The Anti-Vaccine Movement from WNYC's Leonard Lopate Show by listenerservices@wnyc.org (WNYC, New York Public Radio)

Dr. Paul A. Offit, Chief of the Division of Infectious Diseases and Director of the Vaccine Education Center at the Children's Hospital of Philadelphia and a founding advisory board member of the Autism Science Foundation, discusses the debate over vaccines and why the link between autism and vaccines has been discredited. His book Deadly Choices: How the Anti-Vaccine Movement Threatens Us All explains the origins of the anti-vaccine movement and how it has affected public health. Listen to the podcast.

A True Story of Medicine, Science, and Fear from KERA's Think Podcast

[2011-01-11 12:00:00] Just how powerful is fear as a motivator in our modern society? We'll examine the impact of the now completely repudiated late 1990s vaccine and autism scare this hour with Vanity Fair contributing editor Seth Mnookin, whose new book is "The Panic Virus: A True Story of Medicine, Science, and Fear" (Simon & Schuster, 2011). Listen to the podcast.

Seth Mnookin: The Panic Virus: A True Story of Medicine, Science, and Fear

The MMR vaccine controversy refers to claims that autism spectrum disorders are a direct result to having the MMR vaccine administered. MMR is an immunization against measles, mumps and rubella. Claims of a connection between the vaccine and autism surfaced in a 1998 paper, The Lancet, a respected British medical journal. Investigation by Sunday Times journalist Brian Deer discovered that the lead author of the article, Andrew Wakefield, had multiple undeclared conflicts of interest, had manipulated evidence, and had broken other ethical guidelines and codes. The Lancet retracted the, and Wakefield was found guilty by the General Medical Council of serious professional misconduct in May 2010, and was struck off the Medical Register—meaning he could no longer practice as a doctor in the United Kingdom. In 2011, media circulated the news that the BMJ had declared the research about the MMR link to autism “fraudulent.”

"This type of cognitive relativism — or "truthiness," as fictional talk show host Stephen Colbert termed it — has become the defining intellectual trend of our time."

- Seth Mnookin, The Panic Virus: A True Story of Medicine, Science, and Fear

"It gives credence to the belief that we can intuit our way through all of the various decisions we need to make in our lives and it validates the notion that our feelings are a more reliable barometer of reality than the facts."

- Seth Mnookin; April 2010, Larry King Live

"Looking at the diseases mumps, measles and rubella in a country like the US... it doesn't tend to be a problem. Children will do fine with these diseases in a developed country that has good nutrition. And because I live in a country where the norm is vaccine, I can delay my vaccines."

- Mother of a grade-schooler that was infected while on vacation in Europe

“By 2005 … a preoccupation with vaccine safety and an opposition to traditional institutions were viewed by an ever-growing number of ‘autism advocates’ as prerequisites for membership in their community.”

- Seth Mnookin, The Panic Virus: A True Story of Medicine, Science, and Fear

In January 2011, David M. Shribman wrote “Anatomy of a panic” for the Boston Globe. In the past decade Seth Mnookin has become a chronicler of some of the icons of American popular culture. He wrote a popular book, Feeding the Monster,on the ascent of the Red Sox, and a controversial book, Hard News, on the scandals of The New York Times. Now he is taking on another modern phenomenon, the movement against vaccinations. "The Panic Virus"is sure to attract attention — and the virulent criticism of one of contemporary life’s most ardent insurgencies, those who believe inoculations possess the power to injure. Specifically the Seth Mnookin book focuses on the scare triggered by a flawed 1998 scientific paper suggesting that the measles-mumps-rubella vaccine could cause autism. […] In his book, Seth Mnookin traces the spread of the panic and the role of the media in it. A new parent himself, Mnookin admits a certain fear of vaccines — but an even greater fear that his child might encounter someone with measles or whooping cough before he gets all his shots. He understands the panic and passion of parents with sick children — but fears that waves of “self-righteous hysteria’’ have the power of overcoming “critical thinking.’’ […] The Seth Mnookin book is an unsparing brief against the vaccine skeptics. But in a larger sense, this volume is less about the insurrection against inoculations than it is about the democratization of information. It is less about the movement to battle the medical establishment than it is about the ability of social networks to mobilize for what Seth Mnookin and most mainstream scientists and doctors believe is a bad cause.

"That MMR paper is the best example there has ever been of a very, very dodgy paper that has created a lot of discomfort and misery."

- Dr Richard Smith, editor of the British Medical Journal, speaking about Dr. Andrew Wakefield's MMR-autism research

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"Anxiety about the individual's fate in industrialized societies [plays a role in motivating anti-vaccination crusaders]. Then, as now, they appealed to knee-jerk populism by conjuring up an imaginary elite with an insatiable hunger for control. [...] Then, as now, they preached the superiority of subjective beliefs over objective proofs, of knowledge acquired by personal experience rather than through scientific rigor."

- Seth Mnookin, The Panic Virus: A True Story of Medicine, Science, and Fear

January 2011: Dr. Michael Shermer, publisher of the Skeptic Magazine and author of the forthcoming book, The Believing Brain: From Ghosts and Gods to Politics and Conspiracies---How We Construct Beliefs and Reinforce Them as Truths, wrote “An Epidemic of Ignorance” for the Wall Street Journal. Seth Mnookin's "The Panic Virus" is a lesson on how fear hijacks reason and emotion trumps logic. But the story starts with a bit of bad science. On Feb. 26, 1998, the prestigious British medical journal The Lancet published a paper by a medical researcher named Andrew Wakefield who claimed that he had found a causal link between autism and the MMR (measles, mumps, rubella) vaccine. Even though the journal's editors made it clear that further research was needed, at a press conference Dr. Wakefield announced: "With the debate over MMR that has started, I cannot support the continued use of the three vaccines given together." […] In a brilliant piece of reportage and science writing, Seth Mnookin explains precisely how medical researchers set about determining whether there is a causal connection in an apparent pattern. "Broadly speaking, there are three ways scientists collect data to test new theories," he explains. "The best possible method is through a randomized clinical trial, in which researchers take a sampling of a population and arbitrarily test their hypothesis on one half while leaving the other half untouched."

