A Bit Of Bible Study - my response to Messrs Aaronovitch and Thompson

Oh, dear. If you don’t respond to attacks, people think you have no answer to them. So what follows is done more out of duty than anything else. It concerns Damian Thompson. Some readers will recall an extraordinarily virulent and personal attack on me by this interesting and entertaining Daily Telegraph columnist a few weeks ago.  This was ostensibly to do with my views on addiction, though Mr Thompson had suddenly expressed a personal dislike for me during our first  (and so far only) meeting.

 

On the 9th March he wrote as follows (using my deceased brother as a weapon with which to attack me, as so many troubled people do ) : ‘Did you know that the late great Christopher Hitchens (see above) had a younger, less talented, journalist brother called Peter? Me neither – until I was asked by the Spectator to debate the subject of addiction with this gentleman, a chap in a blazer who reminds me of the Viz character Major Misunderstanding.

 

‘I've taken a lot of flak for arguing, in my book The Fix, that addiction is behaviour, not disease. But Hitchens believes that addiction does not exist at all – that it's an excuse for the illegal behaviour of "selfish" people.

 

‘This is scientifically illiterate – people can become involuntarily addicted and their brain chemistry changes. But Hitchens was having none of it, banging on about "the worship of the self" in the way that self–obsessed folk often do.

 

‘Alas, I lost my temper and was rude to him. Now I'm wondering whether I should send him a peace offering. I'm told he adores cravats. Anyone know where I can lay my hands on one? ‘

 

This peculiar, spiteful outburst was quite unprovoked. I had never so much as spoken to Mr Thompson until the first time I met him. I had rather enjoyed his column, and saw him as, in many ways, an ally rather than as a foe. I still read his column.

 

Now he writes (beneath the headline: ‘An unrepentant scaremonger’) as follows:

 

‘It was “the Hillsborough of my profession”, said David Aaronovitch in The Times on Thursday. He was referring to scare stories about the MMR triple vaccine, pushed by journalists and partly responsible for the measles outbreak in Swansea. I agree – though let’s not forget Tony and Cherie Blair, who in 2001 refused to say whether baby Leo had been given the MMR vaccine. (He had.)

 

‘Andrew Wakefield’s “research” linking MMR to autism quickly fell apart, though hacks were slow to catch up. Cue reverse ferrets, as we say. But one scaremonger is unrepentant: Peter Hitchens, who still refers to assurances that MMR was safe as “propaganda”. Also, he doubts that his own tabloid article on the topic, published in 2001, “influenced even one person”. Really? That would be the article which proclaimed: “They told us thalidomide was safe.” Hitchens never usually plays down his own influence; how telling to find him doing so now.’

 

Well, readers here will know that the article to which he refers was written in 2001, almost three years after the Andrew Wakefield paper had been published in ‘’The Lancet’, a respected medical journal, years during which his concerns had been treated sympathetically by many media . I believe these may even have included the Telegraph, as well as ‘Private Eye’ .  I am told (and would be glad of any recollections) that the Wakefield theory was also given friendly treatment by at least one major  BBC programme as well as by a variety of columnists, left and right. I had not been involved at all, as far as I recall. The discrediting of the Wakefield paper had yet to happen, though it was under official and establishment attack.

 

By the time I wrote my long and detailed article, in which I was careful to offer no opinion on the matter ( I said ‘There is no proof that MMR causes or has ever caused autism, or the severe bowel disorder Crohn's disease which can lead to brain damage’) ,  the belief that there might be a risk from the MMR was already widespread and common. I had not contributed even slightly to that.  I genuinely did not believe that I knew one way or the other. The subject of immunisation is a very complex one, in which many apparently sweeping statements turn out to be qualified when you look into them. As a parent myself, I was disconcerted by this, and I had embarked on my research in the hope of finding a clear answer. 

