Bad Science: Quacks, Hacks, and Big Pharma Flacks

by Ben Goldacre

WHO’s highly successful global polio eradication program was on target to have eradicated this murderous disease from the face of the earth by now—a fate that has already befallen the smallpox virus, excepting a few glass vials—until local imams from a small province called Kano in northern Nigeria claimed that the vaccine was part of a U.S. plot to spread AIDS and infertility in the Islamic world and organized a boycott that rapidly spread to five other states in the country. This was followed by a large outbreak of polio in Nigeria and surrounding countries and tragically even farther afield. There have now been outbreaks in Yemen and Indonesia, causing lifelong paralysis in children, and laboratory analysis of the genetic code has shown that these outbreaks were caused by the same strain of the polio virus, exported from Kano. After all, as any trendy MMR-dodging North London middle-class humanities graduate couple with children would agree, just because vaccination has almost eradicated polio—a debilitating disease that as recently as 1988 was endemic in 125 countries—doesn’t necessarily mean it’s a good thing.