Seth Mnookin's Blog, page 3

Poetry by Scott Lentine about life on the autism spectrum

On Monday, I got an email from a 25-year-old named Scott Lentine, who described himself as a “25-year-old man with high functioning autism (PDD-NOS/Asperger’s).” Scott graduated magna cum laude from Merrimack College, majoring in religious studies and minoring in biology. He works as an office intern at The Arc of Massachusetts, where, he says, “I try to persuade lawmakers to pass key disability resources legislation to improve the lives of people with developmental disabilities.”

Scott sent me three poems that he’d written about his experiences that he asked me to share with people I know on the autism spectrum as well as “musicians and parents and friends of individuals on the autism spectrum who support improved health care access and employment resources to individuals on the autism spectrum.” He agreed to let me run them on PLOS; I hope you get as much out of them as I did.

The Ode to the Autistic Man

Try to understand the challenges that I face

I would like to be accepted as a human in all places

Where I will end up in life I don’t know

But I hope to be successful wherever I go

I would like to expand my social skills in life

Making new friends would be very nice

Stand proud for the autistic man

For he will find a new fan

I hope to overcome the odds I face today

Increased acceptance will lead me to a brighter day

By the age of 20, I will have made tremendous strides

I know in the future, life will continue to be an interesting ride

I have made new friends by the year

I will be given tremendous respect by my family and peers

I hope to get noted for bringing the issue of autism to the common man

So that autistic people can be accepted in this great land

Stand proud for the autistic man

For he will find a new fan

I hope to overcome the odds I face today

Increased acceptance will lead me to a brighter day

Just a Normal Day

Never knowing what to say

Never knowing what to do

Always looking for clues

Just a normal day

Feeling unsure

Totally perplexed with everyday life

Always on edge never certain

I wish I could lift this curtain

Needing to constantly satisfy my need for information

Always online searching for new revelations

Going from site to site

Obtaining new insights every night

Trying to connect with people my age

Attempting to reveal my unique vision

But ending up alone and unengaged

Feeling like my needs a total revision

Just a normal day

Can’t You See

Can’t you see

I just want to have a friend

Can’t you see

I need the same connections in the end

Can’t you see

I want a good job

Can’t you see

I need to have stability and dependence and part of the general mob

Can’t you see

I want to be independent on my own

Can’t you see

I want to be able to have my own home

Can’t you see

I want the same things as everyone else

Can’t you see

I want to be appreciated for myself

The whole cell pertussis vaccine, media malpractice, and the long-term effects of avoiding difficult conversations

Seventy years-ago, a pioneering American scientist named Pearl Kendrick combined killed, whole cell pertussis bacterium with weakened diphtheria and tetanus toxins to create the first combination diphtheria-pertussis-tetanus vaccine. It was an almost instantaneous success: In 1934, six out of every 100,000 Americans died of whooping cough. By 1948, that figure was less than one in 100,000; by 1960, there were fewer than ten cases of the disease per 100,000 residents.

In the coming decades, there were reports about complications from the whole-cell pertussis vaccine. This was not surprising: while whole-cell vaccines can be both effective and safe, their use of the actual contagion as opposed to an isolated component mean they are among the crudest of all vaccines. The whole-cell pertussis vaccine could cause febrile seizures, high fevers, and even fainting — reactions which are understandably scary for parents but which typically have no long-term effects. (My younger sister ran an extremely high fever after her first DPT injection, which she received in the late 1970s.) There were also unconfirmed reports — of brain damage, comas, even paralysis — which to this day have never been verified.

Fast-forward to April 19, 1982, when  WRC-TV, the local NBC affiliate in Washington, DC, aired a special titled “Vaccine Roulette.” The report, hosted by Lea Thompson, was an example of scare-mongering at it’s worst: Throughout the hour-long show, Thompson featured heart-breaking interviews with parents  who described how their children had been left in near-comatose states after receiving a vaccine that was mandatory for public-school children in the vast majority of states. These were augmented by what turned out to be inaccurate statistics, cherry-picked quotes, and risible falsehoods about some of the “experts” Thompson used to support her thesis that the “medical establishment” was “aggressively promot[ing]” a vaccine while willfully ignoring “the consequences.” It also presented parents’ recollections as fact — and, as we know from countless studies, memory is imminently fallible.  Those doctors and public health officials who disagreed with Thompson, on the other hand, were subjected to hours of grilling. (One AAP official said that over the course of a five-hour interview, Thompson asked the same question, “repeatedly in slightly different ways, apparently to develop or obtain an answer that fitted with the general tone of the program.”) When Thompson, who won an Emmy for the show, was asked about her errors, she said the grousing was simply coming from “doctors [who] are miffed because they have to talk to their patients now.”

In the days after “Vaccine Roulette” aired, Thompson’s employer provided callers with the phone numbers of other people who’d also called looking for more information about negative information regarding vaccines — and in doing so, helped create the modern-day anti-vaccine movement. Among the parents who met in the days after the airing of “Vaccine Roulette” was Barbara Loe Fisher, who soon formed a group with the Orwellian moniker the National Vaccine Information Center.

At the time, Fisher was a former PR professional who’d become a full-time housewife after she’d given birth to her son Chris four years earlier. When “Vaccine Roulette” aired, it had been more than a year since Chris had started displaying symptoms of what would eventually be diagnosed as a range of developmental disorders. I wrote about Fisher’s reaction to Thompson’s broadcast in my book:

It wasn’t until she saw Thompson’s broadcast that the pieces fell into place. The reactions that Thompson described—convulsions, loss of affect, permanent brain damage—were, Fisher realized, identical to those experienced by her son. Suddenly, Fisher remembered in meticulous detail what had happened one day eighteen months earlier, when Chris had received the final dose of his DPT vaccine:

When we got home, Chris seemed quieter than usual. Several hours later I walked into his bedroom to find him sitting in a rocking chair staring straight ahead as if he couldn’t see me standing in the doorway. His face was white and his lips slightly blue, and when I called out his name, his eyes rolled back in his head, his head fell to his shoulder and it was like he had suddenly fallen asleep sitting up. I tried, but could not wake him. When I picked him up, he was like a dead weight and I carried him to his bed, where he stayed without moving for more than six hours, through dinnertime, until I called my Mom, who told me to immediately try to wake him, which I finally did with great difficulty. But he didn’t know where he was, could not speak coherently and couldn’t walk. I had to carry him to the bathroom and he fell asleep again in my arms and then slept for twelve more hours.

