the fictional future saint, on a fictional fantasy drama, who had a justifiable fictional case based on a fictional internal report for a fictional compound, which resulted in a fictional verdict and a fictional settlement. What’s next, the fictional appeal? Holy Moley.
What happened to the point of view posted the other day admonishing the AAP that “it’s just entertainment, folks”?
If anything good is coming out of this brouhaha, I see that normally reticent academics are coming out publicly on this issue.
Emotions are much easier than science, and hocus pocus science is much easier than real science.
Therefore this problem will never truly leave us. It will hopefully diminish over time, but I fear it is with us forever.
Thanks for the link to the video. Nothing is better than immersing oneself in nature (in the ocean) or the freedom of a bike ride! Very cool.
Joe
The fictional personal injury lawyer suffering from hallucinations and delusions of grandeur (it was in the script, really) is the new patron said of autism? Sounds like a combination of JB Handley and Thomas Powers (multi-millionaire antivax lawyer). Will the biomed parents start putting little statues of Eli Stone, halo and all on their dashboards?
Make that, “patron saint” :-]
One question–did Lancet withdraw the paper? I know that most of the authors (and notably not Wakefield) withdrew the conclusions.
Maybe Hummel-like figurines——
10 of the 13 authors of the Lancet paper retracted their claim of having found an MMR-autism link; Wakefield was not among them. But (from this 2004 source), the Lancet did not retract the paper; thanks!
I found the show refreshing.
Even if it was fantasy it was still exhilerating to see the little guy (family) win and still do the “right thing.”
Yes you are right that show may have been biomed parent’s dream.
When we had LAB WORK done at several different labs (for different reasons) and they all came out very Atypical compared to what it should be.
WE watched those lab reports improve, with alot of work…. and low and behold….we saw our child FEELING better, physicaly and mentaly… gee he had improved. THAT is not rocket science.That is addressing a need autistic/not.
I do think the show’s creators hit on a vein and on what many parents feel and believe—-still I suspect those who made the show may not entirely be of all that’s at stake……
For accuracy’s sake, according to the AP story to which Kristina links re: the retraction of conclusions about the MMR vaccine, the text of the retraction states “We wish to make it clear that in this paper no causal link was established between (the) vaccine and autism, as the data were insufficient. However, the possibility of such a link was raised… Consequent events have had major implications for public health. In view of this, we consider now is the appropriate time that we should together formally retract the interpretation placed on these findings in the paper.” I read that as a statement that a public-health scare would outweigh a still-unconfirmed potential link, and that those who retracted the conclusion wanted to avoid such a scare. That’s a bit short, it would seem to me, of those scientists actually *rejecting* the hypothesis of a connection, yes? This may perhaps be why the Lancet didn’t retract the article detailing the study… ?
The second time I’ve laughed of late, for much the same reasons Regan did. Lord knows I don’t need a patron saint for a personal aspect, and less an fictional one. I also laughed at the “legal” arguments that filled up the AoA article, well, laughable. But amusing in their own way.
Cliff
To be fair, some of us are old enough to remember our nation’s vice president, Dan Quayle, make an impassioned speech about that lousy rotten Murphy Brown – a character on a TV sitcom.
The great part was that the show’s writers took it in stride: the characters went and throw potatoes at the VP’s house! (Quayle, as you may remember, couldn’t spell “potato”!)
So I guess this is a grand tradition… LOL!
Lisa (about.com guide to autism)
Hmm…….so what might get thrown at Stone……
Ah, what I wouldn’t throw.
Because, you see, the writers are endangering children. Something that people don’t get. They’re also endangering their own grandparents-SOMETHING ELSE they don’t get.
Maybe cabbage patch kids?
Anatomy of a public health debacle right there. And how suitable that their patron saint would be fictional. A perfect fit for the fiction they propagate.
My thought is that it should have occurred to someone that TV show characters do not qualify for beaitification and canonization—-on other had, that anyone would suggestion making Eli Stone the “patron saint of autism” gives a good insight into the kind of thinking going on.
I was just re-reading these comments and noticed this one: “Emotions are much easier than science….”
Hmmm…maybe for some folks, but not so much for me.
Hmmmmm—emotions and science………..Eli Stone……..
Oh, you classics/humanities types.
Actually, they gave that guy that name for pretty obvious reasons: they’re using a hammer to send home the message of his dual nature: Eli (from Elijah, I guess?) = the Lord is my God (i.e., that’d be his whole spiritual, prophetic, “I see biplanes flying at me” side), and the “stone” has all kinds of fun connotations, the most obvious of which are “grounded,” “hard,” “tough,” “real.” His name, I assume, is meant to reflect this duality and his prophetic leanings. Oh, the layers! The layers!
Dr. Chew,
I can not make an argument for the scientific reasonings on the link between mercury and autism- because I do not have the medical background that you do. However, I do know an individual that is changing the opinions of a lot of individuals he speaks with- and has the science to back it up. I would love for you to have a conversation with him.
As a parent of a son with autism this is a VERY emotional issue- but at this point the emotion for me is creating awareness. Nothing is going to change the fact that my son is autistic- I just hope that others can prevent this from affecting their children- since it is indeed preventable.