Denialism: How Irrational Thinking Harms the Planet and Threatens Our Lives, by Michael Specter 2 comments
At a party the other day, a volunteer for the National Museum of Natural History described a visitor to the Hall of Human Origins. The young woman looked at a male skeleton and noted that the rib cage narrows as it moves downward. She pointed to a particular spot and asked if that was where the rib was removed to form woman. She was not joking.
Would that this kind of ignorance, of even the most basic facts of science, were an anomaly. As Skeptics Society founder Michael Shermer has observed, the world is decidedly more rational than it used to be: many fewer people believe in witches, for instance. But pseudoscience persists.
In Denialism: How Irrational Thinking Harms the Planet and Threatens Our Lives, Michael Specter examines five examples of this way of thinking. Leaving aside the more common bugbears of skeptics–creationism, global warming denial, alien abduction claims and their ilk, which have been amply documented elsewhere–Specter discusses the fear of science and its disastrous intersection with vaccines, genetic engineering, alternative remedies, race and human origins, and synthetic biology.
The most infuriating, and strongest, section of the book concerns vaccines, and the very determined and deeply misguided people who oppose them. Their beliefs originated with a journal article which linked vaccines to autism, and which has since been thoroughly discredited. Last year, I found myself in conversation with a woman–an EPA employee, no less–who said that clearly it could be no coincidence that she knew of several children who had been diagnosed with autism soon after being innoculated. I barely responded, being horror-struck but insufficiently informed. Had I read Specter’s book, I would have pointed out that vaccinations and autism diagnoses tend to take place at the same age (between one and two), as well, of course, as that even a non-scientist EPA employee should know the difference between correlation and causation. (Of course, that assumes that these parents remember the timing correctly. Specter is sympathetic to the leagues of desperate and confused parents of autistic children, who want an explanation, any explanation, for the plight of their children.)
Denialism is one of a number of interesting current books that allude to the great difficulties we have in gauging risk. Vaccine deniers, while giving entirely fictitious warnings about vaccines, do not tend to consider what happens in their absence. As Specter demonstrates, the pre-vaccine world was far from a naturalistic paradise. (In the developing and often still pre-vaccine world, around 200,000 children died of the measles in 2007. This represented a significant decline in measles deaths–from c. 750,000 in 2000–which of course will not continue if the anti-vaccine lobby has its way.) Specter does not deny that caution is necessary and important, and that scientists can be wrong and even occasionally criminal. But he depicts a world in which the pendulum has swung so far onto the side of caution that the joys of scientific discovery have practically been forgotten, and the truth is almost incidental.
The world of natural remedies is no less filled with fraudulent claims, and many of these (largely unregulated) substances are not only ineffective, but can actually be harmful. I know this from my own experience: working at a health food store, I regularly saw people looking for “natural” remedies to treat what were clearly real health problems requiring real medicine. In South Africa, the Mbeki government denied a connection between HIV and AIDS, refusing to provide antiviral drugs and causing hundreds of thousands of deaths in the process.
Pseudoscience can be merely irritating, the realm of UFO nuts and astrologers. But as the families of South Africans killed by AIDS, as the parents of any unvaccinated child who has succumbed to a preventable disease know, it can be deadly. In Denialism, Specter issues a clarion call for a rational world view.
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I would hesitate to suggest what Specter might have said about lobotomies or the population crisis (though I suspect he would have been on Julian Simon’s side), or to infer his entire argument from my rather brief comments. While there have presumably always been a few doubters, vaccination programs were generally going fine (the U.K. for instance was on track to eliminate measles) until the now-thoroughly-discredited article claiming a link between autism and vaccines. Vaccination rates began to drop specifically because of fear of this disproven risk: which sadly, many still blindly accept.
I don’t think it’s necessary to picture a theoretical world to know how things go without vaccines: the pre-vaccine world–illness statistics, recoveries, permanent conditions, deaths–was (and in the developing world, is) well documented.
Specter does not claim that anything is totally without risk–and there are certainly small groups of people for whom specific vaccines are not recommended–but he does claim, credibly, that vaccines are far better than the alternative, i.e. numerous people dying.
My understanding of Hep B is that worldwide almost 1 in 3 people have been infected, and in the U.S. 5% of the population has been infected; and that it’s spread through bodily fluids and far more contagious than HIV. In developed countries, it seems to be spread mostly through sexual activity and drug use by young adults. So it would be surprising if the state’s only concern were with mothers who are drug users, instead of people who had unprotected sex when they were teenagers. Not to mention, of course, infections at schools and day care centers. (Come to think of it, someone was just telling me about her child being bitten by another kid at the day care center.)
Given the prevalence of Hep B and the seriousness of the disease, a vaccine that will in most cases provide lifetime protection strikes me as a remarkably good idea, especially as there seems to be quite a lot of literature documenting the Hep B vaccine as extremely safe. (Again, this does not mean that there is no documented harm connected to it, ever, but that there isn’t much, and that far, far fewer people are harmed than would die of the disease.) Sorry, can you point me to evidence to the contrary? And I’m not sure what the other vaccines are that you object to?
I think that there is an undercurrent of rational skepticism that is being lumped in with irrational denialism. The anti-vaccine story is not a sudden drop into irrationality. It is based on a long history of real risks from vaccines that have led to a prevailing precaution. Today’s person is not surrounded by deadly disease in the way that our ancestors were. Accepting the veracity of a vaccination program therefore requires a leap of faith into the abstract. One must picture a theoretical world without vaccines and what it would be like and then draw an action conclusion. This is a lot to ask of the average person who is given a choice: (a) inject me with a small dose of polio or (b) do nothing. The conclusion to take option (b) is entirely rational if one perceives the choice through an immediate objective reality as opposed to an abstract reality. It *should* take a lot of reading and convincing to get someone to willfully inject their child with a small dose of a deadly disease that they see no evidence of in their world! Those who have done all of the necessary reading ought not to be surprised by such conclusions. Those who have not done all the reading yet gleefully roll up their sleeves should question whether they are accepting truth, the truth as we know it or merely dogma.
There are in my opinion vaccines on the state requirement lists that ought to be optional. For instance vaccination against Hepatitis B is a VA state requirement for infants and also required for acceptance into public schools. Yet the transmission of Hep B is through blood, the same as with HIV. There is no reason to expect infants to be at risk unless their mothers have the disease. There is no contagious risk. Yet very few question the need for this vaccination which does have side effects which could affect early development and is believed to have caused some infant deaths. The state requirement contains an implicit mistrust of the individual. We don’t know if mom is a secret IV drug user so we’re just going to mandate an action on her child. To me this exposes a significant philosophical argument about the role of the state vs the roles of individuals.
So to me the argument on vaccines is a spectrum argument, as most controversial subjects are. I don’t think that Specter (or objectivism in general) provides due credit to our animal instincts. Far from generally leading us to worship rocks and waterfalls our animal instincts more often serve as beacons in the fog. My gut may say “don’t take the vaccine!”. My brain may fill in the blanks with irrational reasoning but possibly there is a contrarian or even a contrarian-contrarian argument that is legitimately pointing me towards the other end of the spectrum, an argument that my skeptical mind has picked up on but which my frontal lobes have not yet (or may not be capable of) figured out. Had Specter written this book 50 years ago he might be scoffing at those who irrationally discredit the efficacy of lobotomies. Had he written 30 years ago he might be raising alarm over the impending population crisis.
“Blind acceptance” is to me the other side of the coin that is denial.