What is objectionable, what is dangerous about extremists, is not that they are extreme, but that they are intolerant. The evil is not what they say about their cause, but what they say about their opponents.
—ROBERT F. KENNEDY (FATHER OF RFK JR.)
Anti-vaccine activists like Jim Carrey, J. B. Handley, Robert F. Kennedy Jr., Barbara Loe Fisher, Jenny McCarthy, Lyn Redwood, and Andrew Wakefield often say that they’re not anti-vaccine; they’re pro-vaccine. They just want safer vaccines. Like them, I, too, want safe vaccines.
Indeed, when I first encountered a real vaccine-safety activist, I did everything I could to help him. His name was John Salamone. John’s son, David, had developed polio from the oral polio vaccine. Although this side effect is rare—occurring in about 1 in 2.4 million doses—it’s real. In response, John founded the organization Informed Parents Against Vaccine-Associated Paralytic Poliomyelitis. The difference between John Salamone and anti-vaccine activists is that Salamone had identified a legitimate vaccine safety issue. Anti-vaccine groups, on the other hand, want vaccines that don’t cause allergies, asthma, autism, chronic fatigue, diabetes, multiple sclerosis, rheumatoid arthritis, or sudden infant death syndrome, among others. Because vaccines don’t cause these disorders, they’re asking for something they already have.
In 1998, when I first joined the Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices (ACIP) at the CDC, I was made head of the polio vaccine working group. At the time, children in the United States were receiving the oral polio vaccine, the one that had partially paralyzed John Salamone’s son. I had seen John at national meetings of pediatricians and, quite frankly, he hadn’t been treated particularly well. He was often asked to place his organization’s booth, which included several children who had been harmed by the vaccine, in the most inaccessible spot in the exhibition hall (like one of those remote circus cages in Franz Kafka’s A Hunger Artist). I asked John if he would be willing to join the CDC working group as a parent representative. Within two years, we eliminated the oral polio vaccine from the United States; now, because we use only the inactivated vaccine, which is given as a shot, the risk of getting polio from the vaccine has disappeared. No longer do children have to suffer as David Salamone suffers. By putting a human face on the problem, John Salamone had made vaccines safer for children. Because I had led this effort, I, too, consider myself to be a credible vaccine safety activist.
Nonetheless, anti-vaccine activists don’t see me that way. And they do everything they can to discourage me from speaking out.
••••
IN THE MOVIE THE GODFATHER PART II, THE CHARACTER HYMAN Roth tells Michael Corleone that he didn’t complain after the Corleone family had killed his friend Moe Green. “This is the business we’ve chosen,” Roth says. Similarly, if scientists are going to try to educate the public about an aspect of science about which people are passionate, we must accept that things can get ugly. And the way that it gets ugly is with threatening emails, physical harassment, frivolous lawsuits, and death threats.
I’ll start with the emails.
Whether the controversy is climate change, evolution, GMOs, alternative medicine, dietary supplements, or vaccines, the themes of hate email are always the same: money, murder, Nazis, God, Satan, and Judgment Day. For example: “You are a demon straight out of hell”; “You are a very sick and evil man”; “You, sir, have blood on your hands”; “Your day of reckoning will come”; “I just pray that the love of Christ will one day flood your darkened heart”; and “You should be ashamed of yourself and I hope you’re ready for Hell, because I’m positive that when you finally croak, Satan will have his own special place in Hell for evil people like you.” Sometimes the emails are more hopeful, offering a chance at redemption: “Do the right thing. Turn away from evil and corruption. You are a disgrace to humanity. You can change.”
Occasionally, emails are sent to someone else but refer to me. For example, Perri Klass, a professor of journalism and pediatrics at New York University and the director of graduate studies at the Arthur L. Carter Journalism Institute, received an email with the subject line “Nazi Bitch Whore”: “Shut the fuck up if you don’t want to be put next to Offit in the firing squad once your tyranny collapses.” (I suppose it shouldn’t be surprising that an email whose subject line is “Nazi Bitch Whore” contains a message that isn’t particularly supportive.)