 It’s an incredibly moving story, and one that Fisher has told to congressional panels, federal committees, and state legislatures, and at national press conferences for more than twenty-five years. In all that time, she’s almost never been questioned about the specifics of her narrative—and there are parts that, if nothing else, certainly are confounding.~ Fisher, as she told an Institute of Medicine (IOM) Immunization Safety Committee in 2001, is “the daughter of a nurse, the granddaughter of a doctor, and a former writer at a teaching hospital” who viewed herself as “an especially well-educated woman when it came to science and medicine.” How was it that her only response to finding her unresponsive son displaying symptoms associated with heart attacks, strokes, and suffocation was to carry him to bed and leave him alone for six more hours? And if Chris’s reaction to his fourth DPT shot was so severe that it transformed an ebullient boy into a sluggish shell of his former self, why had he been fine after receiving the first three doses?

Shortly after the formation of Dissatisfied Parents Together, Fisher founded the National Vaccine Information Center. Since then, she’s played an essential role in organizing a movement that’s targeted the press, politicians, and the public in equal measures. The result has been a steady erosion of vaccine requirements and a steady increase in the percent of the population skeptical of vaccine efficacy. 

***

The vaccine wars of the 1980′s were nowhere near as pitched or as prolonged as those of today, but the focus on the P in the DPT shot was one factor that helped spur the development and eventual adoption of an acellular pertussis vaccine, which was first introduced in the United States in the early 1990′s. (By the end of that decade, the acellular formulation was used for all five recommended doses of what is now called the DTaP vaccine.) Because of the near-impossibility of having an honest discourse about vaccine side effects, there were few conversations about whether the advantages of the acellular pertussis vaccine outweighed its disadvantages — or even what those disadvantages were.

It’s looking increasingly like we’re in the midst of learning the consequences of failing to have those tough conversations two decades ago. For the past several years, the United States has had a series of unusually robust pertussis outbreaks. (Typically, outbreaks go in multi-year cycles, with peaks and troughs. That hasn’t been happening as of late: There were 27,550 cases in 2010, and there have already been 26,146 so far this year.) One theory has been that the acellular vaccine doesn’t confer as lengthy immunity as the whole-cell vaccine did — and a new study published in The New England Journal of Medicine (abstract, PDF) provides strong evidence that that is, indeed, the case. “[O]ur evaluation of data from a large pertussis outbreak in California [in 2010],” the authors write, “showed that protection from disease after a fifth dose of DTaP among children who had received only DTaP vaccines was relatively short-lived and waned substantially each year. Our findings highlight the need to develop new pertussis-containing vaccines that will provide long-lasting immunity.”

There are those who would point out that we actually know of a pertussis-containing vaccine that provides long-lasting immunity — but the chances of returning to the whole-cell DPT vaccine are next to nil. In the future, hopefully we, as a society, will have the courage and fortitude to have these difficult discussions — but for that to happen, the media needs to use the privilege of communicating with the public responsibly and judiciously. “Vaccine Roulette” might have been good for Lea Thompson’s career, but it was awful for public health.

***

One final note: The conclusions of the NEJM study also illustraste why the current pertussis outbreaks are occurring not only in unvaccinated children but also in children and adults with waning immunity. (Contrast this with the measles outbreaks which gripped the country last year, which were almost entirely initiated and propagated by deliberately unvaccinated individuals.) As Amanda Schaffer recently pointed out in Slate, this does not mean that unvaccinated children are not presenting an increased risk for the rest of us:

Now here’s how parents who don’t give it to their kids, quite apart from those flaws, are making things worse for all of us. Unimmunized children are simply more likely to get the disease than their vaccinated peers, even with the limitations of the current formulation. And when they do, they are more apt to develop severe symptoms that last longer. This means they’re more likely to pass the disease on to others, including infants, who are at greater risk of dying. Nationally, the anti-vaxers may not be responsible for most of the cases in the spate of recent outbreaks. But that’s mainly because they make up a small fraction of the population.

In addition to making sure their children are vaccinated, parents should make sure they have their pertussis boosters up to date. My mother caught whooping cough while I was working on my book, and I can tell you with confidence that it can be a nasty, nasty disease regardless of how old you are.

 

~ I tried to interview Fisher several times over a period of more than a year. She refused, explaining that my association with Conde Nast — I am a contributing editor at Vanity Fair — meant that I was untrustworthy.

NOTE: Portions of this post previously appeared in the chapters “Fluoride scares and swine flu scandals” and “Vaccine Roulette” of my book The Panic Virus.

Twitter awesomeness: I get schooled in genetic sequencing

View the story “Twitter awesomeness: I get schooled in genome sequencing” on Storify

Edward Jay Epstein “submits that Fareed Zakaria is not guilty of plagiarism.” I submit that Epstein doesn’t understand what the word means.

I won’t dwell on this for too long, but: Last week, Fareed Zakaria was suspended from both Time and CNN for plagiarizing a portion of a column (for Time) and a blog post (for CNN) on gun control from a New Yorker article by Jill Lepore. When this came to light, Zakaria immediately apologized:

Media reporters have pointed out that paragraphs in my Time column this week bear close similarities to paragraphs in Jill Lepore’s essay in the April 23rd issue of The New Yorker. They are right. I made a terrible mistake. It is a serious lapse and one that is entirely my fault. I apologize unreservedly to her, to my editors at Time, and to my readers.

