In 1806, Thomas Jefferson wrote to Edward Jenner to praise his “discovery of the vaccine inoculation.” The US president, then also president of the new nation’s leading scientific society, proclaimed that “future nations” would know “that the loathsome small-pox has existed and by you has been extirpated”—as indeed by 1980 it really was, but as measles still has not been.
A present-day Jefferson would appreciate the public-health difficulties of extirpating measles, but would surely balk in disapproving puzzlement at the extra difficulties imposed irrationally by antiscience. In general, present-day journalists balk that way too, as shown by a highly informal sampling of recent media coverage of the Disneyland measles outbreak and the “anti-vaxxers” who enabled it.
In summarizing the recent news, a Wall Street Journal article’s opening almost immediately discredits anti-vaxxers:
The measles outbreak that began at California’s Disneyland Resort last month is part of a new trend that worries public health officials.
Large outbreaks in the U.S. of the highly infectious disease have become more common in the past two years, even though measles hasn’t been indigenous since 2000, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
At the same time, persuading skeptical parents to vaccinate their children has grown more difficult because concerns about a possible link between vaccines and autism—now debunked by science—have expanded to more general, and equally groundless, worries about the effects of multiple shots on a child’s immune system, vaccine experts and doctors say.
To convey context concerning the groundless but pervasive autism worry, much of the coverage and commentary looks back, for example, to a British Medical Journal editorial from four years ago. It summarized and condemned the scientific and medical fraud that the British researcher Andrew Wakefield perpetrated. Years earlier, he had falsely linked the measles, mumps, and rubella (MMR) vaccine to autism. The editorial lamented that “the damage to public health continues, fuelled by unbalanced media reporting and an ineffective response from government, researchers, journals, and the medical profession.”
Two years ago, the American Academy of Pediatrics released the annotated bibliography “Vaccine safety: Examine the evidence,” with a cover page declaring that no study shows “any link between autism and MMR vaccine, thimerosal, multiple vaccines given at once, fevers or seizures.” The Disneyland-outbreak coverage invokes numerous such authorities against vaccine antiscience.
Reporters also seek to ensure that viewers, listeners, or readers understand that measles can afflict a victim more powerfully than does a mere passing ailment. That same WSJ article contained this passage:
Measles is a highly contagious respiratory disease causing fever, cough and rash. It can lead to pneumonia and encephalitis and in about 1 in 1,000 cases, death. Young children are at particular risk of complications. In the U.S., 0.2% to 0.3% of people who become infected die from measles complications. . . . Globally, in 2013, an estimated 145,700 children died from measles, according to the CDC. Measles deaths have declined sharply over the past several years due to vaccination.
Measles doesn’t spread in most U.S. communities because people are protected by “herd immunity,” meaning that 92% to 94% of the population is vaccinated or immune. That level of protection makes it hard for one case of measles to spread even from one unvaccinated person to another without direct contact.
But outbreaks can erupt when someone who has been infected in another country brings the disease to the U.S. and passes it on to others in communities with high numbers of unvaccinated people. Those communities range from wealthy neighborhoods to clusters of religious and ethnic groups that either forgo or delay vaccinations for children.
The Washington Post highlighted a graph that starkly illustrates the measles resurgence. The accompanying article noted a study that “found that only 51 percent of Americans were confident that vaccines are safe and effective, which is similar to the proportion who believe that houses can be haunted by ghosts.”
And indeed vaccine skeptics and disbelievers are easily found. A Los Angeles Times article quoted a Costa Mesa, California, city councilman: “How do I say this without sounding crazy? I don’t want anyone to get measles . . . but you have to make it easier for the parents through the health system to do it the right way. Pounding three live viruses into somebody at 1 year old is devastating.” A publication calling itself Natural News ran a piece headlined “Afraid of the Disneyland measles outbreak? Don’t be fooled by Mickey Mouse science—READ THIS FIRST.” The website newsmaxhealth.com published a commentary headlined “Vaccine risks the govt won’t tell you about.”