In truth, these emails always upset me. I have yet to become thick-skinned enough that they don’t hurt. So I’ve developed strategies to distance myself from them. One is humor (or at least what passes for humor), which helps a little. Another is denial. I simply refuse to believe that people really hate me that much. I think that if they actually knew me, they wouldn’t feel that way.
Although I have been tempted on occasion to answer these emails, I know it would be a mistake. After my first response, I would be far more intimately involved with someone I definitely don’t want to be intimately involved with. So I try my best to ignore them. Reasonable people aren’t writing them. So logic and common sense aren’t going to change their minds.
••••
I’VE ALSO BEEN SUED.
My guess is that the purpose of the lawsuits isn’t to win; it’s to get me to spend my time and money—and mostly to shut me up. If they can make speaking out on behalf of science onerous enough, then presumably I’ll stop.
On December 23, 2009, Barbara Loe Fisher, the director of an anti-vaccine group called the National Vaccine Information Center, sued me for libel. Her claim was based on an article written in the magazine Wired titled “An Epidemic of Fear: One Man’s Battle Against the Anti-vaccine Movement.” Amy Wallace, a celebrity journalist, wrote it. Wallace is probably best known for an article she wrote in GQ about Charlie Sheen titled “Charlie Sheen’s Demons: Coke, Hookers, Hospital, Repeat.” The teaser for that article read “Charlie Sheen talks to Amy Wallace about his latest bender, his true feelings about sobriety and ‘Apocalypse Now,’ and the cyclical insanity of his crazy-ass life.” I can only imagine how much of a comedown it must have been for Amy to have had to interview me.
In her article, Wallace talked about the ill-founded fears of anti-vaccine activists, the cottage industry of false cures for autism, and the celebrities who support the movement. The article was sympathetic to me and to the science. The paragraph that got me, Amy Wallace, and Condé Nast (the publisher of Wired) sued for $1 million was “Fisher, who has long been the media’s go-to interview for what some in the autism arena call ‘parents’ rights,’ makes [Offit] particularly nuts, as in ‘You just want to scream.’ The reason? ‘She lies,’ he says flatly. ‘Barbara Loe Fisher inflames people against me. And wrongly. I’m in this for the same reason she is. I care about kids.”
The sentence to which Fisher objected most was “ ‘She lies,’ he says flatly.” I found out about the lawsuit when Barbara Loe Fisher’s lawyers sent a process server to my home. People can learn that they’ve been sued either by certified mail or by having a guy (who in my case looked like a bouncer at a rough nightclub) come to your house, knock forcefully, and then loudly proclaim that you are being served. This is the more expensive and more embarrassing way, especially if you have guests, and it’s the way Fisher chose. My wife answered the door. After the man handed her the papers, she chirped brightly, “Honey, we’re being served.” (My wife has far too much fun with this. She, like I, feels that this isn’t really our life. The truth is that we’re not all that interesting and, therefore, aren’t the kind of people who should be getting served with anything. I agree with her. I feel that the anti-vaccine people have created an anti-hero, a villain, and they want me to play the role of the villain. I counter this by imagining that I’m in a musical farce about dancing milkmaids from Ukraine.)
When I learned that I was being sued, I called the lawyer who was representing Amy Wallace to see if Condé Nast’s insurance company would cover my legal fees. The Condé Nast lawyer explained that publishers don’t typically cover people who are interviewed for a story; they cover only the writer. He also said that if the lawsuit got to the point that each side would be required to give a deposition, it could cost me between $100,000 and $200,000; if it went to trial, it could cost me as much as $1 million (which, ironically, was the amount for which I was being sued). He reassured me that Fisher’s lawsuit was baseless and that in a just world, it would be dismissed. At issue was whether we were living in a just world.
Then I got some good news. Miraculously, the umbrella policy on our homeowners’ insurance covered me for libel. My insurance company turned the case over to a law firm in the county in Virginia where Fisher had brought her lawsuit. On March 10, 2010, the case was dismissed. Regarding me, the judge ruled that “a remark by one of the key participants in a heated public debate stating that his adversary lies is not an actionable defamation,” but rather “an expression of opinion” protected by the First Amendment. Regarding Condé Nast and Amy Wallace, the judge ruled that “the impassioned response by Defendant Offit toward Plaintiff was itself illustrative of the rough-and-tumble nature of the controversy over childhood inoculations and therefore worthy of mention in the Wired article.”