 

As readers can read here,  (http://hitchensblog.mailonsunday.co.uk/2013/04/some-reflections-on-measles-and-the-mmr-.html) I did not then find one. I recently re-published the article, clearly as a historic document, partly to rebut claims that I had in some way urged parents not to have their children vaccinated. A number of other recent (and older) discussions of the matter can be found by going to ‘MMR Vaccine’ in this blog’s index.  I had detected the creation of a myth, now still being stoked, that the current outbreak of measles in Swansea is the fault of wicked and irresponsible right-wing journalists, who whipped up hysteria. Well, I find no hysteria in what I wrote.  And, as I keep pointing out, sympathetic coverage of the Wakefield thesis was to be found way beyond the ‘right wing’ popular press.

 

There’s a separate question about the behaviour of the Blairs.  I was among journalists who asked Downing Street ( I may have been the first, I am not sure) if Leo Blair, their small son, had been given the injection, as he was of the correct age.  Downing Street refused to answer. I was puzzled by this behaviour, and I still am. As others have pointed out, Mrs Blair was later quite willing to speak publicly about the actual conception of Leo at Balmoral, revealing details about her ‘contraceptive equipment’ which many might have actively preferred *not* to know.  So claims that they needed to guard their privacy hardly carry much weight. Nor do I think it right for a journalist at ‘The Guardian’ to describe this question as ‘unsavoury’. It was a legitimate journalistic inquiry under the circumstances.

A straightforward ‘yes’ would have ended the matter, and boosted take-up.

 

And Mr Blair was at the time at the head of a government which was actively spending taxpayer’s money urging people to give their children the jab. So why the silence? Even some of my critics on this matter acknowledge that the Blairs’ behaviour was unhelpful to the cause of immunisation. Should this episode be blamed on the questioner, or on the person or persons who chose not to answer? It seems to me that if people are to be morally blamed for asking questions of paid members of the government, who have voluntarily sought and accepted public office and responsibility, then we do not have a fully free press. In fact , as I recall, I asked it because readers (and a fellow journalist herself worried about the controversy) suggested that I did so.

 

As for Mr Thompson’s attack, I am interested to see that the only direct quotation he produces is a statement of undisputed fact, that doctors once told us thalidomide was safe. It was one of several examples of the authorities, or the pharmaceutical companies, or medical opinion in general, being partly or wholly wrong, either by default or by deliberate action. I advanced these as reasons why responsible, thoughtful people might reasonably be sceptical of official reassurances about safety.

 

They are also, of course reasons for journalists to be instinctively sympathetic to ‘mavericks’ and ‘whistleblowers’ who challenge the authorities or the drug companies. We may provide their only chance to warn of grave dangers that might otherwise be suppressed. There is a risk that they may be wrong. But there is an equal risk that they may be right. Where controversy continues to exist, it is reasonable, in fact responsible, for journalists to decline to suppress such people’s work, and to decline to accept, solely on trust, official reassurances that all is well.  If The ‘Lancet’ publishes a paper, the layman is entitled to take it seriously, precisely because scientists have done so.

 

If this controversy, where the whistleblower turned out to be wrong, is used to discourage future vigilance, then that is a misuse of it. Journalists, of all people,  should not seek to weaken their trade’s ability to expose.

I say all this though I had no part in the initial coverage of the matter. By the time I wrote my first article on it, the worry was already abroad. I thought then, and think now, that single jabs on the NHS would have been a great comfort to th perplexed, and would have much increased coverage against measles. I am indeed ‘unrepentant’ about that, and see no reason to repent.

 

As for ‘Hitchens never usually plays down his own influence; how telling to find him doing so now’, I am certainly not given to boasting about my influence, as far as I know (though I enjoy pointing out when I have been right, a different thing).  And I would, as I said, be surprised if an analytic 3,000-word article towards the back end of a Sunday newspaper made much impact on a controversy that had already been raging for almost three years. Much as I hope that lots of people read it, I am by no means sure that they did.

 

One other thing. Mr Thompson begins his attack by quoting David Aaronovitch, now of ‘The Times’ . He said ‘‘It was “the Hillsborough of my profession”. Well, I am not terribly convinced by Mr Aaronovitch’s argument, which I can’t link to here because it is behind the Times pay-wall. The headlines on the article ferociously use such terms as ‘sensationalism’ and a ‘crime worse than phone-hacking’  Actually phone-hacking *is* a crime. Reporting in good faith is not. Nor is debating controversies. It’s an interesting formulation.

