History, despite its wrenching pain, cannot be unlived, but if faced with courage, need not be lived again.
—MAYA ANGELOU
In the world of science advocacy, victories are often hard earned and incomplete. No matter how compelling, dramatic, and clear the messaging, science denialists are not going to put down their signs decrying their fears, stop their protests, and say, “You know, I never thought about it that way. Now that I look carefully at the studies, I see that you’re right. And I want to take a moment to tell you just how much I appreciate the academic community’s willingness to spend millions of dollars and thousands of hours to answer our concerns. Thanks for all you do. Really. Thanks.” If this ever happens, then, as predicted in the Book of Isaiah, “Men will beat swords into ploughshares and their spears into pruning hooks; nations will not lift up sword against other nations, nor will they learn war anymore.” Scientists and science denialists will stand shoulder to shoulder on large green meadows, swaying back and forth, smiling and singing in perfect harmony about apple trees and honey bees and furnishing the world with love—like that Coke commercial at the end of Mad Men.
Although I think this scenario is unlikely, the situation has definitely improved.
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ON MARCH 21, 2016, THE LEGENDARY ACTOR ROBERT DE NIRO announced that he would premiere Vaxxed: From Cover-Up to Catastrophe at his prestigious Tribeca Film Festival, which he cofounded in 2002. Vaxxed was written and directed by Andrew Wakefield. The festival’s website provided a glimpse of what was to come:
The most vitriolic debate in medical history takes a dramatic turn when senior-scientist-turned-whistleblower Dr. William Thompson for the Centers for Disease Control turns over secret documents, data, and internal emails confirming what millions of devastated parents and “discredited” doctors have long suspected…what’s behind the skyrocketing increase of autism.
Since Andrew Wakefield had published his study in The Lancet, seventeen studies had shown that he was wrong: MMR didn’t cause autism. But now, at least according to Vaxxed, it appeared that Andrew Wakefield had been right all along. The only reason that these other studies had dismissed his hypothesis was that they had been falsified. Wakefield hadn’t been a fraud; university researchers and public health officials around the world had been the frauds. And now, finally, a government scientist was willing to stand up and blow the whistle.
“Wow,” says Wakefield in the trailer for Vaxxed. “The CDC had known all along there was the MMR–autism risk.” Andrew Wakefield, apparently, was back.
Thirteen years earlier, in 2003, Wakefield had been the star of the docudrama Hear the Silence. Now he was the director and star of a movie that would exonerate him. Robert De Niro announced that Vaxxed would premier on April 24, 2016, the last day of the festival.
The media’s reaction to De Niro’s announcement was swift and one-sided.
Michael Specter, a staff writer for the New Yorker, wrote, “It’s shocking. This is a criminal who is responsible for people dying. This isn’t someone with a ‘point of view.’ It’s comparable to Leni Riefenstahl making a movie about the Third Reich, or Mike Tyson making a movie about violence toward women. The fact that a respectable organization like the Tribeca Film Festival is giving Andrew Wakefield a platform is a disgraceful thing to do.”
Michael Hiltzik, in the Los Angeles Times, wrote, “The damage done to public health by the British ex-physician Andrew Wakefield…has been incalculable. Wakefield’s claims have been conclusively discredited everywhere but in the fever swamp of the anti-vaccine movement—and now in the glamorous environment of the Tribeca Film Festival. How on earth did this documentary full of anti-vaccine lies get into Tribeca? The answer may have much to do with Hollywood’s taste for anything that promotes drama and controversy, no matter how irresponsible.”
Alexandra Sowa, in the New York Daily News, wrote, “I am in complete agreement that we need to discuss autism, a serious disease that now affects one in sixty-eight U.S. children. But there is no longer room for Andrew Wakefield or vaccines to be part of the conversation…. For many, he still serves as a beacon of hope in the fight against autism. But do not be fooled: He is a snake oil salesman and Robert De Niro is helping him peddle his dangerous wares.”
All this negative press, and the movie hadn’t been released yet.
In the end, Vaxxed didn’t resurrect the career of Andrew Wakefield. And it didn’t start a revolution. Colin McRoberts, in an article titled, “Vaxxed: From Cover-Up to Catastrophe to Cancellation to Insignificance,” accurately predicted its impact: “[Vaxxed] will be seen as incredibly important to a small minority of anti-vaxers who would have been anti-vaxers anyway, as a noxious piece of harmful propaganda to actual experts, and as a temporary curiosity to the mainstream.”
Following its theatrical release, Vaxxed was ignored by newspapers, magazines, and trade journals across the country. The few who reviewed it were brutal.