Even if the judge had decided that my quote was not an opinion, but rather a statement of fact, Barbara Loe Fisher would have had to prove that my statement “She lies” was incorrect. Second, she would have had to prove that I had acted with actual malice, meaning that not only was I wrong about her, but that I knew I was wrong, or had at least shown a reckless disregard for the truth. This, too, was a high bar; it’s hard to prove intent. Finally, since Fisher was suing me for $1 million, she would have had to prove that my statement had substantially damaged her reputation. I wasn’t the first person to say that Barbara Loe Fisher was a source of potentially harmful misinformation. So again, proving that I had damaged her reputation beyond the degree to which it had already been damaged would have been hard.
One thing I learned during the Fisher lawsuit was that it’s good to live in a country that has constitutionally protected free speech. This wasn’t the case when a British lawyer named Richard Barr threatened me with a lawsuit. In England, the burden falls on the defendant to prove that what was said was true, not on the plaintiff to prove that it wasn’t. Barr was the lawyer who had funneled money from England’s Legal Services Commission to Andrew Wakefield when Wakefield claimed that the MMR vaccine caused autism. Barr’s threatened lawsuit was based on a statement in my book Deadly Choices: How the Anti-Vaccine Movement Threatens Us All. Referring to the investigative journalist Brian Deer, who had blown the cover off Wakefield’s misrepresentations, as well as his source of funding, I had written, “Deer also found that the personal injury lawyer who represented these children, Richard Barr, had given Wakefield £440,000 (about $800,000) to perform his study, essentially laundering legal claims through a medical journal.” Barr claimed that I had made it sound like he had paid Wakefield out of his own pocket, when in fact he had just directed the money from the Legal Services Commission. According to the lawyers representing Basic Books, which had published Deadly Choices, this kind of lawsuit would never succeed in the United States, the argument being that no reasonable reader would assume that Barr had pulled $800,000 out of his own pocket. But the lawyer also warned that in England, the burden of proof isn’t on the plaintiff to prove wrongdoing; it’s on the defendant to prove no wrongdoing—in essence, to prove that no reader could possibly interpret the sentence the way Barr had claimed. We eventually removed that sentence from the British edition of the book.
In the midst of this back-and-forth with the publisher’s lawyer, I called Richard Barr. As crazy as it might sound, I really liked him. He seemed burned by his association with Andrew Wakefield and was trying to reclaim his reputation following Wakefield’s dramatic fall from grace. (Wakefield’s paper had already been retracted, and he had lost his license to practice medicine.) We agreed that if I sent £1,000 (then about $2,000) to a charity that provided services for children with autism, he would withdraw his lawsuit. A happy ending.
Probably the best advice on how to handle these lawsuits comes from Ken White, whose online nom de guerre is Popehat. On September 26, 2013, White wrote an article titled “So You’ve Been Threatened with a Defamation Suit.” “Hi, I’m Ken White,” he began. “You may remember me from such defamation-related posts as ‘You Can’t Call a Bigfoot Hunter Crazy, That’s Libel!’ and ‘If All Critics of Dentists Go to Jail, Then Only Criminals Will Criticize Dentists!’” White offered advice for what to do if you’re being sued for something that you have written (libel) or said (slander). The first piece of advice was to calm down. White called this the “Martha Stewart Rule.” “Lots of people get in trouble not because they did something wrong, but because they heard they were being investigated for doing something wrong, and they panicked and started lying and deleting files and setting cabinetry on fire and making angry statements to the press.”
Next, White advised his readers to gather important information. Who threatened to sue you? Was the person who contacted you the one who was suing you or a lawyer working on their behalf? Has the lawsuit already been filed, or is this just a threat? White also strongly encouraged people to educate themselves about what you can and can’t say about other people. “One of the most important concepts in defamation law is that statements of fact can be defamatory (‘You got drunk and ran over my polecat with your Segway!’).” In other words, if you say or write something that is true but subjects the other person to hatred, ridicule, or contempt, then you could be found guilty of defamation.