This was the classy and correct thing to do; after all, this wasn’t a close-call type of case: An entire, 68-word paragraph of Zakaria’s CNN piece had appeared, word-for-word, in Lepore’s essay.  In his Time column, Zakaria changed around a few words but also borrowed a couple of more sentences. Here’s Zakaria in Time (the identical words are in bold):

Adam Winkler, a professor of constitutional law at UCLA, documents the actual history in Gunfight: The Battle over the Right to Bear Arms in America. Guns were regulated in the U.S. from the earliest years of the Republic. Laws that banned the carrying of concealed weapons were passed in Kentucky and Louisiana in 1813. Other states soon followed: Indiana in 1820, Tennessee and Virginia in 1838, Alabama in 1839 and Ohio in 1859. Similar laws were passed in Texas, Florida and Oklahoma. As the governor of Texas (Texas!) explained in 1893, the “mission of the concealed deadly weapon is murder. To check it is the duty of every self-respecting, law-abiding man.”

And here’s Lepore in The New Yorker:

As Adam Winkler, a constitutional-law scholar at U.C.L.A., demonstrates in a remarkably nuanced new book, “Gunfight: The Battle Over the Right to Bear Arms in America,” firearms have been regulated in the United States from the start. Laws banning the carrying of concealed weapons were passed in Kentucky and Louisiana in 1813, and other states soon followed: Indiana (1820), Tennessee and Virginia (1838), Alabama (1839), and Ohio (1859). Similar laws were passed in Texas, Florida, and Oklahoma. As the governor of Texas explained in 1893, the “mission of the concealed deadly weapon is murder. To check it is the duty of every self-respecting, law-abiding man.”

I bring this up only because of a Daily Beast piece in which Edward Jay Epstein admonishes the “feeding frenzy of bloggers” going after “‘gotcha’ bait” — and then goes on to argue that Zakaria isn’t even guilty of plagiarism because Zakaria credited the scholar whose ideas he was discussing — i.e., Adam Winkler. (I’m not making this up.) If copying multiple sentences, word for word, doesn’t count as “the practice of taking someone else’s work or ideas and passing them off as one’s own,” then what does?

 

Jonah Lehrer’s missing compass

My first contact with Jonah Lehrer came almost exactly two years ago, on August 4, 2010. He had just published a 660-word Wired blog post titled “The Psychology of Conspiracy Theories,” which recounted an anecdote from the classic 1956 book, When Prophecy Fails, in which Leon Festinger and some of his colleagues developed the theory of cognitive dissonance to describe what happens when “disconfirmed” expectations produced counterintuitive results. In addition to being a fascinating piece of scholarship, Festinger’s book is a rip-roaring read; the main narrative details Festinger’s infiltration of a doomsday cult that prophesied the world would end on December 21, 1954.

I wrote to Lehrer because I had noticed two small mistakes in his post: First, he had incorrectly written that the massive flood that would destroy the world was supposed to come at midnight on December 20; the correct date was December 21. Second, he had misidentified the cult leader as “Marion Keech,” the pseudonym Festinger used in his book; her real name was Dorothy Martin.

Lehrer’s response was gracious and warm (“I’m a big fan of your work”; “If I can help support [The Panic Virus], please let me know”^) — and also a little bit off. He said that he hadn’t realized Keech was a pseudonym, which was plausible enough. He also wrote, “According to my copy of When Prophecy Fails, the flood was supposed to begin after midnight on 12/20, with the rapture coming on 12/21.”

Even at the time, that seemed like an odd and completely unnecessary thing to say. By convention and practice, 12:00 am is considered part of the following day, not the preceding one. Why not just make a quick change and be done with it?

***

On Monday, Lehrer was revealed to be a liar, a charlatan, and a fraud. He made up quotes by Bob Dylan for his latest book, Imagine, and then lied to Michael Moynihan, the reporter who’d uncovered his deception. When those revelations came to light, I went back to re-read my initial email exchange with Lehrer, as well as the post that had prompted that correspondence. What I discovered was disturbing and sad, but not surprising.

The first thing I noticed was that Lehrer had lied to me: Unless he has access to a one-of-a-kind edition of Festinger’s book, Festinger never wrote, as Lehrer claimed, that “the flood was supposed to begin after midnight on 12/20, with the rapture coming on 12/21.” What Festinger actually wrote was that the events he describes were supposed to “take place precisely at midnight on December 21.” What’s more, those events are not, as Lehrer claimed in his post, the “massive flood” that would destroy human civilization; as Festinger writes again and again and again, that wouldn’t occur until sometime the following day.

Then I noticed that Lehrer had misspelled the pseudonym Festinger used for Dorothy Martin. (It’s Marian, not Marion Keech.) That’s evidence of sloppiness, but nothing more. The same can’t be said for Lehrer’s selective altering of Festinger’s description of the events of that fateful night. Here’s Festinger describing the cultists as the clock approached, and then passed, midnight (emphasis added):

They had nothing to do but sit and wait, their coats in their laps. In the tense silence two clocks ticked loudly, one about ten minutes faster than the other. When the faster of the two pointed to 12:05, one of the observers remarked aloud on the fact. A chorus of people replied that midnight had not yet come. Bob Eastman affirmed that the slower clock was correct; he had set it himself only that afternoon. It showed only four minutes before midnight.

These four minutes passed in complete silence except for a single utterance. When the (slower) clock on the mantel showed only one minute remaining before the guide to the saucer was due, Marian exclaimed in a strained, high-pitched voice: “And not a plan has gone astray!” The clock chimed twelve, each stroke painfully clear in the expectant hush. The believers sat motionless.