 

It does provide one fascinating piece of information (and I did not previously know this). It cites a campaign by a local newspaper in South Wales which began *before* Andrew Wakefield’s 1998 press conference. That is a separate issue, it seems to me, from the reporting of matters arising from a paper in ‘The Lancet’. I’d like to know more.

 

Apart from that it’s mostly the regurgitation of government statements about how single jabs are less effective than triple ones. Well, yes, David, perhaps, though the logic is a bit feeble ( it assumes that the parents involved are irresponsible, which the evidence suggests is not the case), and the facts in support of it are scanty, but even if this argument were much stronger than it is –one more time – single jabs are more effective than no jabs, and if you offer worried parents a choice between triple jabs and no jabs , under the circumstances existing in 1998-2003,  a lot of them will choose no jabs. That’s what happened. That’s why the policy Mr Aaronovitch backs failed, a failure his faction never, ever acknowledge or take responsibility for.

 

They suffer from a basic misunderstanding of human nature, and a basic misunderstanding of the proper relationship between the state and the individual.

 

This is where I get a little narked. Mr Aaronovitch’s problems with people who won’t do as they’re told (especially when it’s officially for their own good) may have something to do with his upbringing as a Communist, a world-view he doesn’t seem to me to have repudiated all that thoroughly.  Readers here will know that as an ex-Marxist myself (rather more ex than most) I have an informed and intense interest in this question.

 

But if we are going to go searching for Hillsboroughs and misdeeds by our trade (Journalism, thank  heaven, is not a profession),  is a controversy about a vaccine really the  most prominent recent example of the power of words to affect lives, and of mistaken behaviour?

 

Mr Aaronovitch, it must be recalled, was one of the most notable media supporters of Anthony Blair’s appalling Iraq War, which without doubt was responsible for tremendous loss of life. Whereas the damage done by the current measles outbreak, and all measles outbreaks in recent history,  is not only immeasurably smaller, but (in this current case) is also arguably attributable (I put this at its most modest) to government pig-headedness, at least as much as it is to Andrew Wakefield’s behaviour and that of the journalists who, in good faith, reported his concerns sympathetically.

 

Now, Mr Aaronovitch has since then offered various tortured and obviously distressed noises about his part in supporting Mr Blair's war. He’s had grave difficulties in acknowledging that the government did not tell the truth. He’s tried to advance Iraq’s new democracy  (itself a rather questionable thing) as a justification for the gory hell which we visited on that country, and which still persists. I won’t say he’s not repentant. He’s clearly troubled. But essentially, when it was a journalist’s duty to be sceptical and critical of politicians and the state, he was supportive and helpful to those politicians and that state (I might point out that I took the opposite view on the matter) . And therefore his actions played a part in making possible an event of great violence and destruction. In my view, he continued to defend it, and its authors, long after he should have stopped. But I can see the difficulty.  

 

But do you know what? I won’t embark on a campaign which suggests that in future people such as him should be afraid to voice such opinions,  or urge such courses of action for fear that they might be wrong (I never went so far in advocacy over the MMR as he did over war) . Nor will I impugn his motives, which I believe to have been fundamentally good. Many of us make mistakes, about things which are great and small. I will certainly not equate his actions with deeds which are actually crimes.

 

But I will offer him this quotation from the Authorised Version of the Bible (The Gospel according to St Matthew, the Seventh Chapter, beginning at the Third verse) : ‘ And why beholdest thou the mote that is in thy brother’s eye, but considerest not the beam that is in thine own eye? Or how wilt thou say to thy brother, Let me pull out the mote out of thine eye, and behold, a beam is in thine own eye ?’

 

For the sake of peace and harmony in our trade, and because I am very conscious that all such scriptures invariably refer to the one who cites, as well as to the one cited against,  I shall go no further, but suggest he looks up the foregoing and later verses for himself.

 

As for Mr Thompson, I am happy to forgive him as soon as he offers me any occasion to do so. But if he doesn’t watch out, I shall have to add his name to the ever-growing list of enemies, mostly unsought, for whom I have to pray. Though whether he thinks my Protestant prayers count, I am not sure.