June 11th, 2011 → 11:16 am @ Seth Mnookin
I have a piece in tomorrow’s Washington Post Outlook section titled “An early cure for parents’ vaccine panic.” It outlines some thoughts I have about implementing a standard pre-natal appointment for parents to discuss vaccines and vaccine safety. In a recent post on my blog at the Public Library of Science, I started what I hope will be a fruitful back-and-forth for doctors and parents to share their thoughts on the issue. Check it out — I’d love to hear what you think.
Post: Parents and pediatricians: Do you think a pre-natal discussion about vaccines would help assuage fears? (The Panic Virus Blog, The Public Library of Science.)
Post Categories: Blog & Discussion
May 24th, 2011 → 11:58 pm @ Seth Mnookin
Earlier today, the CDC released a report about the measles outbreaks that have been occurring across the country since the beginning of the year. (Hat tip to USA Today‘s Liz Szabo for this story.) One reason measles outbreaks are so scary (and so difficult to contain) is that measles is the most infectious microbe known to man–it’s transmission rate is around 90 percent. It has also killed more children than any other disease in history.
May 3rd, 2011 → 12:45 pm @ Seth Mnookin
Almost three months ago, a writer named David Kirby wrote a 3,800-word piece for The Huffington Post titled “The Autism-Vaccine Debate: Why It Won’t Go Away.” It was not an impressive piece of reporting. As I wrote in Scientific American at the time,
By obscuring the difference between anecdotes and evidence, fomenting unfounded fears, and disguising tendentious tracts as objective analyses, he might be influencing public opinion, but he’s not helping the search for verifiable truth. (more…)
Post Categories: Blog post
April 22nd, 2011 → 11:02 am @ Seth Mnookin
On Tuesday, Robert MacNeil was on The Emily Rooney Show, which airs on WGBH in Boston. Rooney asked him about my criticisms of his reporting. This was his response:
Well, he’s entitled to his opinion and to sell his book.
It’s true that I expressed my opinion — but I assume what Rooney was asking him about were facts, like, for instance, the fact that he quoted his daughter saying that she believed her son had gotten autism from vaccines but didn’t quote a single scientist or public health official or epidemiologist or vaccine researcher or spokesperson from the American Medical Association or the American Academy of Pediatrics. (more…)
Post Categories: Blog post
April 20th, 2011 → 11:22 am @ Seth Mnookin
As you might have heard, PBS’s Newshour is in the midst of a six-part series on autism. It’s being hosted by Robert MacNeil, who returned to the show for the first time in 16 years to work on a special that he says is the first time in his career that he used his family’s personal stories to inform his reporting.
As I said on Monday, he shouldn’t have come out of retirement. The series has been an embarrassment. (For my take on the series’s first episode, see my post titled “An embarrassing, reckless, and irresponsible coda to Robert MacNeil’s career.” For my thoughts on the ineffective counter-tactics of the AAP, see “[Abstracts] vs. anecdotes: What we have here is a failure to communicate.” And for an example of how the series will be used by anti-vaccine activists to legitimize their efforts, see “The first of many statements yoking Robert MacNeil to the vaccine-autism canard.“) (more…)
Post Categories: Blog post
April 19th, 2011 → 12:02 pm @ Seth Mnookin
Exhibit A in why Robert MacNeil’s “Autism Now” series has been reckless and irresponsible is a press release issued by Alison MacNeil and SafeMinds* titled, “Daughter of Journalist Robert MacNeil States that Son Regressed Into Autism After Vaccines.”
Notice that it does not say “Alison MacNeil believes that son regressed into autism after vaccines,” or “Family member featured on Newshour believes son regressed into autism after vaccines.” Instead, it invokes a trusted, even revered, newsman and links his name to the “statement” that a child’s autism was called by vaccines.
The rest of the press release contains a drum-beat of half-truths presented as fact (the U.S. has the most aggressive vaccine schedule in the world, the U.S.’s vaccine schedule is a “grand experiment”), either-or fallacies and rhetorical sleights of hand (“are we trading the elimination of childhood disease for a lifetime of disability?”), non sequiturs (“one-fifth of all U.S. children take at least one prescription medication”), and scare tactics (“I have never met a family willing to sacrifice their child for the good of the herd”).
Obviously, any group (or person) has the right to release a statement that makes all sorts of claims. The problem here is that by framing the first hour of his autism special the way he did, Robert MacNeil opened himself (and Newshour) to charges that he’s actually promoting a scientifically disproven (and dangerous) theory. I’m sure we’ll be seeing more of this in the days to come.
* SafeMinds is an acronym for Sensible Action For Ending Mercury Induced Neurological Disorders. It is a parent-advocacy group founded in the wake of fears that an ethyl-mercury based preservative used in some childhood vaccines was causing autism. That preservative, thimerosal, was shown in numerous studies not to cause autism; it was also removed from childhood vaccines a decade ago.
Post Categories: Blog post
April 18th, 2011 → 10:25 pm @ Seth Mnookin
The fact that so many people still believe vaccines cause autism is due to many factors — but ultimately, I think it’s a failure of communication on virtually every level.
Today, Pediatrics, the journal of the American Academy of Pediatrics, unintentionally provided another example of how the medical infrastructure in this country has a lot to learn in that department. In what was intended to be a partial antidote to the embarrassing PBS Newshour series “Autism Now,” Pediatrics released 18 vaccine-safety reports for free. As far as scientific journal articles goes, they’re fairly easy to understand…but compare Pediatrics‘s point of entry: (more…)
Post Categories: Blog post