One might have expected some visible reaction. Midnight had passed and nothing had happened. The cataclysm itself was less than seven hours away. But there was little to see in the reactions of the people in that room. There was no talking, no sound. People sat stock still, their faces seemingly frozen and expressionless.

And here’s Lehrer:

On the night of December 20, Keech’s followers gathered in her home and waited for instructions from the aliens. Midnight inexorably approached. When the clock read 12:01 and there were still no aliens, the cultists began to worry. A few began to cry. The aliens had let them down.

One of the striking things about those changes are that they’re both completely unnecessary and obviously deliberate.

Even that wasn’t the end of Lehrer’s obscuring of reality: He also conflated two quotes from Festinger’s book. Here’s Festinger, quoting a message Martin/Keech received from outer space:

[F]rom the mouth of death have ye been delivered and at no time has there been such a force loosed upon the Earth. Not since the beginning of time upon this Earth has there been such a force of Good and light as now floods this room and that which has been loosed within this room now floods the entire Earth.

Here’s Festinger describing that message:

It was an adequate, even an elegant, explanation of the disconfirmation. The cataclysm had been called off. The little group, sitting all night long, had spread so much light that God had saved the world from destruction.

And here’s Lehrer:

But then Keech received a new telegram from outer space, which she quickly transcribed on her notepad. “This little group sitting all night long had spread so much light,” the aliens told her, “that god saved the world from destruction. Not since the beginning of time upon this Earth has there been such a force of Good and light as now floods this room.” It was their stubborn faith that had prevented the apocalypse.

Again, what’s so odd is how totally unnecessary this is; why not just write, “But then Keech received a new telegram from outer space, which she quickly transcribed on her notepad. ‘Not since the beginning of time upon this Earth has there been such a force of Good and light as now floods this room,’ the aliens said. It was as if, Festinger wrote later, ‘[t]his little group sitting all night long had spread so much light that god saved the world from destruction’”?

***

One last note: When I was looking for Lehrer’s Wired post on Festinger earlier this week, I typed “jonah lehrer” festinger keech “prophecy fails” into Google. One of the first results that popped up was a Science Blogs piece Lehrer had written on February 11, 2008 titled “Cognitive Dissonance: A Mitt Romney Case Study.” There were more sloppy mistakes in that post (it’s Jon, not John, Stewart), but what’s most notable about it is that — and I’m betting most of you have guessed this already — more than half of 2010 Wired Lehrer’s blog post had been lifted from this earlier piece, word for word.

Since Monday, I’ve spoken with about a dozen people who know Lehrer in one capacity or another. A theory that several have raised is that when the 2008 publication of How We Decide made Lehrer a superstar — with Colbert Report appearances, huge speaking fee paydays, and bylines in the country’s top glossy magazines and newspapers — he became overwhelmed and started to cut corners. But the simultaneously pervasive and picayune journalistic misconduct cited above — and remember, that’s all in a single blog post that’s roughly half as long as the one you’re reading —  doesn’t illustrate sloppiness or corner-cutting. It illustrates a writer with a remarkable arrogance: The arrogance to believe that he has the right to rejigger reality to make things a little punchier, or a little neater, or a little easier for himself. This is not the work of someone who lost his way; it’s the work of someone who didn’t have a compass to begin with.

^ Lehrer did, in fact, blurb The Panic Virus, on the request of our shared agent.

Further reading

* In late June, Carl Zimmer, Deborah Blum, David Quammen, Jack Shafer and I did a three-part roundtable about` Lehrer. That can be found here.

* Around the same time, I used the earlier revelations about Lehrer as a peg for a Salon.com piece on devising a scale for judging journalistic malfeasance.

` EDIT, 10:35 am, 8/3/12: This sentence initially read, “did a three-part roundtable able Lehrer.” Thanks to Jag Bhalla, author of I’m Not Hanging Noodles On Your Ears, for the correction.

New review of Andy Borowitz’s “An Unexpected Twist” at Download the Universe

In 2008, Andy Borowitz’s knotted colon (and the “top rated” doctors that operated on him) almost killed him. His ebook about the experience, An Unexpected Twist, is a testament to Kindle Single’s raison d’etre: “compelling ideas expressed at their natural length.” My new review has just been posted at the online science e-book review Download the Universe:

What follows brings a whole new meaning to having a run of shit luck. After an operation to untwist his colon — “by hand, the artisanal way” — Borowitz undergoes another procedure to remove approximately two feet of his large intestine. No sooner had he returned home than he begins vomiting uncontrollably, “like I’ve just seen a Matthew McConaughey movie or something.” With the exception of a brief respite provided by a couple of enemas, hand-administered by Borowitz’s saintly wife, things only get worse; by the time he gets back to the ER the next day, his resting heart rate is 120, his blood pressure is crashing, and his stomach has filed with bile. As it turned out, Borowitz’s colon had, during the previous operation, “sprung a leak,” which means that “at this point ‘Shit’ is both a justifiable response and an accurate diagnosis.” His chance of surviving the emergency surgery that will attempt to fix this is approximately 50 percent.

Read the rest of the review at DtU.

Apparently, Rob Schneider thinks ALL CAPS is a substitute for having a clue: A lower-cased, fact-based rebuttal

Anyone unsure of where Rob Schneider fell on the vaccine conspiracy scale can rest assured: he’s way down there on the sanitation-and-hygiene-wiped-out-infectious-disease-claiming, homeopath-quoting, Louise-Kuo-Habakus-praising end of things. To wit, check out this comment, which he left earlier this morning on my recent Txchnologist piece, “Vaccine denilaism isn’t funny, so why does HuffPost give Rob Schneider a forum?”

This is Rob Schneider.

To quote Bernadine Healy, MD., former director, National Institutes of Health (NIH), “There are unanswered questions about vaccine safety… No one should be threatened by the pursuit of this knowledge.” The National Childhood Vaccine Injury Act (“1986 Act”) describes vaccines as “unavoidably unsafe.” FACT, In the last 2 decades more than 2 Billion Dollars has been paid to families of children injured or killed by vaccine injuries, paid by tax payers, (The 1986 Act indemnified Vaccine manufacturer’s against lawsuits).