On April 19, 1982, nearly thirty-five years before the release of Vaxxed, Lea Thompson, a veteran correspondent for NBC News, aired a one-hour special titled “DPT: Vaccine Roulette.” (The vaccine, which is actually called DTP, is a combination vaccination against diphtheria, pertussis [whooping cough], and tetanus.) The documentary claimed that the pertussis component of the DTP vaccine caused permanent brain damage. The images were riveting. Children stared vacantly into space with withered arms and legs, seizing, crying, helpless. Parents all told the same story; our children were fine; then they got this vaccine, and look what happened.
The media covered “Vaccine Roulette” as fact. Anti-vaccine advocacy groups were born. Congress held special hearings to determine whether vaccines were doing more harm than good. Manufacturers abandoned vaccines following an avalanche of lawsuits. Massive outbreaks of pertussis swept across the country. Although dozens of studies later showed that the pertussis vaccine hadn’t caused brain damage, the notion that vaccines carried hidden dangers was born.
Following the airing of “DPT: Vaccine Roulette,” the anti-vaccine movement was riding high. When the media wanted to get parents’ perspectives on vaccines, they called Barbara Loe Fisher, the founder of the anti-vaccine group Dissatisfied Parents Together (derived from the purported problem with the DTP vaccine), which would later become the National Vaccine Information Center. Fisher was everywhere, a one-stop shop for the media. When the CDC recommended the Haemophilus influenzae type b (Hib) vaccine for infants in the late 1980s, Fisher appeared on a national television program warning parents that the vaccine caused diabetes. When the hepatitis B vaccine was recommended for all newborns in 1991, Barbara Loe Fisher worked with ABC’s Sylvia Chase on a 20/20 episode claiming that the vaccine caused chronic arthritis, multiple sclerosis, and sudden infant death syndrome. When the pneumococcal vaccine was recommended for infants in 2000, Fisher again appeared on national television warning against its routine use. Parents who listened to Barbara Loe Fisher’s misleading claims put children at unnecessary risk of meningitis, pneumonia, bloodstream infections, hepatitis, cirrhosis, and liver cancer.
Fisher wasn’t the only anti-vaccine activist with ready access to the media. J. B. Handley, the cofounder of Generation Rescue, Jenny McCarthy’s autism research organization, was often quoted in national newspapers and magazines and appeared on television shows and in documentaries. Handley believed that vaccines had caused his son’s autism and that by injecting children with drugs that bind mercury, children with autism could be cured. He traveled around the country to preach his ill-founded beliefs, calling his recruits “rescue angels.” Other anti-vaccine activists, like Sallie Bernard and Lyn Redwood of SafeMinds and Mark Blaxill of Age of Autism, were often given access to the media. At the center of it all, however, was Andrew Wakefield.
For years, these groups held sway with the media. Then, just as quickly as it had come, all of this mainstream media attention waned. Today, reputable news sources rarely give a voice to the scions of the anti-vaccine movement. Quite the opposite. Now we hear an avalanche of voices from the other side. Celebrities like Marc Anthony, Kristen Bell, Julie Bowen, Jennifer Garner, Sarah Michelle Gellar, Salma Hayek, Kim Kardashian, Jennifer Lopez, Amanda Peet, Keri Russell, and Marissa Winokur; television journalists like Richard Besser, Campbell Brown, Erin Burnett, Anderson Cooper, Michael Smerconish, and Nancy Snyderman; radio talk show hosts like Dom Giordano and Margaret Hoover; athletes like Kristi Yamaguchi and Deion Branch (who made eleven receptions for the New England Patriots in Super Bowl XXXIX, single-handedly defeating my beloved Philadelphia Eagles but who can now be forgiven); cultural and political icons like Bill Gates, Michelle Obama, and Mark Zuckerberg; comedians like Samantha Bee, Stephen Colbert, John Oliver, Penn and Teller, and Jon Stewart; science bloggers like Matt Carey, David Gorski, David McRaney, Colin McRoberts, Steven Novella, Ken Reibel, and Michael Simpson; and journalists like Arthur Allen, Gardiner Harris, Ron Lin, Anita Manning, Maryn McKenna, Donald McNeil Jr., Seth Mnookin, Michael Specter, Mike Stobbe, Liz Szabo, and Trine Tsouderos, among many others, have all stepped forward not only in defense of vaccines, but in angry opposition to the anti-vaccine movement.
What happened? Why has the media largely abandoned its mantra of balance in favor of the science that has exonerated vaccines?
One possible explanation is that the science has matured. When Andrew Wakefield claimed that the MMR vaccine caused autism in 1998, no one could point to a study showing that he was wrong. Since then, seventeen studies have been published. Now journalists can confidently stand on a mountain of evidence. But the same could be said for climate change, which also stands on a mountain of evidence but is still often presented by the media as a controversy. Indeed, whole political parties continue to deny its existence. The availability of clear, overwhelming scientific evidence alone doesn’t appear to be enough to explain this sea change against the anti-vaccine movement.
