Measles Is Spreading. Blame Doubtiness.
(The measles vaccine. Getty Images)
The most surprising thing to go viral so far this year isn’t a video of a precocious pet, a politician’s telling gaffe, or an unlikely Super Bowl star. It’s the measles.
As of Monday, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) had confirmed 102 cases in 14 states. While it isn’t spreading as fast as a left-shark GIF, this actual infection has been moving at an alarming rate for a disease that was essentially wiped out in the United States 15 years ago.
Not surprisingly, the scientific and medical community has gotten increasingly vocal about this. State and city health officials from New York to Berkeley have issued public appeals for vaccinations. And this past weekend, the head of the CDC took to the Sunday news shows to encourage parents to get their kids vaccinated against the virus. “You should get your kids vaccinated,” advised the president of the United States.
Sounds straightforward. But unfortunately –– and paradoxically, given the number of avenues we have for disseminating information in 2015 –– it’s become distressingly difficult to spread the word about the best counsel that modern science has to offer.
That’s because, as you probably know, the startling comeback of measles in the U.S. is attributed to a growing number of people who actively reject the official medical point of view. Indeed, they believe that it is the vaccines themselves that represent the real health threat.
This isn’t just some silly conspiracy theory or an argument grounded in the partisan, gut-level “truthiness” that Stephen Colbert identified a decade ago. Those are familiar side effects of our so-called Information Age and the most sophisticated communication apparatus the world has ever known. Everybody knows that the “democratized” media can spread dubious ideas at least as easily as wise ones.
But the antivaccination meme is remarkable in part because many who embrace it are evidently well educated, well off, presumably sophisticated people with access to all of the wisdom and knowledge of the Internet. And yet their position seems to have less to do with any well-articulated theory than with a raw mistrust and rejection of authority. It is based, in other words, on gut-level skepticism.
It’s not truthiness. It’s something even harder to counter — doubtiness.
Weird (attitudes toward) science
Just the other day, the Pew Research Center released a report gauging American attitudes toward modern science. On one level, the results were fairly upbeat. According to Pew, 79 percent of American adults take apositive view of “science’s impact on the quality of health care, food and the environment.”
But a different picture emerged when those surveyed were asked about scientists’ actual conclusions about the world we live in. Pew found that 88 percent of scientists, for instance, believe that genetically modified foods are safe; among the wider public, the figure was 37 percent. The difference was almost as stark on the subject of humans’ effect on climate change.
And childhood vaccines? Some 86 percent of scientists believe they “should be required.” Only 68 percent of the public feels this way.
Opinion Differences Between Public and Scientists: Pew Research Center.
Of course, a certain degree of skepticism is healthy: Scientists do get things wrong occasionally. But ultimately the scientific method has a pretty good track record of acknowledging and correcting those wrongs over time, should contradictory evidence emerge.
An interesting example, in fact, is the 1998 study that claimed to find a link between measles/mumps/rubella vaccinations and autism. Published in the journal The Lancet, the study remains a core concern of antivaccinators to this day.
Thing is, that research was rather swiftly contradicted and debunked. The Lancet retracted its article; its author lost his medical license.
None of this is obscure information — it’s been repeated in endless media reports, not to mention a popular 2011 book that cast a critical eye on the antivaccine phenomenon and its discredited origins, called The Panic Virus: A True Story of Medicine, Science, and Fear. And yet, more than 15 years on, a vague distrust of vaccination seems to be more widespread than ever. Hence the present measles outbreak and hence the head of the CDC popping up on network news to make the case for science.
“We’ve had over 1 billion vaccines given,” he told ABC, “and study after study has shown that there are no negative long-term consequences.”
But of course, an authority figure making pronouncements on network television doesn’t necessarily mean so much these days. So doubts persist. Because apparently in the level playing field of new media, there’s no expert advice that can’t be shrugged off by individual opinion.
“Personal belief”
Most examinations of resistance to official pleas for vaccination cite the role of Jenny McCarthy. McCarthy is best known as a TV host and former Playboy model. One might infer that if she is this movement’s most prominent figure, then the movement must consist of ill-informed people who get their “news” from lowbrow talk shows and celebrity gossip sites.
That is all, at best, misleading. By most accounts, a crucial faction in the doubtiness movement is made up of “wealthy and well-educated families, many living in palmy enclaves around Los Angeles and San Francisco,” as one report put it, pursuing some form of “natural” lifestyle.
“It’s because these people are highly educated and they get on the Internet and read things and think they can figure things out better than their physician,” a professor of clinical pediatrics at UC San Diego School of Medicine observed in a separate report. “That’s a universal phenomenon around the country.”
Shouldn’t such people be responsive to logical persuasion? Well, in the face of a growing backlash against their doubtiness (or “vaccine lunacy,” as Frank Bruni called it in a recent column), they appear to be doubling down on their doubt. The complaints are just “hype,” they claim, aimed at “covering up vaccine failures.”
Tellingly, those who get their kids exempted from school vaccination requirements exercise what’s often referred to as a “personal belief” exemption. While a fraction of vaccine refusers (notably the Amish) do in fact cite religious objections, the “personal belief” idea seems to have morphed into something murkier. Basically, the vaccine doubters position their decision as matter of individual choice and nobody’s business but theirs.
Everybody is in favor of individual choice, of course: Among other things, it’s a notion that makes our informational menu so much more appetizing than the three-networks-and-a-local-paper world of yore. But we might want to think twice about the primacy of individual choice when the subject at hand is literally contagious. “What you do for your own kids doesn’t just affect your family,” the head of the CDC pointed out this weekend. “It affects other families as well.”
Sounds like a reasonable point to me. But in the latest (unsurprising) twist, the matter is now being politicized, with interpretations of comments by New Jersey Governor Chris Christie and Sen. Rand Paul (R-Ky.) being parsed for evidence of a choice-trumps-all perspective. Hillary Clinton, meanwhile, has weighed in with a pro-vaccination tweet, complete with #vaccinationswork hashtag. “Engagement with the post is off-the-charts,” Vox columnist Matthew Yglesias reported, with the blandly reassuring lingo of a venture capitalist, “and it secured over 3,400 retweets and just as many favs in its first 15 minutes of life.”
It got 3,400 retweets? Problem solved!
Actually, choice-driven media culture seems less likely to build consensus than to spark contention and leave room for doubtiness. “Like any affiliation, anti-vaccination beliefs become stronger when attacked by outsiders,” points out Slate's Jamelle Bouie.
If it were up to me, I’d go with the solution that Bouie alludes to: The states with the best vaccination records are the states with the strictest vaccination requirements. Others should follow their lead and tighten their rules, too, eliminating dubious exemptions: Rather than pretend that this can be effectively hashed out in the court of public opinion, let’s just take the steps our best science has to offer to prevent the spread of a contagion.
Failing that, we can only hope that the just-get-vaccinated message makes its way through our noisy, individual-choice-driven media culture and really catches on.
Write to me at rwalkeryn@yahoo.com or find me on Twitter, @notrobwalker. RSS lover? Paste this URL into your reader of choice: https://www.yahoo.com/tech/author/rob-walker/rss.