The bitter truth is 3 out of 4 vaccine victims are turned away without any compensation through THE SPECIAL COURT. The heavy burden is placed on the families to PROVE vaccine injury, not the Vaccine Manufacturer having to prove it’s product’s safety and efficacy.

This is almost the exact opposite of what actually happens in the Vaccine Court, where there is a much lower bar to prove causality than there would be in a regular court of law. The entire Vaccine Court is set up to give the overwhelming benefit of the doubt to parents. I have a whole chapter that deals with this subject in The Panic Virus.

We must challenge the assumption that vaccination mandates are strictly necessary for the public good. These mandates have not been studied empirically.

This is false. Vaccines are probably the most studied public health intervention in history. That’s why we know, beyond any doubt, that there is no causal connection between vaccines and autism. Check out the Institute of Medicine’s August 2011 report, “Adverse Effects of Vaccines: Evidence and Causality” for a discussion of some of these hundreds of studies. (You could also flip through the 100 pages of bibliography and source notes I included in my book.)

INFECTIOUS DISEASE MORTALITY HAD A PRECIPITOUS AND SUSTAINED DECLINE DURING THE ENTIRE TWENTIETH CENTURY! BEFORE THE ADVENT OF FEDERAL VACCINATION POLICY.

These two things — the beneficial effect of public sanitation on public health and the ability of vaccines to protect against infectious diseases — are not mutually exclusive. Tougher drunk driving laws and safer cars are both factors in lowering fatal car accidents…or, to put it in terms Schneider might be able to better understand: An unusually hot summer and a big blockbuster hit could both affect movie ticket sales.^ So while it’s undeniably true that many public health efforts played a role in, for instance, the decline in measles, it was vaccines that all but wiped out the disease in the US. But don’t take my word for it — here are the facts! In between 1917 and 1919, the civilian population in the US had more than a million measles infections and more than 21,000 measles deaths. In the 1950s, the number of infections had been cut basically in half and the number of annual deaths was around 500. Then, in 1963, the measles vaccine was introduced:Figure and data in previous graph from: Hinman, et al., “Impact of Measles in the United States,” Review of Infectious Diseases, Vol. 5, No. 3. (May-June 1983), pp. 439-444.)

 

Health officials attributed these gains to the significant investments the country made in modern sanitation and hygiene infrastructure.

Really? What “health officials” are you talking about? Because I don’t know any public health official who has said that vaccines have not been a major factor in the decline in infectious disease in the twentieth century.

Furthermore, the government must prove that those who are vaccinated will be harmed by those who are NOT vaccinated.

Is Julieanna Metcalf, a fully vaccinated girl who was placed in a medically induced coma after being infected with Hib, proof enough for you? How about the San Diego infant who was too young to have been fully vaccinated who caught measles after one of Bob Sears’s unvaccinated patients was infected while on vacation in Switzerland? Or maybe you’d like to talk to some of the parents whose infants have died of pertussis?

The Government surrenders it’s moral authority when it requires children to receive vaccines it knows will cause death or permanent injury to some.

Ten infants died of pertussis in California, your home state, in 2010. There have been Hib deaths in the US and measles deaths in the UK over the past several years. This is reality, not the paranoid ravings of conspiracy theorists; the government would surrender its moral authority if it ignored these facts.

There needs to be an open public debate.

There has been an open public debate — for years and years and years. The sad fact that places like The Huffington Post give you attention is evidence that there continues to be a public debate long after the answers have come in. Just because you or Jenny McCarthy or Generation Rescue or any of the other vaccine denialist groups out there haven’t gotten the answer you want doesn’t mean there hasn’t been a debate.

Vaccines can be a useful tool against disease.

We agree!

But there needs to be procedures put into place to test those who may be VULNERABLE to the very real side effects of this invasive medical procedure and the increasing toxic load placed on these small people.

What increasing toxic load are you talking about? Due to our improved understanding of immunology, vaccines have many times fewer immunogenic proteins today than at any time in the past. When you were growing up, you received more than 3,000 immunogenic proteins; children today receive less than 150. (On the off chance that math is not your strong suit, 150 is five percent of 3,000 — which means it’s much, much smaller.)

Unfortunately, mandated vaccination represents a limitation on basic human rights.

Thank you,

Rob Schneider, Father.

Hey, guess what — I’m a father too! So is Levi Johnston and Barack Obama and Jack White and Stephen Colbert. The fact that we’ve all successfully procreated doesn’t give us any special knowledge into vaccines, infectious disease, or public health.

Please read “The Vaccine Guide” by Randall Neustaedter OMD

I love Orchestral Maneuvers in the Dark! Oh, wait — that stands for “Oriental medical doctor,” doesn’t it? I have a better idea: If you want to read about vaccines, how about reading a book by an actual immunologist like Paul Offit?

and “Vaccine Epidemic” by Louise Kuo Habakus, MA and Mary Holland, JD (research scholar, NYU School of Law)

I’ve spent many hours with Louise, and have read “Vaccine Epidemic,” a book which includes a contribution from, and several celebrations of, Andrew Wakefield. If you believe that the CDC is made up of Nazi stormtroopers who spend their every waking moment dreaming about ways to main and kill innocent children, this is definitely the book for you!

^ EDIT: July 18, 9:08 pm: In the initial version of this post, the “effect” was incorrectly used in place of “affect.”

 

The Huffington Post plays up Rob Schneider’s anti-vaccine ravings — and it makes everything else on the site look bad.

