The Culture of Fear_ Why Americans Are Afraid of the Wrong Things - Barry Glassner [122]
Fisher has been joined in the past decade by a slew of new antivaccine crusaders and advocacy groups whose websites garner millions of hits, and whose spokespeople have come to include a category that scarcely existed when I wrote the earlier edition but has become commonplace—the celebrity victim-cum-expert.
In the vaccine scare, former Playboy model Jenny McCarthy was arguably among the most physically attractive celeb victims. The parent of an autistic child (“vaccine injured,” she likes to say), McCarthy asked on CNN, with nothing to suggest the question had merit, “With billions of pharmaceutical dollars, could it be possible that the vaccine program is becoming more of a profit engine than a means of prevention?” Even as scores of scientists and physicians were urging that the antivaccine advocates be granted no more respect than Holocaust deniers and AIDS deniers, producers at cable news stations and shows like “Oprah” and “Imus in the Morning,” gave McCarthy and fellow zealots lots of airtime to implant ill-informed anxieties in anxious parents’ minds.34
Auspiciously, by late in the decade, knowledgeable science journalists were actively countering the twaddle on those shows. In particular, Sharon Begley, Newsweek’s science reporter, published a lengthy rebuttal of the MMR—autism scare in 2009. “It is bad enough that the vaccine-autism scare has undermined one of the greatest successes of preventive medicine and terrified many new parents,” Begley avowed at the conclusion of the article. “Most tragic of all, it has diverted attention and millions of dollars away from finding the true causes and treatments of a cruel disease.”35
No effort to shine the light of science on a metaphorical illness, regardless how sizeable or decisive the evidence, seems to be enough, however, to settle down the media and politicians for long if the ailment has sympathetic victims, motivated attorneys, energetic advocacy groups, and heartbreaking anecdotes buoying it. Consider another metaphorical illness I highlighted. Headlines in major newspapers and on radio and television in 2008 blared “Gulf War Syndrome Is Real,” and the stories said the causes were a drug given to soldiers and pesticides to which troops were exposed in the 1991 Persian Gulf War. But in point of fact, my conclusion in chapter 7 was probably closer to the mark: “Not until well into the twenty-first century are medical scientists likely to have sufficient long-term studies to reach a definitive conclusion about the causes of Gulf War Syndrome” (p. 159).
Reporters and advocates variously ignored or played down the fact that the 2008 report from a Congressional advisory committee of scientists and veterans was just one of at least a dozen expert summaries of the matter, and far from the most persuasive, comprehensive, or prestigious. Two years earlier, for instance, a panel assembled by the National Academy of Science’s Institute of Medicine reviewed nearly all the scientific literature—850 studies—and concluded that while Gulf War veterans suffer awful symptoms and deserve better care than they’ve received, GWS has no clear diagnosis, cause, or recommended treatment.36
It is, therefore, an apt metaphor for America’s involvement in the Gulf, where we have now gone to war twice: briefly in the ‘90s, lengthily in the ’00s, each time without clear provocation, diagnosis of conditions, or realistic battle plans, and with scarce attention to protecting and caring for our soldiers.
An iffy illness of more recent origin likewise resonates as a metaphor for other collective failings and anxieties. Said to cause a mountain of miseries, from infections, bleeding gums, and pulmonary hemorrhages to brain lesions, memory loss, seizures, and even dementia, household mold spawned an industry that encompasses everything from fumigators to home mold-detection kits to mold-sniffing dogs.
The panic took off in 2001, after a Texas family was awarded $32.1 million for a mold problem in their twenty-two-room mansion. That case, which was widely publicized, had the effect