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."
"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.”
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
"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."
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."
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.
Product description: “The revolution will be Twittered!” declared journalist Andrew Sullivan after protests erupted in Iran in June 2009. Yet for all the talk about the democratizing power of the Internet, regimes in Iran and China are as stable and repressive as ever. In fact, authoritarian governments are effectively using the Internet to suppress free speech, hone their surveillance techniques, disseminate cutting-edge propaganda, and pacify their populations with digital entertainment. Could the recent Western obsession with promoting democracy by digital means backfire? In this spirited book, journalist and social commentator Evgeny Morozov shows that by falling for the supposedly democratizing nature of the Internet, Western do-gooders may have missed how it also entrenches dictators, threatens dissidents, and makes it harder—not easier—to promote democracy. Buzzwords like “21st-century statecraft” sound good in PowerPoint presentations, but the reality is that “digital diplomacy” requires just as much oversight and consideration as any other kind of diplomacy. Marshaling compelling evidence, Morozov shows why we must stop thinking of the Internet and social media as inherently liberating and why ambitious and seemingly noble initiatives like the promotion of “Internet freedom” might have disastrous implications for the future of democracy as a whole.
Evgeny Morozov wrote "Think Again: The Internet
They told us it would usher in a new era of freedom, political activism, and perpetual peace. They were wrong" for the periodical, Foreign Policy, in which he said this: "The Internet Has Been a Force for Good" No. In the days when the Internet was young, our hopes were high. As with any budding love affair, we wanted to believe our newfound object of fascination could change the world. The Internet was lauded as the ultimate tool to foster tolerance, destroy nationalism, and transform the planet into one great wired global village. Writing in 1994, a group of digital aficionados led by Esther Dyson and Alvin Toffler published a manifesto modestly subtitled "A Magna Carta for the Knowledge Age" that promised the rise of "'electronic neighborhoods' bound together not by geography but by shared interests." Nicholas Negroponte, then the famed head of the MIT MediaLab, dramatically predicted in 1997 that the Internet would shatter borders between nations and usher in a new era of world peace.
From www.EvgenyMorozov.com: Evgeny Morozov is the author of The Net Delusion: The Dark Side of Internet Freedom (out in January 2011). He is a contributing editor to Foreign Policy and runs the magazine's "Net Effect" blog about the Internet's impact on global politics (neteffect.foreignpolicy.com). Morozov is currently a visiting scholar at Stanford University and a Schwartz fellow at the New America Foundation. He was formerly a Yahoo! fellow at the Institute for the Study of Diplomacy at Georgetown University and a fellow at George Soros's Open Society Institute, where he remains on the board of the Information Program. Before moving to the US, Morozov was based in Berlin and Prague, where he was Director of New Media at Transitions Online, a media development NGO active in 29 countries of the former Soviet bloc. Morozov's writings have appeared in The Economist, The Wall Street Journal, Newsweek, The Washington Post, The International Herald Tribune, Times Literary Supplement, Prospect, The Sunday Times, The Boston Globe, Slate, Le Monde, San Francisco Chronicle, Boston Review, Foreign Policy, Project Syndicate, Dissent and many other publications. He has appeared on CNN, CBS, SkyNews, CBC, Al Jazeera International, France 24, Reuters TV, NPR, BBC Radio 4 and BBC World Service. His research has been quoted in The New York Times, The Washington Post, Suddeutsche Zeitung, Wall Street Journal, CNN.com, Los Angeles Times, The Guardian, Bloomberg News, The Globe and Mail, Die Zeit, Il Sole 24 Ore, Der Standard, L'Express, AFP, Der Spiegel, Corriera della Serra, El País, Le Figaro, and many others
Evgeny Morozov wrote "How the Kremlin Harnesses the Internet" for The New York Times, in which the author said this: Hours before the judge in the latest Mikhail Khodorkovsky trial announced yet another guilty verdict last week, Russia’s most prominent political prisoner was already being attacked in cyberspace. No, Khodorkovsky’s Web site, the main source of news about the trial for many Russians, was not being censored. Rather, it had been targeted by so-called denial-of-service attacks, with most of the site’s visitors receiving a “page cannot be found” message in their browsers. Such attacks are an increasingly popular tool for punishing one’s opponents, as evidenced by the recent online campaign against American corporations like Amazon and PayPal for mistreating WikiLeaks. It’s nearly impossible to trace the perpetrators; many denial-of-service attacks go underreported, as it’s often hard to distinguish them from cases where a Web site has been overwhelmed by a huge number of hits. Although most of the sites eventually get back online, denial-of-service attacks rarely generate as much outrage as formal government attempts to filter information on the Internet. In the past, repressive regimes have relied on Internet firewalls to block dissidents from spreading forbidden ideas; China has been particularly creative, while countries like Tunisia and Saudi Arabia are never far behind. But the pro-Kremlin cyberattackers who hit Kodorkovsky’s Web site may reveal more about the future of Internet control than Beijing’s practice of adapting traditional censorship to new technology.
