The Culture of Fear_ Why Americans Are Afraid of the Wrong Things - Barry Glassner [99]
Public concern over vaccine dangers subsided after the program went into effect, due also to a couple of massive studies published in prominent medical journals and reported in the media. With a combined sample of nearly 1 million children, the studies demonstrated ever more definitively the relative safety of the vaccine. A child’s odds of brain damage or death from the disease of whooping cough, these studies showed, clearly exceed risks from the vaccine.67
Keeping Doubt Alive
I wish that were the bottom line on the great vaccine scare. I wish I could close this chapter with the encouraging news that strong action by government, coupled with strong findings from medical science, put an end to superstition.
Instead, the vaccine scare underscores a fundamental if regrettable reality about metaphoric illnesses, and more generally, about the persistence of fear in American society. A scare can continue long after its rightful expiration date so long as it has two things going for it: it has to tap into current cultural anxieties, and it has to have media-savvy advocates behind it.
The vaccine scare had both. In the late 1980s and throughout the 1990s it resonated with growing concerns over the impact of government and medicine on people’s private lives. As Emily Martin, an anthropologist at Princeton, noted in a book on Americans’ views of the human body, “Accepting vaccination means accepting the state’s power to impose a particular view about the body and its immune system—the view developed by medical science.” And the vaccine scare had a tireless champion, Barbara Loe Fisher, who continually strove to tap into public prejudices. At the end of the 1980s and in the early 1990s, when concern over vaccines ebbed, she continued to publish a newsletter in which she inveighed against the “medical elite” and recast vaccination—a social responsibility if ever there was one—as an individual choice.68
Reporters seldom took Fisher’s bait during those dry years, but by the mid-1990s she made it back onto their Rolodexes. In 1994 NBC’s prime-time magazine show “Now” ran a sensationalistic report introduced by anchor Katie Couric and inspired by Fisher. “What if,” she asked, “we told you that one of the shots designed to protect your children might actually hurt or cripple them? It’s frightening.” Taking precisely the same approach as NBC’s expose of 1982, the program featured affecting tales from parents about their vaccine-damaged kids, shown drooling, stumbling, or being pushed in wheelchairs. This time, though, Fisher provided parents and children featured in the story, and her organization, which had changed its name to the official-sounding National Vaccine Information Center (NVIC), greatly profited. By their own count they received more than 65,000 phone calls to their 800 number as a result of the broadcast.69
A few weeks later NVIC enjoyed another bonanza, this time courtesy of the Miss America Pageant. When Heather Whitestone of Alabama, who is deaf, won the contest, news organizations reported, based on what her mother told them, that the cause of her disability was a DPT shot she received when she was eighteen months old. The vaccination “wiped out all but a tiny sliver of her hearing,” went the story in the Atlanta Journal and Constitution and other media, and reporters included comments from NVIC to the effect that this sort of tragedy occurs regularly.70
One can hardly imagine a clearer example of the ignorance that results when journalists eschew real experts in favor of advocates and intimates. A couple of days after the initial stories came out and doctors had reviewed her medical records, the American Academy of Pediatrics announced that Whitestone’s hearing loss had actually been caused by an infection. Ironically, the Heather Whitestone story, rather than being