Controversy Addiction and the MMR Vaccine Scare

Is the media addicted to controversy—as in the notion that the MMR vaccine could be linked to autism—and is this potentially seriously damaging to people’s health? So Peter Wilby asks in today’s Guardian:

Nearly all journalists aspire to emulate two stories: the Watergate scandal, which brought down a US president; and the thalidomide scandal, which, after years of campaigning and legal battles, forced a multinational giant to eat humble pie…

In regard to autism, one might speak of: Vaccinegate? MMRgate? CDC/Big Pharma/name your government agency or large drug company gate? Or, simply, Autismgate?

Wilby notes some familiar topoi in discussions about autism and vaccines, and parent accounts about how vaccines affected their children:

For the press…….MMR had all the ingredients of a cause celebre, and possibly another thalidomide. Any journalist would recognise what the trade calls “a cracking story”, with the potential to grip many readers. Children were being struck down by a terrible condition. Fearful “mums” were fighting for their children’s future.

Officialdom was not to be trusted, and nor (as far as rightwing papers were concerned) was a Labour government. The signs of an “establishment cover-up” were obvious. Consumer “choice” - between MMR and three separate vaccines - was being denied. The NHS, stormed the Sun, was “arrogant”, treating “our readers” as “second-class citizens”. The MMR affair was symptomatic of “a centralised, tax-funded, state-controlled National Health Service”, argued the Telegraph. Declining vaccination rates vindicated the papers’ campaigns, showing that “ordinary parents”, with children’s best interests at heart, shared journalists’ concerns.

And, as some parents say, children were being “struck down by a terrible condition” that was the result of them doing as they were told they ought to. As one mother puts it, she saw herself as holding her “child down while [she] allowed others to inject him with vaccines that [she] *assumed* were safe.” A mother just trying to do the right thing for her poor disabled child can create a different sort of stir on the evening news than a scientist citing studies, facts, and statistics, and what better story to uncover than that some evil corporate entity, especially one that “makes drugs,” has knowingly “injected toxins” into some poor innocent child, and made them…….autistic? Wilby notes how the press rushed to “report” on such a sensational story, and perhaps only helped to fan and fire up the flames of an unsubstantiated hypothesis of what causes autism.

And maybe it’ll after all be evident, that reports of the “controversy about autism and vaccines” are at least somewhat and maybe grossly overstated. Controversy gets attention and sells papers, gets people commenting on blogs and message boards.

But you kind of get the feeling, the truth is out there, and all these rhetorical speculations are, well, just that.

A few days ago, I posted about the autism card and a deficit of compassion; might controversy addiction and “compassion deficit disorder” be in each other’s pocket?