REPUBLICANS AND EVANGELICAL CHRISTIANS ARE not the only people who passionately believe in factual untruths that have unfortunate impacts on people.
Most Americans have been eating genetically modified foods since the 1990s, and nearly all our meat and chicken (and tofu and processed food) derive from GMOs. I understand why people tend to find the idea unsettling. Frankenfoods! Created by the agribusiness cartel! Identical majorities of liberals, moderates, and conservatives believe that foods containing GMOs are unsafe to eat—57 percent of all Americans.*1 But they are almost certainly mistaken.
After more than three decades and many hundreds of studies, the overwhelming scientific consensus is that GMO foods are safe to eat. The National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine commissioned a comprehensive study of the science, and in 2016 their report declared GMOs both safe to eat and environmentally benign. Of the scientists in the American Association for the Advancement of Science, 88 percent think it’s safe to eat GMO foods. This is almost exactly the same percentage of those scientists who say climate change is real and man-made, the latter a data point regularly used to demonstrate right-wing antiscience craziness.*2 In other words, people on the left occasionally choose to ignore evidence and disbelieve important science that they find upsetting.
But whipping up hysterical fears of GMOs does not pick your pocket or break your leg—although the millions of people in the Third World whose lives have been improved and saved by cultivating and eating GMO foods might beg to differ.*3 The movement that has made people afraid of vaccines, however, has unquestionably harmed Americans’ public health.
When I was little, a thousand American children died from polio every year, and thousands more were permanently paralyzed. The year I turned three, a flu epidemic killed seventy thousand people in the United States, and I spent two weeks in the hospital with unstoppable diarrhea caused by a retrovirus, and nearly died. Back then, as many as a thousand American kids died every year from diphtheria, tetanus, and whooping cough. Several hundred Americans were dying every year from measles, and the disease rendered many hundreds more deaf or, as we said then, retarded. But during the 1950s and early ’60s, vaccines appeared that prevented all those, and every kid got them. Many thousands of unnecessary deaths and cripplings were prevented. There was no antivaccine movement.
The false belief that vaccines cause autism and other terrible illnesses derives from familiar sources—a misplaced nostalgia for the past, excessive mistrust of experts, the conviction that some vicious conspiracy is behind everything bad, and the gatekeeper-free Internet.
The study that ignited the hysteria appeared in 1998, when diagnoses of autism had been increasing. A doctor studied ten children who showed autistic behavior after they were vaccinated against measles, mumps, and rubella, published his research in a medical journal, and instantly became the guiding light of a new movement.
His research could not be replicated by other doctors and scientists. Nor could the movement’s other article of faith, that a mercury-based vaccine preservative was the autism trigger, be substantiated. Indeed, major study after major study after major study ever since has found stronger and stronger evidence that vaccines do not cause autism. Not until a dozen years after publishing the original paper—after the doctor was stripped of his medical license and found to have acted “dishonestly and irresponsibly”—did The Lancet finally retract his study, calling it “utterly false.” The other major British medical journal called it an “elaborate fraud.”
In the meantime, however, none of these reality checks mattered to the Americans who believed. A year after the original study came out, they got U.S. health authorities and the American Academy of Pediatrics to recommend that the preservative be removed from vaccines, just to be safe, and manufacturers did so. See, the believers said, we must have been right—and vaccines must still be dangerous! Google, which had just launched, enabled the panic to spread. Indeed, when the actress Jenny McCarthy became a public face of the antivaccine movement in the 2000s, she went on Oprah and gave the perfect defense of her credentials: “The University of Google is where I got my degree from!”
Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., became the movement’s star, repeating his line that U.S. government scientists were “involved in a massive fraud.” His big article on the subject was eventually retracted by both magazines that published it. Part of the corrupt cover-up! Among children born since thimerosal was removed from vaccines, autism-spectrum diagnoses continued rising. Lies, disinformation and lies! Still more studies appeared concluding vaccines are safe. If not the mercury, then some other toxin! If not autism, then asthma or juvenile diabetes! Their beliefs, like religious faith, are unfalsifiable by facts.
