Vaccines and Politicized Science : Daniel Henninger
http://www.wsj.com/articles/dan-henninger-vaccines-and-politicized-science-1423700743?mod=hp_opinion
Jenny McCarthy knows the credibility of science is a house of cards.
An important question that emerges from the rise of the vaccine doubter movement is by what process of persuasion did so many people come to believe what they do about vaccination? They believe the risks of vaccination are much greater than the risk of the diseases it is supposed to prevent.
Life without serious disease for the majority is now taken for granted as the natural order. The young don’t sign up for health insurance because they don’t need it.
Forgotten over time is the extraordinary human effort and intelligence that produced the good life today. The young women turning against vaccination, a decision that potentially imperils the lives of others in their communities, have mothers or grandmothers with personal experience of the last great pre-vaccine disease, which was polio.
During the great polio epidemic of the 1950s, most people knew a classmate or relative who caught this infectious disease, which invaded the spinal column and often made them a paralytic for life. Others, then in grade school, simply died.
So when Jonas Salk and Albert Sabin developed their vaccines against polio, everyone stood in long lines to take them. Everyone knew from experience there was no “cure” for polio. Today, with life so good, many young parents believe that if their child gets a bad disease, the doctors will be able to “do something” for them.
Put differently, how has it come to pass that so many decently educated parents (assuming high-school biology still mentions the immune system) believe that the medical community urging them to vaccinate their children against measles, mumps, rubella or whooping cough is lying to them, but that a third-tier celebrity named Jenny McCarthy is giving them the facts when she says on an afternoon TV show that vaccinations can cause autism in their children?
It’s easy to dismiss Jenny McCarthy as an airhead, but maybe her airhead knows something the doctors don’t know. Jenny McCarthy knows that if she can plug her celebrity into the electronic torrent known as standard media and social media, her opinions will be hard to stop. We know this is true, because two men who want to be president of the United States, Gov. Chris Christie and Sen. Rand Paul , thought Jenny’s misinformed minions were large enough in number to warrant their obeisances.
The importance of the vaccination mess is twofold.
The first is that progress in public health, especially against infectious diseases that cause mass mortality, is really, really hard. Acquiring the knowledge needed to fight bacteria and viruses is a slog. Changing habits of behavior to accept new knowledge is difficult. Losing these gains can be catastrophic.
The second problem, which can crush such remarkable achievements, is the eroding credibility and authority of science. If too many people think even scientists are lying to them, humanity is headed toward the lemmings’ famous cliff.
Partisanship alert: If you believe with all your being in the indisputable truth of climate-change science, turn to the sports page now, because I’d hate to see anyone ripping up The Wall Street Journal in rage or smashing an LCD screen.
For the purposes of the argument here, what anyone thinks about climate change isn’t the issue. There was a point in this combustible debate, though, when I began to think that science and the people who do the work of science beyond climate were allowing the credibility of their profession to be put at risk with the broader population.
That turning point was when the cause changed its name from global warming to climate change. When the warming-only argument became scientifically difficult and the subject became the irrefutable “climate change,” it was clear that politics, not science, was running the show.
The people doing basic science should learn a well-proven truth about basic politics: Any cause taken up by politicians today by definition will be doubted or opposed by nearly half the population. When an Al Gore, John Kerry or Europe’s Green parties become spokesmen for your ideas, and are willing to accuse fellow scientists of bad faith or willful ignorance, then science has made a Faustian bargain. The price paid, inevitably, will be the institutional credibility of all scientists.
Many scientists believe their authority is already on thin ice. An issue raging now through biomedical research, arguably our most important scientific enterprise, is whether the system that ensures the reproducibility of research experiments is failing. That’s right, the foundation of science itself. The reason for the rise of irreproducible science is that showy results produce grants, tenure and, ironically, public belief in “breakthroughs” that in fact are merely conjecture or hypothesis.
As with Jenny McCarthy, the word for what too much of science purports now is half-baked.
The rise of the vaccine doubters proves that, in the Internet age, all authority can be turned overnight into a house of cards. Scientists ought to get back to the business of taming fire, not playing with it.
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