Evgeny Morozov also wrote "Edit This Page: Is it the end of Wikipedia?" for the Boston Review: Can you trust Wikipedia? Most of us have stopped asking and simply bookmarked it. That makes sense when you consider the alternatives: you can explore the first dozen or so Google search results, or you can go straight to the occasionally erroneous Wikipedia entry, typically culled from the very same search results. If you are looking for fast, up-to-date information, it is Wikipedia or Google (not Wikipedia or Britannica), and Wikipedia wins on speed. Wikipedia still has its critics, skeptics who doubt its merits as a reference source. But even they cannot deny the tremendous social innovation unleashed by Wikipedia-the-project. Every professional conference—on topics ranging from entrepreneurship to journalism to philanthropy—now includes the mandatory, impassioned plea for the industry to adopt The Wikipedia Model, as if it were a set of Lego pieces that could be ordered from eBay and assembled in a newsroom or on the trading floor.
Also for the Boston Review, the author, Evgeny Morozov, wrote "Texting Toward Utopia: Does the Internet spread democracy?" In part, this is what he said: In 1989 Ronald Reagan proclaimed that “The Goliath of totalitarianism will be brought down by the David of the microchip”; later, Bill Clinton compared Internet censorship to “trying to nail Jell–O to the wall”; and in 1999 George W. Bush (not John Lennon) asked us to “imagine if the Internet took hold in China. Imagine how freedom would spread.” Such starry–eyed cyber–optimism suggested a new form of technological determinism according to which the Internet would be the hammer to nail all global problems, from economic development in Africa to threats of transnational terrorism in the Middle East. Even so shrewd an operator as Rupert Murdoch yielded to the digital temptation: “Advances in the technology of telecommunications have proved an unambiguous threat to totalitarian regimes everywhere,” he claimed. Soon after, Murdoch bowed down to the Chinese authorities, who threatened his regional satellite TV business in response to this headline–grabbing statement.
In December of 2010, the author said in an interview with Current Intelligence:
Well, these are really tragic days for Ireland. After overcoming its long history of poverty to become a high-growth economy known as the ‘Celtic Tiger’, Ireland now has stumbled into a financial debacle that will take it years to escape. The villains were reckless banks that binged on cheap capital to fuel a housing and credit bubble that was larger even that what we had here in the United States, facilitated by blind or cowed regulators and politicians who were happy to pretend that the good times could last forever. Some tried to warn them they were wrong, but while the boom lasted the Cassandras were ignored. Now, the Irish people – both the guilty and innocent – face years of unavoidable sacrifice and hardship. It’s going to be a long time before anyone again looks to Ireland as an economic model, as small countries from Colombia to Croatia did during the Celtic Tiger years. But if the Irish carry out some long overdue reforms, they can look forward to a decent future once the crisis passes. I’ve had the chance to report from other countries in the midst of just terrible economic suffering – Indonesia and Russia in 1998, Turkey in 2001 – and in the dark times it’s always impossible to imagine there will be brighter days ahead. But there were for those people and there will be for the Irish.
It is true, though, that Ireland’s political class has been tried and found wanting, a theme pursued also in David Lynch’s book, “When the Luck of the Irish Ran Out”. He begins, appositely enough, with a gathering of property developers and their political cronies in the Fianna Fail tent at the Galway races. Much of the rest of his tale concerns Sean Fitzpatrick’s disastrous mortgage bank, Anglo Irish. It was the troubles of Anglo Irish that led to the extraordinary decision by Brian Cowen, the Fianna Fail prime minister, taken in the small hours of September 30th 2008, to guarantee all bank deposits in Ireland—and hence to incur a bill that has now reached almost a third of GDP.