I have a long and not-so-friendly history with The Huffington Post: My second post for this blog was titled “The Huffington Post — Featuring Bad Science and Facile Reasoning Since 2005,” and in the 19 months since then, I’ve written about how HuffPost features dangerously ignorant dreck, I’ve bemoaned the site’s “medical review board” signing off on vaccine fear-mongering, and I’ve written about how HuffPost has played a major role in perpetrating the myth that vaccines can cause autism.

I’ve also been hopeful that the launch of the site’s Science channel in January marked a change in attitudes — and it has, to some extent. (Heck, they even let me post a piece that implicitly criticized their past actions.) But recently, I’ve been despairing that the good work being done on the site has actually served to amplify the crazy. I wrote a piece about this that ran today on Txchnologist:

A little more than a month ago, HuffPost Science asked me to do a video interview for a piece they were putting together on why, despite the massive amount of information to the contrary, so many people still seemed to believe there was a link between vaccines and autism. The resulting five-minute segment, which ran on June 12 and was titled “Vaccines and Autism: Controversy Persists, But Why?” hits on a lot of the points I’ve been talking about since my book The Panic Virus was published in early 2011—including the media’s role in spreading misinformation.

Less than three weeks after that piece ran, the site prominently featured this gem: “Rob Schneider Links Autism to Vaccines, Rails Against Big Government.” …

The fact that…the offending piece ran on The Huffington Post’s Comedy channel doesn’t mitigate the ways in which [it] tarnish[es] the responsible reporting that occasionally appears on the site. It also doesn’t change the fact that an important part of The Huffington Post’s business plan is to use that responsible reporting as an implicit validation of this type of dreck. The “Also on HuffPost” box at the bottom of the Schneider story includes an embedded video of the HuffPost Science interview I did last month. Either the intention was to counteract Schneider’s paranoid conspiracy theories (which implies that his viewpoint is valid enough to need refuting) or to provide a different take on the story (which implies that there are two “takes” on this story in the first place). The effect is the same either way: delusional scare-mongering is treated as being worthy of rational discussion.

You can read the rest of the piece (and some entertaining comments) over at Txchnologist.

Did the BBC rip off the Guardian’s Higgs boson explainer?

On Tuesday, Carl Zimmer, Deborah Blum, David Quammen and I discussed the Jonah Lehrer plagiarism accusations. (These are distinct from the recycling controversy, which we, along with Jack Shafer, discussed last week.) The general consensus: if there was an offense, it was more akin to jaywalking than vehicular manslaughter.

At one point in our discussion, I’d debated bringing up TV news programs, which regularly lift dispatches directly from the front pages of major metro newspapers without credit; I ultimately decided that that was a whole other topic that would only complicate matters.

Yesterday, an apparent example of TV news appropriation was brought to light publicized* by the ever-vigilant Ed Yong, who noticed that a BBC segment explaining the Higgs boson was virtually identical to a video demo Ian Sample put together for the Guardian. This isn’t an example where two dispatches are similar; the mechanisms used for the explanation (lunch trays, ping-pong balls, and sugar) and even some of the canned quips (“The tools I have are…a tray from our canteen” and “I’ve been to the BBC canteen”) are identical.

Here’s the Guardian’s piece; I can’t seem to find a way to embed the BBC video, but you can see it here:

The reaction when Ed pointed this out on Twitter were pretty universal: Carl Zimmer (“slam-dunk rip-off”), Deborah Blum (“outright theft”), Maryn McKenna, Martin Robbins, Tim Carmody, and David Dobbs, among others, all agreed this was out of bounds. Apparently, someone at the BBC did, too: The video on the site now includes a note saying, “The demonstration is taken from an idea originally devised by Ian Sample of the Guardian. See also the classic analogy from UCL’s David Miller, and one from Don Lincoln from Fermilab who uses water.” The phrasing — “taken from an idea” — and the hat-tips to other people seems too cute by half; as Deborah noted, “groveling called for here.” (That seems to be going on now, too: at 3:04AM EST, the BBC correspondent in question tweeted, “None top the originality/genius of@iansample - the beauty quark of UK science journalism http://bit.ly/M7tF2L ‪ json#sugarpingponggate‬! ‪#corr“‬.)

So — what do you all think? Is this type of stuff SOP? Do any regular BBC watchers agree with Robbins, who says that’s the second or third piece in the last several days the BBC appears to have pinched from other sources? Should we be paying more attention to on-air appropriation?

* Ed points in, in the comments, that he was actually tipped off by Guardian deputy editor Ian Katz.

 

 

SciWriteLabs 8.3: Adjudicating the Lehrer plagiarism accusations. Plus: Are we ignoring the truly frightening trends in journalism?*

Two weeks ago, Jim Romenesko revealed that Jonah Lehrer had recycled work from a 2011 Wall Street Journal column for a recent blog post on NewYorker.com. As anyone who has been following this knows, plenty more revelations followed, including accusations that Lehrer had plagiarized from New Yorker colleague Malcolm Gladwell.

Last week, I pivoted off of the discussion about Lehrer in a piece on Salon.com that attempted to codify some sort of judgment system — I called it the Blair scale, named after Jayson Blair — that could be used for journalistic transgressors. Several people also asked me to talk about this in a larger context, so I decided to round up some folks and do a new SciWriteLabs. I’m lucky these four pros agreed to participate; I think you’ll agree that the conversation that follows goes off in some interesting directions. (This entry is the final of three; the first one, which talked about consequence-free plagiarism, rules for blogging, and much else, is here, and the second one, which pondered whether it’s kosher to recycle Facebook updates in “real” journalism and whether we need a Son of Sam law for media miscreants, is here. Given the subject matter, I also feel compelled to note that this introductory passage is virtually identical for all three entries.)

Without further ado, our esteemed panel:

Deborah Blum – Author of The Poisoner’s Handbook, among many other books; Wired Science blogger; professor in the School of Journalism and Mass Communication at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.

David Quammen – Author of Song of the Dodo, among many other books, including the upcoming Spillover, about zoonotic diseases; three time National Magazine Award winner.

