Anatomy of a panic

How skeptics, media helped a flawed study linking a vaccine, autism gain credence

January 09, 2011|David M. Shribman, Globe Correspondent

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 book focuses on the scare triggered by a flawed 1998 scientific paper suggesting that the measles-mumps-rubella vaccine could cause autism. The paper, by Andrew Wakefield, has since been discredited, most recently in a report Thursday saying that Wakefield had altered facts in his study. In his book, 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.’’ He knows the limits of science — but believes it should be regarded “not as an ideology but as the best tool we have for understanding the universe.’’

Mnookin’s 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 Mnookin and most mainstream scientists and doctors believe is a bad cause. It is less about reasoned debate than about the free flow of information through the Internet. It is less about the contagion of ideas than about the contagion of misinformation and mistrust that metastasizes in the new technology.

And in some ways it is less about the modern autism wars than about cultural resistance to vaccines over the centuries, for in setting forth his argument he provides a history of disease and vaccines that is one of the high points of this volume. We’ve come a long way from the early methods used to combat smallpox, which in 1717 included spreading pus from an infected person onto the open wound of an uninfected person.