An article in the Guardian appeared under the headline and subhead “Disneyland measles outbreak leaves many anti-vaccination parents unmoved: In some parts of California, resistance to vaccinations including the MMR shot is stronger than ever, despite cases of measles hitting five US states.” It quoted a Los Angeles parent, Michelle Henney: “Vaccines are a great idea, but they are poisoning us, adding things that kick in later in life so they can sell us more drugs.” It also reported that “media coverage has been intense, almost all of it shining a spotlight on the anti-vaccination movement and the threat it has posed to ‘herd immunity,’ a level of inoculation high enough to protect even the most vulnerable, including newborns, the elderly and those with auto-immune conditions.”
The New York Times reported on anti-vaxxers:
Organizations that have led the campaign of doubts about vaccinations . . . cautioned parents not to be pressured into having their children receive vaccinations, which the organizations say have been linked to other diseases. Health professionals say those claims are unfounded or vastly overstated.
“It’s premature to blame the increase in reports of measles on the unvaccinated when we don’t have all the facts yet,” said Barbara Loe Fisher, the president of the National Vaccine Information Center, a group raising concerns about inoculations. “I do know this: Fifty-seven cases of measles coming out of Disneyland in a country with a population of 317 million people is not a lot of cases. We should all take a deep breath and wait to see and get more information.”
A handful of doctors seem sympathetic to these views. Dr. Jay Gordon, a Santa Monica pediatrician who has cautioned against the way vaccines are used, said he had “given more measles vaccines” than ever before but did not like giving the shot to younger children.
“I think whatever risk there is—and I can’t prove a risk—is, I think, caused by the timing,” he said, referring to when the shot is administered. “It’s given at a time when kids are more susceptible to environmental impact. Don’t get me wrong; I have no proof that this vaccine causes harm. I just have anecdotal reports from parents who are convinced that their children were harmed by the vaccine.”
Condemnation of vaccine ignorance and irresponsibility pervades the coverage. Last May at the Los Angeles Times—not far from Disneyland—columnist Michael Hiltzik warned that the measles threat was growing. “The anti-vaccination movement is a corner of the United States that is backsliding into medieval ignorance,” he wrote. “Unfortunately, it’s an expanding corner, with alarming outbreaks in affluent and ostensibly educated communities. Entertainment figures such as the starlet Jenny McCarthy and the talk show host Katie Couric have played their role in spreading the darkness.” He called the US “a public health disgrace.”
At the business site Forbes.com, a posting advocated identifying unvaccinated disease spreaders and suing their parents. The Washington Post columnist Petula Dvorak bitterly condemned anti-vaxxers; her colleague Alexandra Petri mocked them in a satirical send-up. Another Washington Post piece charged that “the anti-vaccination movement is fueled by an over-privileged group of rich people grouped together who swear they won’t put any chemicals in their kids (food or vaccines or whatever else), either because it’s trendy to be all-natural or they don’t understand or accept the science of vaccinations. Their science denying has been propelled further by celebrities, like Jenny McCarthy, Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. and actress Mayim Bialik, who is also a neuroscientist and even plays one on TV.” Bialik appears regularly in CBS’s fun but trivial physicist-caricaturing sitcom The Big Bang Theory.
The outraged 15 January Los Angeles Times editorial “Blame Disneyland measles outbreak on anti-science stubbornness” cautioned that the outbreak “should worry and enrage the public.” It indicted the anti-vaxxers’ “ignorant and self-absorbed rejection of science” and declared, “Getting vaccinated is good for the health of the inoculated person and also part of one’s public responsibility to help protect the health of others.” A 28 January follow-up editorial called for banning the personal-belief exemption for schoolkids and narrowly tailoring any religious exemption. “It’s wrong,” the editors emphasized, “to allow public health to be threatened while everyone else waits for these science-denying parents to open their eyes.”
Who are these science-denying parents? Where do they lurk? The Wall Street Journal reported that the “vast majority of cases are in Southern California.” The WSJ added that Mark Sawyer, professor of clinical pediatrics at UC San Diego, said that in some schools around San Diego, including some upper-middle-class neighborhoods, 20% to 30% of children aren’t immunized. The WSJ quoted Sawyer: “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.” The Washington Post cited “wealthy communities in Los Angeles and Orange counties and in northern California with double-digit vaccination exemption rates.”