The author was recently invoked in The Opinion Pages of The New York Times:
Now, John Boehner is blaming the Dream for making him howl like an abandoned puppy. It’s what my friend Rebecca Traister calls “Boehner doing Masterpiece Theater on the hard life of John Boehner.” Traister is the author of “Big Girls Don’t Cry,” a chronicle of the Clinton-Obama battle for the Democratic presidential nomination. One of the best-remembered moments in that campaign — Hillary Clinton cries in New Hampshire — is an excellent example of the difference between what men and women can get away with, tear-wise. “Hillary didn’t cry,” Traister pointed out. “Not a drop of liquid fell below her lower lash.” With her back to the wall and the presidency on the line, Clinton approached the edge of a sniffle and we are still talking about it. Boehner is driven to great, noisy sobs when he contemplates the fact that as a youth, he mopped the floor at his father’s tavern.
Richard McGowan was recently quoted in The New York Times feature story, "States Look for Winning Formulas to Spur Lottery Sales:" With state budgets in crisis and lottery-financed programs like prekindergarten being considered for cuts, the pressure is on to make lottery tickets more attractive to casual scratchers and people who may have never dropped a dollar on a chance before. [...] The key to success is catching a customer’s eye, said Richard McGowan, a management professor at Boston College who studies state gambling. “It’s an impulse buy when you walk into a store,” he said. “It all depends on how aggressive a lottery commissioner wants to be with advertising.”Read that full NYT story here. NPR's Fresh Air with Terry Gross recently had Richard McGowan on their show as a guest. Listen to the podcast, "States Gamble On Casinos To Generate Revenue," below.
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.
In December, 2010, The Washington Post wrote this about the author and book:
Pauline Maier, the William R. Kenan, Jr., Professor of American History at M.I.T. and one of the nation's foremost scholars of the American Revolution, explores how the process of ratification worked in each of the 13 states. In doing so, she transforms our understanding of what representative government itself means. Eschewing a traditional focus on great men and their political ideas, Maier investigates the complex route to ratification in each state. After receiving the Philadelphia Convention's proposal for a new Constitution, the Confederation Congress, in accordance with procedures described in the document itself, recommended that the people (meaning white, male property holders) in each of the 13 states hold elections for delegates to state ratifying conventions. (Always contrarian, Rhode Island held a referendum instead.) Again according to the document itself, it would take ratification by nine states for the Constitution to go into effect. Representatives ran on a platform of support for or opposition to the document. What was at stake was nothing less than this question: Did ordinary people believe that an entirely new system of government, never tried before in history, was the best means of ensuring the country's future - or was it a too-risky experiment that they dared not accept?
Read that WP article here. In 2004, the author was a guest on NPR's All Things Considered. See the webpage for that radio show here. The podcast is embedded below.
Despite concerns about the stability of the progress, the Obama Administration’s report assessing the war in Afghanistan says that the U.S. is on pace for troops to begin pulling out in June. NPR’s national security correspondent Rachel Martin digs in to the report. Plus: Former NY Senator James L. Buckley on his new book Freedom is at Risk; and Follow Up Friday looks negotiating with terrorists and mandatory gun ownership.
Texas congressman Ron Paul has long been a fierce critic of the Federal Reserve. In fact, last year he published a book called End the Fed, calling for an end to the central bank and a return to the gold standard. Now, Paul has been appointed head of the House subcommittee on domestic monetary policy, which, among other things, oversees the Federal Reserve. So, does Paul see this as his chance to try to end the Fed? "In a partial sense, but not directly," he tells NPR's Guy Raz. "What I'm really asking for is competition, to get rid of the monopoly power of the Fed, because they don't have legitimate power to do what they do."
All week long we have been talking about the idea of "home," and the physical attributes and emotional attachments we have to our homes. We end our series by talking with artist and writer Maira Kalman. She is the author of “And the Pursuit of Happiness,” a compilation of her year-long journey for our partner, The New York Times, to explore her adopted home, America. Kalman was not born in the United States, but she traveled the country to fall back in love.
If children’s picture books are on the wane, all the more reason to hail the advent of a new picture book for grown-ups. Kalman, the creator of a dozen books for children, and whose previous adult works include “The Principles of Uncertainty” and the unaccountably ingenious illustrated edition of “The Elements of Style,” now brings us AND THE PURSUIT OF HAPPINESS (Penguin Press, $29.95), an investigation of the historical underpinnings and current workings of democracy in America. Sort of. Really, it’s more like an impromptu interpretive dance about our country, executed in fat, frolicky color, unprissy brushstroke, a smattering of pleasantly pedestrian photographs and perfectly rambunctious penmanship. Oh, Maira. May we call you Maira? You are like the imaginary childhood friend we never had. Never mind, we have you now, and in these pages you give us your giant, wistful heart; your unfettered, inquisitive prose; and your loving renderings of hats, noses, despondency, public restrooms, a numbered Civil War grave, a Brooklyn sewage plant, Thomas Edison in a cream-colored suit, napping on the grass, and various fried eggs. Wait — this is democracy? In Kalman’s eclectic, catholic, ecstatically skewed view, yes. All this and more.