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From the website of the James Randi Educational Foundation, dated April 1, 2009: Jenny McCarthy is well known as a model and actor, but in recent days she's getting far more publicity for her stance that vaccines cause autism. She has a son who may be autistic, and of course we are sympathetic to her plight. But that can only go so far when Ms. McCarthy appears on endless chat shows, is interviewed in magazine articles, and even writes books encouraging people not to vaccinate their children. Numerous, well-done studies have shown conclusively that there is no causal link between vaccines and the onset of autistic spectrum disorders (ASD) - the claim that they are connected is spurious, based on anecdotes and the fact that vaccines are given to children around the same time that ASD symptoms begin to appear. The antivaccination movement has been directly linked with outbreaks of various vaccine-preventable diseases such as measles, and there have been numerous illnesses and even deaths associated with these outbreaks. The facts are in, and have been for quite some time: vaccines are an overwhelming modern medical success story, having eradicated such scourges as smallpox, and hugely lowering rates of other diseases such as measles, mumps, rubella, polio, influenza, and diptheria. The evidence is also overwhelmingly against any link between vaccines and autism as well. Yet all that evidence has been overturned in the public's mind with ease and alacrity by Ms. McCarthy, so she wins the Pigasus award for her contribution to the country's ill-health.

Wendell Potter: Deadly Spin: An Insurance Company Insider Speaks Out on How Corporate PR Is Killing Health Care and Deceiving Americans

In "Killing health care and deceiving Americans," Linda Greene at the Bloomington Alternative, a progressive media outlet, recently wrote: “About 45,000 people die in America every year because they have no health insurance. I am partly responsible for some of the deaths making up that shameful statistic.” Those two sentences open a book by Wendell Potter called Deadly Spin: An Insurance Company Insider speaks Out on How Corporate PR Is Killing Health Care and Deceiving Americans. Part expose and part memoir of the author’s experience in the health care industry, the book’s as dramatic and suspenseful as a good novel.

PRI's The World: Global Health Podcast: The Challenge of Global Health from PRI's The World: Global Health Podcast [Originally posted March 16, 2008]

Anchor Lisa Mullins speaks with Laurie Garrett, Senior Fellow for Global Health at the Council on Foreign Relations, about funding strategies for helping the world's sick and poor. Her article, "The Challenge of Global Health," appears in the upcoming issue of Foreign Affairs. It challenges the notion of putting money toward specific diseases.

That article can be found here. Download the podcast here. Recently, the author was quoted as hypothesizing that cholera was actually imported to Haiti, a place that is absolutely ravaged by the disease currently. Human Events, a conservative website, said this:

Earlier this month, Laurie Garrett, senior fellow for global health at the Council on Foreign Relations, told The Washington Post that cholera was clearly imported to Haiti, but couldn’t pinpoint the exact source. “It has to be either peacekeepers or humanitarian relief workers, that’s the bottom line,” she told the Post.

You can find that Human Events article here. See also: The Coming Plague: Newly Emerging Diseases in a World Out of Balance, Charlie Rose with Laurie Garrett; David Denby, Peter Travers & Janet Maslin; Susan Eisenhower (June 9, 1995), Great Minds of Medicine:Cancer [VHS]

Thomas Goetz - The Decision Tree from IT Conversations - Tech Nation Podcast

Dr. Moira Gunn and David Ewing Duncan talk personalized medicine with Wired magazine Executive Editor, Thomas Goetz.

Download the podcast here. See also: The Healing of America: A Global Quest for Better, Cheaper, and Fairer Health Care, Landmark: The Inside Story of America's New Health Care Law and What It Means for Us All (Publicaffairs Reports), Who Killed Health Care?: America's $2 Trillion Medical Problem - and the Consumer-Driven Cure

New England Journal of Medicine Review of "Just Health: Meeting Health Needs Fairly" by Samuel Y. Sessions, M.D., J.D.

Many important issues of health policy, such as whether government should provide universal health insurance, raise fundamental questions about the proper scope of government and the fair allocation of resources in society. Norman Daniels’s new book, Just Health, presents a carefully reasoned approach to answering such questions. The book is by design a successor to an earlier work, Just Health Care (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1985), in which, as the title indicates, Daniels focused on equity in the provision of health care. In the more than two decades since the earlier work’s publication, extensive research has shown that although health care is important, health status depends heavily on factors such as education, the environment, behavior, and socioeconomic status. One of Daniels’s principal goals in Just Health is to integrate these insights into his analysis. The result is a much more comprehensive study of the role that health should play in social policy, broadly defined to include even the economic and political structures of society.

Read the full New England Journal of Medicine book review, here. The author serves as the inspirational and philosophical footing for this particularly well established healthcare blog, which says:

CRUD’s guiding philosophy is rooted in Norman Daniels’ call for greater transparency in health policy making processes. In a BMJ article, Daniels writes that “[a] fair process requires publicity about the reasons and rationales that play a part in decisions. There must be no secret where justice is involved, for people should not be expected to accept decisions that affect their well being unless they are aware of the grounds for those decisions.”

See that blog entry, here. See also: Public Health: What It Is and How It Works, Introduction to Public Health, Third Edition, Betrayal of Trust: The Collapse of Global Public Health, A History of Public Health