Jack Shafer – Press and politics columnist for Reuters.com; longtime media critic; former editor of Washington City Paper. (Note: Jack didn’t weigh in on this final entry; his thoughts can be found in the earlier ones.)

Carl Zimmer – Author of A Planet of Viruses, among many other books; frequent contributor to The New York Times and National Geographic, among other publications; Discover Magazine blogger.

Seth: David, last week, you raised a number of authors who have published books they’ve claimed are non-fiction: John Berendt, Truman Capote, Lillian Hellmann, and James Frey. That’s a whole other interesting conversation that hopefully we can have one day soon, but it might be too much to deal with here. I would look to take a look at the most serious allegations against Lehrer: plagiarism. This gets back to something Deborah implicitly raised when she talked about a second rush to judgment that criticized the criticizers. While I think some of the hand-wringing about Lehrer’s journalistic onanism (h/t to Jack for that phrase) might be a little over-the-top, I don’t think it’s out of bounds. I do have a problem with what I think are inaccurate accusations of plagiarism. As far as I know, these stem from three paragraphs in Imagine that Edward Champion linked to some of Malcolm Gladwell’s work.

The first two examples both come from a Gladwell piece that ran in 2000 titled “Designs for Working.” (The repeated examples are in bold.)

“Allen found that the likelihood that any two people will communicate drops off dramatically as the distance between their desks increases: we are four times as likely to communicate with someone who sits six feet away from us as we are with someone who sits sixty feet away. And people seated more than seventy-five feet apart hardly talk at all.” — Gladwell, “Designs for Working,” The New Yorker (12/11/00)

“…he came up with the likelihood that any two people in the same office will communicate. The curve is steep: according to Allen, a person is ten times more likely to communicate with a colleague who sits at a neighboring desk than with someone who sits more than fifty meters away.” — Imagine, p. 153.

***

 “It had short blocks, and short blocks create the greatest variety in foot traffic. It had lots of old buildings, and old buildings have the low rents that permit individualized and creative uses. And, most of all, it had people, cheek by jowl, from every conceivable walk of life..” — Gladwell, “Designs for Working”

“The Village had short city blocks, which were easier for pedestrians to navigate. It had lots of old buildings — Jacob’s street was mostly nineteenth-century tenements and townhouses — with relatively cheap rents, and cheap rents encouraged a diversity of residents.” — Imagine, p. 182.

Calling this plagiarism — and I want to be clear that Champion is far from the only person who labelled it thusly; that Knight Journalism Tracker post accused Lehrer of “cop[ying] a paragraph” and “recycl[ing] the work of other writers” — seems mildly hysterical to me. I’d bet dollars to donuts that Gladwell’s work was the source of those two nuggets about Thomas Allen and Jane Jacobs and I think Lehrer screwed up by not making this clear. (I also think Lehrer’s source notes are woefully inadequate, but that’s another issue.) In my own work, I give credit to the person whose reporting turned me on to a study or conclusion, as I did in this passage from The Panic Virus: “Conventional wisdom holds the more emotional a decision, the less rational it is, but in his 2009 book How We Decide, Jonah Lehrer explains that is not always the case. He describes the case of a patient named Eliot who in 1982 had a tumor removed from an area of the brain just behind the frontal cortex.” But repeating “the likelihood that any two people will communicate” and “it had lots of old buildings” seems well shy of what’s needed to start throwing around accusations of one of journalism’s cardinal sins.

The third example is a little trickier:

“One of the highest-grossing movies in history, ‘Raiders of the Lost Ark,’ was offered to every studio in Hollywood, Goldman writes, and every one of them turned it down except Paramount: ‘Why did Paramount say yes? Because nobody knows anything. And why did all the other studios say no? Because nobody knows anything. And why did Universal, the mightiest studio of all, pass on Star Wars? . . . Because nobody, nobody—not now, not ever—knows the least goddamn thing about what is or isn’t going to work at the box office.’” – Gladwell, “The Formula,” The New Yorker, 10/16/06

“For instance, one of the highest-grossing movies in history, Raiders of the Lost Ark, was offered to every studio in Hollywood, and every one of them turned it down except Paramount: ‘Why did Paramount say yes?’ Goldman asks. ‘Because nobody knows anything. And why did all the other studios say no? Because nobody knows anything. And why did Universal, the mightiest studio of all, pass on Star Wars…? Because nobody, nobody — not now, not ever — knows the least goddam thing about what is or isn’t going to work at the box office.’” — Imagine, p. 144.

Note that I only bolded the portion of those sections that are not part of William Goldman’s quotation — more on that shortly. This is, I think, the best argument that can be made for Lehrer being guilty of plagiarism — but I still think it’s pretty weak. Again, I’m gonna go out on a limb and guess that Gladwell’s article was where Lehrer originally found the Goldman anecdote; extrapolating from there, one media critic wrote that the “devil is in the ellipsis,” implying that the fact that both Lehrer and Gladwell compressed Goldman’s quote in the same manner proves that Lehrer lifted from Gladwell without even citing the source material. It’s an interesting idea — but it’s not one that’s actually reported out. If you take a further look at Gladwell’s story and Lehrer’s book, you can see that not only did Gladwell changed Goldman’s spelling of goddam to goddamn while Lehrer left it as Goldman had written it — something that would have been impossible for Lehrer to do had he solely relied on Gladwell’s article — but that Lehrer also quotes from sections of Goldman’s book that do not appear in Gladwell’s article.

When a case is this Talmudic, as Carl says, I think it’s worth going to the aggrieved party — Gladwell, in this case. Not only did he blurb Imagine — which presumably means he read it and didn’t think Lehrer had ripped him off — he’s called the accusations “absurd” and “ridiculous.”