October 28, 2010 - Maira Kalman Views: 26,541 Aired: 10/28/10 Episode 06137 The McRib returns on election day, and Maira Kalman falls in love with Abraham Lincoln.
William Upski Wimsatt, hip hop and graffiti writer, founder of the League of Young Voters and the author of Please Don't Bomb the Suburbs: A Midterm Report on My Generation and the Future of Our Super Movement, talks about the state of (no longer so) young radical Americans.
"This is Not Florida: How Al Franken Won the Minnesota Recount" by Jay Weiner (University of Minnesota Press, $24.95). A blow-by-blow account of the eight-month recount in Minnesota that ultimately led to Al Franken's election to the U.S. Senate. Kevin J. Hamilton, a Seattle lawyer who reviews books for The Seattle Times, was a key member of Franken's legal team and is prominently featured in the book.
He's been Sherlock Holmes, Charlie Chaplin and Iron Man. So it shouldn't be too much of a stretch for Robert Downey Jr. to play a gun-toting, lock-picking, plane-flying, government-defying survivor. Columbia Pictures announced Wednesday it had optioned the rights to Neil Strauss' non-fiction 2009 bestseller "Emergency! This Book Will Save Your Life." The book is to be developed into a feature produced by Team Downey — that's Downey Jr. and his wife, Susan Downey — and Michael DeLuca. The project is being considered as a vehicle for Downey. Allan Loeb ("Wall Street: Money Never Sleeps") is writing the screenplay.
Why is the United States the only advanced capitalist country with no labor party? This question is one of the great enduring puzzles of American political development, and it lies at the heart of a fundamental debate about the nature of American society. Tackling this debate head-on, Robin Archer puts forward a new explanation for why there is no American labor party--an explanation that suggests that much of the conventional wisdom about "American exceptionalism" is untenable. "In an intriguing and elegant exposition of comparative history, Archer uses the labour politics of the 1890s in both countries to illustrate the similarities and the differences between the two societies . . . the innovative quality of Archer's approach, together with the clarity of its exposition, will unsettle established opinions and rejuvenate what has been a venerable debate into an altogether fresher controversy."--Michael Foley, Times Higher Education
CHARLIE ROSE: Stephen Kinzer is here. He is the former "New York
Times" foreign correspondent and the author of several books including
"Overthrow" and "Crescent and Star." His new book makes the case that the
United States should build a new relationship with Turkey and Iran. It is
called "Reset -- Iran, Turkey, and America’s Future."
I am pleased to have him here back at this table. Welcome.
STEPHEN KINZER: Great to be with you.
CHARLIE ROSE: Talk to me about Turkey.
STEPHEN KINZER: I think the key to Turkey’s success as a nation has
been that in its 85 years of existence, it has managed to change with the
times. Turkey was founded as an authoritarian country at the time when the
idea of dictatorship was very prominent.
After World War II, the world didn’t like dictatorship anymore. We
wanted democracy. Turkey was a one-party state that voluntarily
transformed itself into a multi-party state with an election. And then the
party that had been in power since the founding of the republic lost and
they left power freely.
[2010-06-17 12:00:00] How will China dominate the world's markets and governments in the next hundred years and what does it mean for U.S.-China relations? We'll talk this hour with Stefan Halper, Senior Fellow at the Cambridge Centre of International Studies and author of the new book "The Beijing Consensus: How China's Authoritarian Model Will Dominate the Twenty-First Century" (Basic Books, 2010).
,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.
, wrote “An Epidemic of Ignorance” for the Wall Street Journal. Seth Mnookin's "The Panic Virus
, 
, 
, 
. According to ABC News, Paul recently said, "Now that doesn't mean that the first week in January I send over a subpoena for (Fed Chairman Ben) Bernanke and demand that he come over with a pile of papers, I don't think that would be logical." 
, 
, 
, 
, 
, 
, 
, 
, 
, 
, 