White pointed out that for the most part, in a country with a First Amendment, you have free rein to state your opinion about a public figure like Barbara Loe Fisher: “Pure opinion (‘You’re the worst dad’) and ‘rhetorical hyperbole’ (‘You’re an asshole traitor)” are not defamatory. In other words, I could have called Fisher things far worse than a liar.
••••
ANOTHER STRATEGY USED BY ANTI-SCIENCE ACTIVISTS IS harassment.
I’ve been stalked, grabbed, shouted at, and received some pretty harrowing phone calls. The goal of these attacks is to get me to react—to say or do something that will discredit me. I’ll give you an example.
On November 21, 2016, I was asked to participate in a symposium at the NYU Langone Medical Center in New York City. The title of the symposium was “Confronting Vaccine Resistance: Strategies for Success.” Richard Pan, the state senator who had led the fight to eliminate California’s philosophical exemption to vaccination; Dorit Rubinstein Reiss, a law professor and vaccine advocate from the University of California Hastings College of the Law; and Benard Dreyer, the president of the American Academy of Pediatrics, had also been asked to speak.
A few days before the meeting, activists issued a call to arms on a prominent anti-vaccine website:
Please plan on attending a demonstration against an event entitled “Confronting Vaccine Resistance.”…The meeting is closed to the public but will feature three of America’s leading proponents of forced vaccination…. Bring friends, families, and cameras. And bring a poster with a picture of any vaccine-injured loved one, along with their name, the date they were injured, and the vaccine(s) that injured them.
A few years earlier, anti-science activists had staged a similar event at the CDC in Atlanta. In order to get to the meeting, I had to walk through a group of angry protesters carrying signs, one of which showed a picture of me with a bright red slash across my face above the word “TERRORIST!” While walking through the crowd, one of the protesters grabbed my arm and spun me around. I asked him to please let go, and eventually he did. But it was frightening. I had no interest in repeating that experience. So I got on an early train from Philadelphia, arriving in New York City three hours before the event started. When I entered the main building, I met with the chief of security, who was well aware of the protest. I asked him if I could wait in the meeting room. He said that the room wasn’t ready yet, but that I could wait in the cafeteria. “You’ll be safe there,” he said. “Relax, have some breakfast. No one will bother you. When it’s time for the symposium to start, we’ll escort you to the meeting room.”
The cafeteria was located on the first floor of the hospital. I bought a bagel and juice and took a seat by the window (not a wise choice). After a few minutes, I noticed a woman with a large camera filming me from the street. I recognized her as Polly Tommey—a collaborator of Andrew Wakefield—who believes that all vaccines are unsafe and advises parents to be wary of pediatricians. Standing next to her was another woman pointing toward a large black bus with the word “VAXXED” printed on the side, underneath of which was the phrase, “Where There’s Risk, There Should Be Choice.” Vaxxed was an anti-vaccine movie that had been written and directed by Andrew Wakefield.
I couldn’t believe that someone was filming me from the street. At this point, a security guard walked up to the window and frantically waved at Polly Tommey to stop. I was about to get up and move away from the window when a man who appeared to be in his early forties with a camera hanging around his neck came up behind me. The camera had a large lens that came close to my face. He asked if I would like to come onto the bus to be interviewed by the Vaxxed team. If I had said yes, I would have had to go outside and talk to a group of people who not only didn’t care what I had to say but routinely vilified me on their websites. If I had said no, it would have sounded like I didn’t care about parents who only wanted a chance to express their concerns.
I said no. Then I asked him who he was. He said, “I’m the cameraman for Vaxxed.” He asked again if I would come talk to the Vaxxed parents. I said, “You’ve got to be kidding.” At this point, I should have gotten out of my chair and walked away. But I was scared, and also a little angry. I felt ambushed. Plus, the camera in my face made it difficult for me to stand up. (I assumed that his camera took photographs. I hadn’t imagined that the camera was filming me while he stood there with his hands at his side. Yes, I’m that old.) The young security guard waving to Polly Tommey wasn’t helping. The cameraman said that if I had truth on my side that I should want to come out and talk to the parents. What was I afraid of?
