Vaccine antiscience returns to the spotlight in Trump era
DOI: 10.1063/PT.5.8206
Anti-vaccine advocate Robert F. Kennedy Jr, seen here giving a speech in 2007, seems to have the president’s ear.
Daniel Schwen, CC BY-SA 4.0
Once when Thomas Jefferson was president of the leading US scientific society—and of the US itself—he praised Edward Jenner’s “discovery of the vaccine inoculation.” Since then, has constructive science-mindedness in politicians risen or declined? At the presidential level two centuries later, vaccine antiscience has erupted.
Most journalists are grounding their reporting of the eruption in settled science, with no artificial reaching for balance where balance would be false. They have lots to report. On 10 January, ardent “anti-vaxxer” Robert F. Kennedy Jr, heir to a famous political name, met with President-elect Donald Trump, then announced he’d been asked to chair a “vaccine safety and scientific integrity” commission.
Widespread worry
Despite indications that Kennedy might have overstated things, the news reenergized alarms that had sounded during the election campaign. A Scientific American headline warned, “Proposed presidential autism-vaccine panel could help spread disease: Committee mentioned in a Trump meeting last week could scare people away from protective immunizations, scientists say.” At Business Insider , it was “Trump has suggested vaccines cause autism—an idea that couldn’t be more wrong.” At the Washington Post : “The United States already has a vaccine safety commission. And it works really well, experts say.”
Last August, physicist and science popularizer Lawrence Krauss observed in the New Yorker that just as Trump “was a persistent ‘birther’ even after the evidence convincingly showed that President Obama was born in the United States,” he now continued “to propagate the notion that vaccines cause autism in spite of convincing and widely cited evidence to the contrary.” A few weeks later, the Daily Beast reported that in 2010 Trump had donated $10 000 to an anti-vax organization. In November, Science magazine reported that for 45 minutes in August, candidate Trump had spoken with prominent anti-vaxxers including discredited British physician Andrew Wakefield. Nearly two decades ago, Wakefield, now barred from practicing medicine, began falsely promoting a link between autism and the measles-mumps-rubella vaccine. Science reported that candidate Trump had promised to watch Wakefield’s discredited conspiracy-accusation film Vaxxed and noted that Trump had expressed anti-vax sympathy in interviews, tweets, and presidential debates.
Science also cited a 2004 US Institute of Medicine report concluding that there is no autism–vaccine link and calling for the vaccine schedule for children to be left alone. At the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention website, and elsewhere , additional materials authoritatively debunk vaccine objections.
This month the brouhaha has expanded. Kennedy reportedly claims to have been contacted three more times by the Trump administration. The Washington Post said that some 350 organizations, led by the American Academy of Pediatrics, affirmed vaccine safety in a letter to the new president. New York magazine noted that in a White House meeting, the president once again expressed “false beliefs about autism rates,” calling to mind not only his own past factual errors about vaccination safety but anti-vaxxers’ errors too.
Vox posted the headline “I was skeptical that the anti-vaccine movement was gaining traction. Not anymore.” The subhead portrayed presidential framing: “Trump has energized the vaccine skeptics, and that’s dangerous.” The article reported that organizers of a hoped-for 31 March demonstration in Washington, calling themselves “Revolution for Truth,” condemn what they see as “corporatized mainstream media” bias and “demonization” of anti-vaxxers. They want legal accountability for drug companies “when government mandated vaccines injure or kill.”
Under the headline “Robert De Niro and RFK Jr. have joined forces to push vaccine nonsense,” Vox also reported on a press conference with a panel that the Washington Post called “fiery.” Vox called the event a “showcase” of “thoroughly discredited claims about vaccines, from the notion that they cause autism, to the suggestion that vaccines are a huge source of mercury that’s making kids sick.” Kennedy reportedly accused the government and the media of collusion to withhold the truth about vaccine safety and what Kennedy called “the autism epidemic.”
Siding with science
Two years ago, when a measles outbreak associated with Disneyland stirred vaccine passions, condemnation of vaccine ignorance and irresponsibility pervaded the media coverage . It’s the same this time. In Boston at WGBH, anti-vax sympathy can even get you fired from a science-reporting job.
Boston? Liberal town in a bright-blue state? There’s also Republican-favoring conservative Charles Krauthammer. In a Washington Post column republished by conservative National Review and others, Krauthammer called Trump’s visit with Kennedy “immensely harmful” and the entire incident “an exclamation point on the scatterbrained randomness of the Trump transition.”
Other commentators have written similarly. USA Today published a piece headlined “Trump’s fake science could be lethal.” The subhead mocked, “‘Alternative science’ is way more serious than ‘alternative facts’ about crowd size.” Ardent, adamant opinion essays also appeared at Forbes.com by Geoffrey Kabat of the Albert Einstein College of Medicine, at both the Chicago Tribune and Foreign Policy by the Pulitzer-holding Laurie Garrett of the Council on Foreign Relations, and at the Washington Post by Saad B. Omer, professor of global health, epidemiology, and pediatrics at Emory University.
Especially widely noted has been the recent New York Times op-ed of Peter J. Hotez, whose extensive resumé includes serving as founding dean of the National School of Tropical Medicine at the Baylor College of Medicine, president of the Sabin Vaccine Institute, and director of the Texas Children’s Hospital Center for Vaccine Development.
In his October 2016 PLOS Medicine article “Texas and its measles epidemics,” Hotez had warned that the “latest numbers from Texas indicate a serious downward trend in vaccine coverage to the point where there is a high risk that measles outbreaks will return.” He cited state government statistics: “There are now almost 45,000 children with nonmedical or ‘reasons of conscience’ exemptions to school immunization laws, almost double the number of exemptions in 2010 and a 19-fold increase compared to 2003.”