Another possible explanation is that the press and the public have finally tired of conspiracy theories. The premise of Vaxxed is that the government and pharmaceutical companies have joined forces to defeat Andrew Wakefield, who casts himself as a counter-cultural hero. At the time of the release of Vaxxed, I was asked to write a review of the movie for the Hollywood Reporter, in which I concluded, “For people who believe that President Barack Obama is not a U.S. citizen, that the moon landing was filmed on a Hollywood sound stage, and that an intergalactic board of elves and fairies are trying to get the IRS out of Puerto Rico, this movie is for you.” Judging from the number of hate-filled emails and phone calls I received after writing this review, conspiracy theories and conspiracy theorists are alive and well. So I don’t think that’s it.
Or maybe the anti-vaccine movement has been a victim of its own success. Now—scared by the notion that vaccines might be causing chronic disorders—a critical number of parents have chosen not to vaccinate their children. As a consequence, measles outbreaks occurred in the United States in 2014, 2015, and 2017. Nothing educates like highly contagious viruses. The combination of the recent measles outbreaks, the fraudulent study that promoted the MMR vaccine as a cause of autism, the studies that exonerated the MMR vaccine, and the vigorous response by clinicians, academics, and science bloggers in support of those studies, at least in part account for the marginalization of the anti-vaccine movement by the press. Still, I don’t think this explains everything. Rather, I think that the dramatic fall of the anti-vaccine movement can be attributed in large part to one man: Andrew Wakefield, one of the greatest cautionary tales of the modern era.
When Wakefield stepped forward in 1998 to tell the world that the MMR vaccine caused autism, the media embraced him. Thousands of articles were written about his discovery, most claiming that at the very least he had raised an important question. Wakefield appeared on virtually every morning and evening television program; Ed Bradley interviewed him on 60 Minutes, and Representative Dan Burton asked him to speak in front of an important congressional committee. Wakefield was the newly minted hero of the anti-vaccine movement—an accomplished physician who provided an explanation for something that had previously been unexplainable.
Then Wakefield was found not only to be wrong, but to have acted fraudulently. And nobody likes a fraud. We learned, primarily from the investigative efforts of Brian Deer, that Wakefield had misrepresented clinical and biological data; that he had received hundreds of thousands of dollars to support research on behalf of parents in the midst of suing pharmaceutical companies; that he had filed a patent on what he believed would be a safer measles vaccine; and that he had drawn blood from children at his young son’s birthday party. For these and other transgressions, Wakefield lost his license to practice medicine, and his now infamous Lancet paper was retracted. Andrew Wakefield had become a pariah, an icon for bad science: his “study” appearing on biology exams as an example of what scientists shouldn’t do.
But Wakefield didn’t give up. With Polly Tommey, Wakefield helped create the Autism Media Channel, a video production company that portrays children with autism as vaccine-damaged, further stigmatizing them. During the promotion of Vaxxed, Andrew Wakefield, Polly Tommey, and Del Bigtree (the producer) traveled from state to state, venue to venue. Crowds were small and the media generally absent. Although Wakefield had always believed that pharmaceutical companies and public health agencies had conspired to defeat him, he had seriously miscalculated how unpopular he had become. Journalists, child activists, and parents of children with autism now saw him not only as a pariah, but as a threat to children with autism. Ken Reibel, a parent of a child with autism and the curator of the blog Autism News Beat, said, “He’s still trying to tell the world he’s not the greatest scientific fraud of the twentieth century. He’s scared that is what he’s going to be remembered for.” Matt Carey, a blogger, physicist, and another father of a child with autism, wrote, “It’s important to note that Wakefield is NOT part of the autism community. He’s a parasite who latched on to our community twenty years ago and now we are his main source of income. He is a problem, not a solution.” At the time of the release of Vaxxed, 85 percent of parents of children with autism didn’t believe that vaccines had been the cause. In his many interviews, Wakefield had consistently repeated the theme that “we need to listen to what the parents are telling us.” He wasn’t listening anymore.
The anti-vaccine movement, by attaching itself to Andrew Wakefield’s rising star, has now fallen with him. Colin McRoberts, a journalist who had interviewed Wakefield during the “Conspira-Sea Cruise,” summed it up best: “Here’s the big takeaway for the anti-vaccine movement. Andrew Wakefield is poisonous. He is death to your credibility. I am actually happy that anti-vaxers won’t listen to me here, because I don’t know how to cut the ethical Gordian Knot; on the one hand, I want Wakefield involved in all high-profile anti-vax efforts because he sabotages them with his very presence…. On the other hand, I also think it’s long past time for Wakefield to disappear into ignominious retirement.”
Although it might seem counterintuitive, when communicating science and health information to the public, it can be a godsend to have someone like Andrew Wakefield on the other side.