The cameraman wasn’t going away and, although he appeared calm on the surface, he was seething. I was trapped in my chair. So I said, “Get out.” Then I said the magic words that would haunt me (and my hospital) for the next few days. I said, “Get the fuck out.” I regretted it the minute I said it. Undeterred, he again asked me to come outside. I said, “Out!”
Within minutes, a video of me cursing at this man appeared on an anti-vaccine website and soon on YouTube (where, by the end of the day, thousands of people had seen it). Later, I was escorted to the meeting by a security guard. A series of security guards never left my side for the rest of the day. When the symposium started, it seemed that everyone in the room had seen the video. The head of public relations at NYU Langone said that she would be happy to provide me with media training (assuming that I didn’t know that you weren’t supposed to curse at people who were filming you).
At the time that I was harassed, I didn’t know the man who had confronted me. Later that day, Dorit Reiss informed me that it was Joshua Coleman and directed me to a news article dated October 30, 2015, titled “Roseville Anti-vaccination Campaigner Charged with Willful Cruelty to Children.” Roseville is in California. Joshua Coleman had apparently traveled from California to New York to attend this protest. Coleman had been arrested for keying a car parked in a handicapped parking space, even though the car had a handicapped sticker. While he was vandalizing the car, he was holding one of his young children under his arm. When the police were informed of the vandalism and tried to arrest Coleman, he ran away and hid in a garbage can. “I’ve found people in trash cans before,” said Sergeant Jason Bosworth of the Roseville Police Department. The article stated that Coleman was “now facing charges of vandalism, willful cruelty to a child, and obstructing a public official.” This wasn’t Coleman’s first angry outburst. Coleman had also been shown on a Facebook post harassing Dr. Richard Pan, the California state senator who had spoken at the symposium in New York City.
This article helped me understand why Coleman had scared me. Coleman hadn’t been loud and confrontational, but he was clenching his teeth when he spoke, clearly holding back his anger. He wasn’t Charles-Manson-blue-swastika-on-the-forehead scary. He was more of a placid-disarming-smile-of-someone-who-might-hurt-you scary. So I struck back more out of fear than anger. But what I did was unacceptable. I had given the anti-vaccine activists exactly what they had wanted. I had made their day.
When I posted the details of the episode on my Facebook page, people who have supported my efforts responded. Most wrote letters to my hospital’s director of public relations, concerned that the hospital wouldn’t support me. Frankly, the responses were more than I felt I had deserved. For example:
From a microbiologist at the CDC:
In October, the anti-vaccination and anti–public health group calling itself “Vaxxed” protested outside the main gates of the CDC. I was working that day and went to lunch, as I normally do on Friday, with a group of fellow scientists. As we left the security checkpoint, we were surrounded by women and children shoving signs in our faces, yelling at us from multiple angles and accusing us of all sorts of heinous acts. They shoved cameras in our faces without permission, stood in our way as we moved forward, and tried to incite us to say something to the salacious things they threw at us. Thankfully, we were able to get past them as they screamed on a bullhorn, “We can smell your souls rotting from here; you are going to HELL.” This group is simply trying to bully and push people and catch them in a moment of frustration when they do NOT leave after repeatedly asking to be left alone. They don’t film that part. I wanted to bring this to your attention as I think their tactics when they attacked Dr. Offit were the same. Please consider the source.
From a professor at the University of Edinburgh in Scotland: “I am writing to assure you that you are exposed to what is a coordinated activity of an exceedingly small, albeit very vocal, minority of vaccine refusers. The vast majority of parents and patients are tremendously grateful for Dr. Offit’s work as a doctor, inventor, and public health/vaccine advocate. His, and by proxy, CHOP’s, excellent reputation extends across and beyond the U.S.”
And from a mother of a young toddler (and my personal favorite): “I, along with many others, was so glad to see Dr. Offit tell ‘Vaxxed’ to get fucked.”
There is an old saying that you should never find out how much your friends are willing to stand behind you. And while it was certainly heartening that my hospital received dozens of emails and letters supporting me, I had tested my friends unnecessarily. And you can only push that button so many times.