The Guardian article mentioned earlier linked vaccination opposition to the “political left, which has long been suspicious of the lobbying power of the pharmaceutical industry and its influence on government regulators, and also the fringe political right, which has at different times seen vaccination, fluoridisation and other public-health initiatives as attempts by big government to impose tyrannical limits on personal freedom.” Chris Mooney at the Washington Post, known in part for his book The Republican War on Science (Basic Books, 2006), cites two scientific studies in a column questioning the assumption that anti-vaccination involves a left-wing slant. But the authors of a study in the American Academy of Pediatrics journal Pediatrics, though they found that underimmunization and vaccine refusal cluster geographically, reported that they couldn’t explain why the clusters arose.
How should science-denying parents be engaged? Another study at Pediatrics—also reported on in the media, and roughly echoed at the journal Vaccine—concluded that it seems easy to make things worse just by trying:
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. More study of pro-vaccine messaging is needed.
But a Washington Post piece observed that “doctors believe the current outbreak could change the minds of a less-known but even larger group: parents who remain on the fence about the shots. These ‘vaccine-hesitant’ parents have some doubt about vaccinations, leading them to question or skip some shots, stagger their delivery or delay them beyond the recommended schedule.” For these parents, the article conjectured, the threat might now possibly seem less abstract and distant.
Sticklers for scientific accuracy in news reporting might ask whether giving air time or column inches to anti-vaxxers constitutes false balance. That is, could doing so mislead citizens into thinking that anti-vaxxers’ arguments must contain at least some validity? An editorial seven years ago in Nature Immunology cautioned that “attempting balance by giving vaccine skeptics and pro-vaccine advocates equal weight in news stories leads people to believe the evidence for and against vaccination is equally strong.”
Nevertheless when USA Today posted its editorial condemning vaccine antiscience on the evening of 27 January, it simultaneously posted—and cross-referenced—an anti-vaxxer’s op-ed arguing that “inflexible vaccine mandates threaten some children’s health” given that “we are not all the same, and doctors cannot predict which child will be harmed.” When Comedy Central’s Nightly Show host Larry Wilmore put together a four-person panel for a serious—and no kidding, it really was serious—discussion of vaccine antiscience, he included a mother whose seriousness is her distrust of vaccines. A recent edition of the Washington Post carried a letter defending anti-vaxxers as “people who generally are pro-science and highly educated, who have high incomes and who have studied this issue carefully before coming to the conclusion that the risk to their children is greater than the slim possibility of contracting a childhood disease that [in many cases leaves] little or no residual consequences.”
Still, when it comes to the question of false balance, anecdotal evidence suggests that some journalists, rather than omitting anti-vaxxers’ views, prefer to expose them and then oppose them. CBS, for example, did an interview report highlighting, but forthrightly undercutting, the view of Jay Gordon—the California pediatrician mentioned earlier, who readily signs forms used in obtaining personal-belief exemptions and who figures centrally in the vaccine antiscience of the actress Jenny McCarthy.
In any case, it appears that most journalists share the view set forth in a Wall Street Journal op-ed by Marc Siegel, a professor of medicine and a Fox News medical correspondent. He called anti-vaxxers’ “unwarranted fear . . . an assault on one of the greatest public-health inventions in world history.”
From the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, Melinda Gates offers—and the media have conveyed—a summarizing overview. Americans take vaccines for granted, she observed, but a woman in the developing world “will walk 10 kilometers in the heat” with her child and line up to get a vaccine because she has seen what Americans have forgotten: “what measles deaths look like.”
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Steven T. Corneliussen, a media analyst for the American Institute of Physics, monitors three national newspapers, the weeklies Nature and Science, and occasionally other publications. He has published op-eds in the Washington Post and other newspapers, has written for NASA's history program, and is a science writer at a particle-accelerator laboratory.
