The Culture of Fear_ Why Americans Are Afraid of the Wrong Things - Barry Glassner [100]
Some journalists did make a point of correcting the earlier reports, but tellingly, even during this subsequent phase of the coverage, NVIC spokespeople were given space to push their paranoias. An article in the Washington Post, for instance, included a comment from Fisher suggesting that medical records may be inaccurate because physicians discount parents’ reports.71
In the years that followed as well Fisher and her group garnered respectful coverage for dubious contentions that vaccinations were responsible for everything from Gulf War Syndrome to increased incidence of asthma and diabetes to exorbitant profits by pharmaceutical companies. A long piece in Money magazine in 1996 provocatively titled “The Lethal Dangers of the Billion-Dollar Vaccine Business” referred to Fisher as an “expert.” And after a new DPT vaccine was approved by the FDA that same year articles in the Los Angeles Times and Washington Post went so far as to claim that “the doggedness of Fisher’s group ... paid off.” Less likely to cause side effects such as swelling, fever, and irritability, which sometimes accompanied the old shot, the new vaccine is “a happy culmination of 15 years of effort” by NVIC, the media quoted Fisher saying.72
In fact the new vaccine was in development before the public panic began. Research and testing on the vaccine came to successful fruition thanks less to campaigns by Fisher and her compatriots than to the availability of new technology. Moreover, agitation over the old DPT vaccine may well have delayed introduction of the new one, at least in the United States. Drug companies and the FDA, fearful of lawsuits, took an especially cautious approach in testing and approval of the new product, which is not, in any event, as exemplary as its champions make it sound. Compared to the old vaccine, it is less effective and more expensive.73
Whatever else advocacy groups may achieve through fear campaigns about metaphoric illnesses, they rarely facilitate the advance of medical science.
8
PLANE WRECKS
Small Danger, Big Scare
Upon landing at the Baltimore airport, as he taxied to the terminal, the pilot of my flight from Los Angeles announced: “The safest part of your journey is over. Drive home safely.”
He was right. We stood a greater chance of being killed driving the few miles into Washington from the airport than in the 2,500-mile trip across the continent. In the entire history of commercial aviation, dating back to 1914, fewer than 13,000 people have died in airplane crashes. Three times that many Americans lose their lives in automobile accidents in a single year. The average person’s probability of dying in an air crash is about 1 in 4 million, or roughly the same as winning the jackpot in a state lottery.1
The news media do make reference to these sorts of numbers. They may dish out exaggerated statistics about multiple chemical sensitivity, heroin use among the middle class, road rage, and innumerable other superfluous scares, but not about plane wrecks. They let their readers and viewers know that the likelihood of dying in an airplane crash is roughly on a par with “the risk of being brained by a meteorite,” as one editorial in USA Today put it. “U.S. airlines are so safe now that accidents are largely random events. The average passenger would have to take a flight every day for thousands of years before he would be in a plane crash,” Adam Bryant of the New York Times has noted.2
The media’s record isn’t perfect, of course. Occasionally a set of numbers gets misreported. In 1988 the Washington Post ran the headline “Airline Accident Rate Is Highest in 13 Years,” even though the accident rate in fact had been declining for several years. The writers and editors had mistaken incidences for rates. While the total number of accidents