David: I agree that the only instance worth much attention is the Goldman/Gladwell paragraph.  Looks like plagiarism, yes. Shouldn’t happen.  Is it possibly a reflection of moving too quickly, writing too much, grabbing up information and culling sources too greedily in order to offer brainy analysis?  Those “scoops of analysis” you mention?  That’s my guess.  Moving too quickly, plus too little ethical compass.  Didn’t Alex Haley and Stephen Ambrose and even Doris Kearns Goodwin get into some trouble about lifted passages (that’s not an assertion about those three, just a question; I don’t remember details) once they were famous and successful and publishing many books quickly, probably each of the star writers with an atelier of research assistants helping? (Ed: yes, yes, and yes.) I think some of this problem just comes, especially today, in the blog environment, from people writing too quickly, too much.  I’ve said this before, in my cranky-old-man voice: “Problem is, young people today–they type too goddamn well.” This isn’t a problem for me.  I type and think and write like a snail.

Deborah: And I agree as well that the Goldman-Gladwell paragraph is the only one worth real attention here. I occasionally will catch this kind of slip as a writing instructor. It’s the electronic cut and paste – students copy a paragraph here and there meaning to rewrite them later, as placeholders for a point they want to make. But they’re in a hurry so they don’t rewrite and the original copy slips through. Or they forget to mark the passage and it just slides through. Are we not teaching young writers that this is wrong? We can, as David suggests here, reinforce standards by public example (and embarrassment) of writers who side-step professional standards. But can you teach an ethical compass?

In the case of plagiarism, I think, the Lehrer case makes a poor example. Not just because the general consensus is that this is “marginal” lifting. But because the lifting, if that’s what it is, was taken from the work of a very supportive friend. And I mention that because years ago, I did a series of reports on an animal behavior conference for a science news website and another writer at another website lifted them almost entirely verbatim, tweaking the leads a little but no more. My website had its lawyers send a cease and desist letter and the competing website yanked the stories. But I can tell you that when I was reading my work, with another person’s name on it, it felt like literal, tangible theft. As if I’d been walking down the street and encountered someone wearing my clothes. And I did not feel like a supportive friend to this other writer. In any way.

But – and here I’ll go ahead sound cranky myself – if we’re looking for this public Lehrer example to shock young writers, to emphasize to them that stealing another’s words is actually theft, then I think we’re deluding ourselves. No outrage from Gladwell, no real acknowledgment from Lehrer. Call it more line with  changing attitudes, more in sync with the Pirate Party, anti-DRM argument that knowledge is free and good words are there for the taking.

And given that, maybe we are making a lot of noise over an episode that’s unlikely to change too much.

Seth: I’m not sure if our not being shocked by the Lehrer-Gladwell example points to a declining ethical compass or lack of suitable moral outrage; I think it just points to this being kind of a ridiculous example to get all hot and bothered about. Instead of dealing with some of the real problems plaguing news — the un-realities portrayed when false equivalencies supersede the truth; the whole-sale gutting of sections (and staffs) dedicated to topics, foremost among them being science, that required specialized knowledge; the naked campaigning by broadcast news outlets who insist on claiming they’re just reporting the facts, ma’am — we get upset about recycling (or whatever it is we ultimately decide Lehrer did). I’ve gotten more than a few messages from people who believe Lehrer should never work again. I’d rather some of that energy be focused on people like Lou Dobbs, who gave oxygen to a demonstrably false conspiracy theories about Obama’s birthplace for weeks on end; or Arianna Huffington, who similarly prints demonstrably false dreck and also takes horrible advantage of struggling writers by essentially telling them that their pay comes in the form of cachet; or Oprah, who arguably has done more harm to the health and wellness of viewers than any other media personality ever.

Carl: I agree — given the low “Blair-o-meter” score Seth rightly gave this particular case, I’ve been puzzled by all the buzz it’s gotten. I understand that a prominent magazine like The New Yorker and Lehrer’s recent visit to the New York Times best-seller list give it a cachet, but the facts themselves don’t rise to the occasion. I get the sense that a lot of people piling on Lehrer are writers themselves who feel that it’s unfair for someone who cuts corners to enjoy these successes. But I think this ends up being merely a pleasant little game of outrage. It’s addictive to journalists, because it’s a relief from the truly frightening trends out there.

The details of the Lehrer affair are rapidly being supplanted in my own brain by what I’ve been learning today about a company called Journatic. It makes its money replacing the local news coverage that newspapers can’t do themselves, because they’re laying off so many reporters in order to balance their books. How does Journatic make this arrangement so appealing to these big newspapers, like the Chicago Tribune? By supplying them with hundreds of thousands of stories for a pittance. And how do they accomplish that editorial feat? By hiring people in the Philipines, Africa, and Eastern Europe to write stories about school board meetings and other local events in the United States for thirty-five cents a story, or less. (You can read about it at Poynter, and listen to a report on the latest episode of This American Life.)

Ethical disasters abound. The reporters allegedly lie about where they work, and get fake local phone numbers to fool their sources. Their articles end up with fake bylines, which the Tribune belatedly started to investigate when This American Life pointed them out. Even worse is the general corruption that Journatic represents: a news culture in which it doesn’t matter if local news gets reported by people from another continent who are trying to get as many stories done each day to add up to a living. Because all that really matters is flooding a newspaper site with as many stories as possible, to get as many clicks as possible.

It’s reasonable to hope that Jonah Lehrer learns his lesson, cleans up his act, and achieves his full promise as a writer. But I don’t have much hope that anyone can stop Journatic and what it represents.

Seth: And with that, maybe we should wrap this up and save the rest of our discussion of Arianna and Oprah and Journatic for a future confab. Thanks again to the panel for taking part in a great discussion — and see you all down the road.

Note: The first iteration of this headline read, “Plus: Do Arianna and Oprah deserve lifelong bans?” A colleague at PLoS pointed out that since we didn’t address the meat of that question in this post, it might be more appropriate to highlight something else in the headline.