One of the things I never understood was why these protesters did what they did. There they were, across the street from the NYU Langone Medical Center with their signs, standing out in the January cold for hours. Several had infants and young children with them. It reminded me of the CDC protest at which a mother of a five-year-old boy had dressed him in a T-shirt that read “Damaged by Mercury.” What kind of a parent has their child wear a shirt with the word “Damaged” on it? Also—and I only wish I had taken a picture—the mother was smoking a cigarette at the time.
These parents represent a very small minority of parents of children with autism. Although they often get most of the media attention, it’s the other parents of children with autism who are the real heroes. Parents like Alison Singer, a former NBC executive producer and the mother of a daughter severely affected by autism. Alison founded the Autism Science Foundation (the only autism foundation with the word “Science” in the title), which is devoted to raising money to fund autism research. It’s unlikely that this research will help her daughter. In that way, Alison is remarkably selfless, giving so much of her time and energy to help future children. Or parents like Matt Carey, Shannon Des Roches Rosa, Liz Ditz, Fiona O’Leary, and Ken Reibel, who fight for services for these children, as well as to get people to appreciate what children with autism have to offer and to destigmatize the disorder.
But what exactly did the Vaxxed parents standing in front of NYU Langone hope to accomplish by harassing scientists and public health advocates? How did it help their children? In 2015, I spoke at a symposium at the University of California, Berkeley. While speaking, a woman in the second row held up her iPhone to film me. I asked her to please stop, but she wouldn’t. So I gave up. At the end of the talk, she walked to the front of the room and put her camera phone inches from my face. I asked her to please put the camera down, but she wouldn’t. So I walked away. She wanted me to get angry, to touch her or her camera so she could claim battery—that I had touched her against her will. The same thing happened at NYU Langone. The parents innocently claimed that all they wanted was for me to come outside and talk with them. But they didn’t want that at all. They only wanted to upset me—to make me suffer. My mistake was that I let them get to me. As one supporter wrote, “Dr. Offit is a scholar and a humanitarian and a gentleman. But he is not a saint.” True enough.
••••
THEN THERE ARE THE DEATH THREATS.
Not too long ago, I received an email that read, “If someone is forced to vaccinate their child when they did not want to because of your legislated ideas, and that child dies, then that parent should have the right to kill you. So please, continue your push for universal vaccination.” Although this email contains an implied death threat, it doesn’t reach the level of an actionable threat. The following story explains why.
In the early 2000s, I received an email from a man in Seattle that read, “I will hang you by your neck until you are dead.” Every day in the United States, thousands of threatening emails are sent. In order for an email to reach the level of an actionable death threat, three criteria must be met: (1) The threat must be specific. It can’t read, “Hope nothing happens to you,” or “Watch your back.” By stating how he would kill me, the Seattle man had met the first criterion. (2) The threat must be made more than once. Sadly, I received another threat from the same man. (3) The threat must be made by someone who might actually do it; for example, a person with paranoid schizophrenia. When my tormentor met all three criteria, an FBI agent in Philadelphia set the wheels in motion to investigate him. The FBI told the man to “cease and desist.” Then agents checked his emails, monitored his phone calls, checked to see whether he had purchased weapons, and observed his comings and goings. All of this was very reassuring. (By the way, any high-minded notions you might have about civil liberties vanish the minute you’re threatened. I had no problem with law enforcement officials invading this man’s privacy. Please, invade away.)
When the Seattle man threatened me, I was still a voting member of the ACIP. This meant that six days every year, I worked for the federal government. Because the threat was related to my public statements about vaccines, and because I worked for the government in the area of vaccines, the CDC offered me protection for a few ACIP meetings. At the time, these meetings weren’t held on the CDC campus—where guards and metal detectors are at every entrance—they were held at a Marriott hotel, where there was little security. So a sheriff was assigned to watch out for me. He would follow me to and from lunch, a gun at his side.
••••
SADLY, ALL OF THESE TACTICS OF INTIMIDATION HAVE FORCED A number of good scientists to the sidelines.