His Times op-ed predicted that an anti-vaxxer “ascendancy” will descend on the country, starting with outbreaks of highly transmissible measles, “one of the most contagious and most lethal of all human diseases.” The piece cited an American Academy of Pediatrics public document presenting studies that disprove the autism-link nonsense. Not enough kids, Hotez warned, are getting the recommended vaccines. Part of his worry is Wakefield’s film. Hotez summed up:
As a scientist leading global efforts to develop vaccines for neglected poverty-related diseases like schistosomiasis and Chagas’ disease, and as the dad of an adult daughter with autism and other disabilities, I’m worried that our nation’s health will soon be threatened because we have not stood up to the pseudoscience and fake conspiracy claims of this movement.
The public seems mostly to side with science too. The Washington Post flagged on its front page an interior-page article about a recent Pew survey that Pew summarized this way: “Vast majority of Americans say benefits of childhood vaccines outweigh risks: Parents of young children support measles, mumps and rubella vaccine requirements but rate the risks higher, the benefits lower. There are not major partisan divisions on these issues, though.” Pew notes that “Americans who are high in science knowledge, based on a nine-item index of factual questions covering a range of topics, overwhelmingly rate the risk of side effects from the vaccine as low (79%). By contrast, US adults with low science knowledge are closely divided on whether the risk of side effects is low (50%) or is medium or higher (47%).”
Quartz too found the partisan-divisions question important. Its Pew-survey article stipulated, “Most Americans on both sides of the political aisle are in favor of school-mandated vaccines.” For a report on another survey that also showed the public generally siding with science, Huffington Post editors chose this headline : “Americans aren’t with Donald Trump on vaccines: Public health experts and the general public think the president-elect is wrong that shots are unsafe.”
Business Insider reported on two Republican US senators who oppose vaccine antiscience. But at FiveThirtyEight a headline asked, “Will Trump make vaccines another partisan issue?” The article cited a survey showing “wide, bipartisan support” for vaccines, yet also warned: “But we live in polarized times, and there have been a few issues recently that—once ushered into the political limelight—have lost bipartisan support.” Omer in his Washington Post commentary predicted, “There’s a real risk that Trump—who has expressed doubt about the safety of immunizations in the past—could politicize vaccines, undermining trust in one of the great public health interventions in human history.” Hotez in the New York Times lamented, “Sadly, the Texas anti-vaxxer movement has become conflated with fringe political elements to create a dangerous and toxic mix of pseudoscience and conspiracy theories.”
What’s to be done?
At Time, Meghan Bridgid Moran of the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health wrote :
To understand how concerned parents could be persuaded not to vaccinate their children, a team of researchers at San Diego State University and I conducted a deep dive into 480 anti-vaccine websites to analyze their tactics and assess their methods. The picture that emerged from these sites … is at once bracing and informative: Anti-vaccine websites leverage an arsenal of powerful and persuasive tactics to manipulate people into believing vaccines are dangerous.
The researchers found that the sites connect with people in terms of personal freedom and autonomy—and that they “play fast and loose with the facts (that is, if facts are even employed).” Nearly four out of five such sites express mistrust of government, and more than two in five express distrust of medical people. Many see conspiracies.
“We need to find a balance between a cold presentation of science and an overheated rebuttal to the angry voices,” Moran wrote. Some of her colleagues, she explained, “are in the early stages of doing just this, through a program that presents tailored vaccine education materials to parents and trains physicians in effective vaccine communication. Though science has long been on our side, communicating scientific truths is our next frontier.”
On that frontier, but unmentioned by Moran, a February 2014 study in the journal Pediatrics called to mind, whether or not inadvertently, a frequent finding about climate-science communication. It observed, “Current public health communications about vaccines may not be effective. For some parents, they may actually increase misperceptions or reduce vaccination intention. Attempts to increase concerns about communicable diseases or correct false claims about vaccines may be especially likely to be counterproductive.” The paper concluded, “More study of pro-vaccine messaging is needed.”
More study has taken place. That same journal’s September 2016 issue includes what the publisher, the American Academy of Pediatrics, calls a clinical report , “Countering vaccine hesitancy.” It prescribes thoughtful, in some ways gentle, but at the same time firm measures for constructive science-grounded pushback against vaccine antiscience.
Days after the Trump–Kennedy visit on 10 January, Nature published an editorial showing no interest in sugarcoating scientific reality. The headline was blunt: “Trump’s vaccine-commission idea is biased and dangerous: Scientists must fight back with the truth about the debunked link between vaccines and autism.” The editors warned that if the new president proceeds with this vaccine commission, he’ll confer legitimacy on anti-vaxxers. The editorial’s ending paragraph asserted a prescription for action:
Scientists, medics and commentators who have fought vaccine disinformation in the past must take a deep breath and return to the fray. There is no need to wait for this commission to be announced officially. There is no need to wait until it issues its findings. There is no cause to be surprised if it shows little regard for science—or even if it targets scientists who speak out in favour of vaccination. Those who claim a link between vaccines and autism can do so only by discrediting the scientific evidence and, often, the scientists who gathered it. Kennedy’s reference to investigating vaccine safety “and scientific integrity” provides ample warning of what is to come. Scientists should get their retaliation in first. Lives are at stake.
Steven T. Corneliussen is Physics Today‘s media analyst. He has published op-eds in the Washington Post and other newspapers, has written for NASA’s history program, and was a science writer at a particle-accelerator laboratory.