The media did their part too. In 2002 The New York Times Magazine ran a long article called “The Not-So-Crackpot Autism Theory.” Kennedy, a liberal celebrity from a liberal celebrity dynasty, was endorsed all over TV, including in his appearance on The Daily Show. Oprah Winfrey: sure. But one doesn’t expect America’s great celebrity skeptic, the maker of a feature-film documentary mocking religion, to entertain and encourage provably false fantasies. According to Bill Maher, “Flu vaccines are bullshit”—in fact, getting vaccinated with a “flu shot is the worst thing you can do….If you have a flu shot for more than five years in a row,” he said on CNN, “there’s ten times the likelihood that you’ll get Alzheimer’s disease.” It wasn’t the vaccine against polio that reduced its U.S. incidence from thirty thousand cases the year before he was born to several dozen when he was in grade school—it was just that better sanitation came along in the late 1950s. “I’m not into Western medicine,” Maher says, and he means it—he denies the very basis of infectious disease medicine: “It’s not the invading germs….It’s not the mosquitoes, it’s the swamp that they are breeding in.” That’s what scientists thought in the early 1800s.
Millions of American parents stopped having their children vaccinated.*4 States had always granted exemptions to people such as Christian Scientists and Jehovah’s Witnesses with theological objections. During the 2000s, exemptions for the new just-because reasons mushroomed. In a decade, Ohio’s exemptions tripled, and in California the number of nonimmunized kindergartners more than doubled. The unvaccinated fractions grew disturbingly high in red states (Idaho, Arkansas), blue states (Vermont, Oregon), and purple states (Colorado, Wisconsin), in religious enclaves (Orthodox Jews in Brooklyn, Ohio Amish, Minnesota Muslims, Scientologists everywhere) and in cosmopolitan Sodoms.
The antivaccine hysteria among well-educated, affluent parents I find especially galling. A population’s “herd immunity” starts to collapse and permit infectious epidemics when as few as 6 percent forgo immunization. In dozens of New York City private schools, the rate rose to more than 30 percent. In the richest section of Los Angeles—Malibu to Santa Monica down to Marina del Rey, through Beverly Hills and Brentwood to West Hollywood—the fraction of preschoolers with Personal Belief Exemptions exceeded 9 percent, four times the rate in L.A. County at large. In plenty of West L.A. private schools, especially “progressive” ones, majorities of parents stopped vaccinating.
This natural experiment confirmed the science: diseases we had eliminated returned. If you’d nostalgically pined for a return to old-time America, you got your way. U.S. cases of whooping cough had bottomed out at around 8,000 through the early 2000s; by 2012, we were up to 48,000—the 1955 level. The outbreak in California (as in Washington State) was the worst since the 1940s—hundreds were hospitalized and ten were dead in one year. Twenty of the Americans who got whooping cough in 2012 died, most of them newborns. Measles cases increased tenfold within a few years.
Vaccine-phobia runs the ideological gamut, but lately it seems to be shifting rightward—where antiexpert and antigovernment derangement is more intense. In all, almost a third of Americans believe that “vaccinations can cause autism” and that schools shouldn’t require children to get them.*5 And the true believers keep believing, some more bonkers than ever. In a 2013 keynote address to a big convention of antivaccination activists, according to Discover magazine, Kennedy said that “this is like the Nazi death camps….I would do a lot to see Paul Offit and all these good people behind bars.” Offit is a distinguished pediatrician, professor, retrovirus vaccine inventor, and author of Do You Believe in Magic? The Sense and Nonsense of Alternative Medicine. “Is it hyperbole to say they should be in jail?” Kennedy asked his audience. No. “They should be in jail and the key should be thrown away.”
*1 2014 Pew surveys.
*2 2014 Pew surveys.
*3 Full disclosure: the insulin that keeps me and nearly all Type 1 “juvenile” diabetics alive is derived from GMO bacteria.
*4 As did parents in Britain and Ireland—it had been a British medical journal that published the original fraudulent study by a British doctor. Measles vaccination rates dropped in France, Denmark, and Italy as well. America is the Fantasyland mother country, but it extends beyond our borders.
*5 2014 Pew and Harris surveys.