[Note that the full article can be accessed by clicking here and a downloadable PDF version is available by clicking on the note at the top of the article]
The
So-Called Vaccine Debate, False Balance in the Mass Media & The
Risk to Public Health
Executive
Summary
February
26, 2018
The
San Diego Union-Tribune
(UT) recently published two opinion pieces on vaccine mandates,
responding to California Senate Bill 277 which removed the “personal
belief” exemption to vaccine requirements for children entering
into day care, elementary or secondary schools. The bill was passed
by the California Legislature in 2015:
Mark
Sawyer, MD is a professor of clinical pediatrics in the Division of
Infectious Diseases in the UCSD Medical School. Terry Roark is the
advocacy director in California for the nonprofit National Vaccine
Information Center.
Each
piece was given equal length, giving the impression that each side
represented a legitimate position, creating a false balance. In all
fairness, the UT has posted articles and editorials on other
occasions that clearly supported vaccines and the science behind
them, e.g., “In a win for science and for student safety, school
vaccination rates are the highest they have been in California in at
least 15 years” (The
San Diego Union-Tribune Editorial Board, 2017).
The problem is that people often have short term memories, may not
have read the previous pro-vaccine articles in the UT, or, seeing two
articles, were influenced more by the one than the other.
As
will be shown in this paper, the article by Terry Roark is full of
inaccuracies, falsehoods, and misrepresentations, cultivating readers
to form an opinion that is invalid. Like Roark, the vast majority of
antivaccinationists lack the basic understanding of the science
underlying vaccines, view the world as all or none, subscribe to
paranoid conspiracy theories, and their certainty of the rightness of
their opinion clearly reflects research that shows once people form
opinions, they seldom change them and, remarkably, when confronted
with evidence that they are wrong, they often embrace their point of
view even more tenaciously (Tavris, 2007). Some of this can be
attributed to the Dunning-Kruger effect, which posits that people
often fail to grasp their level of competence (or more to the point,
incompetence), which precludes their ability to form credible
opinions.
Summary
and Conclusion
In
publishing Roark’s opinion piece, in my opinion, The
San Diego Union-Tribune
is guilty of creating a false balance. My intent is NOT to single
out the UT as this is a problem belonging to our mass media in
general. However, as the UT is my hometown newspaper, it provided an
excellent example.
As
I’ve demonstrated in this article, not one point made by Roark is
valid. The underlying premise she is coming from is based on a lack
of the basics of science, thus, a bogus opinion on vaccines, a lack
of understanding of the economics of vaccine production, and a
misleading quote, taken out of context, from a Supreme Court
decision. Her affiliation with the National
Vaccine Information Center
and its Co-Founder and President, Barbara Loe Fisher, as shown by
Fischer’s statement, leaves little doubt that besides a lack of
scientific knowledge, antivaccinationists suffer from paranoid
delusions of conspiracy theories, project their own, often vicious,
attacks on the integrity and honesty of those promoting vaccines,
including threatening statements, and see the world in terms of the
Nirvana
Fallacy
(for more on Barbara Loe Fisher as the main spokesperson for the
National Vaccine Information Center, see
Orac, 2017).
Attacks on the integrity and honesty of scientists says more about
the attackers than the scientists. Such attacks indicate that
antivaccinationists are incapable of systematically and validly using
microbiology, immunology, epidemiology, biostatistics, and the
history of infectious diseases to make their case and display, in my
opinion, a crass lack of integrity and decency, basically anything
and everything goes to influence people’s opinions, regardless of
how unscientific, illogical, and including threats and character
assassination.
Given
that The
San Diego Union-Tribune
has, on the whole, been supportive of vaccines, it would behoove
them, as well as our mass media in general, to re-evaluate their
choice of opinion pieces and even letters that clearly do not
reflect, have NO validity, on other issues as well. The UT’s policy
regarding Letters to the Editor, “It is also our policy to attempt
to publish letters supporting or opposing a particular issue in a
ratio reflecting the number received on each side,” when one side
is clearly taking an unscientific, invalid position, promotes false
balance and is a disservice to readers (The
San
Diego Union Tribune. Letters and Commentaries).
Joel
A. Harrison (2018 Feb). The So-Called Vaccine Debate, False Balance
in the Mass Media,
and
the Risk to Public Health: Terry Roark’s Opinion Piece in the San
Diego Union-Tribune (Oct
5, 2017) , “Exemptions should be option for parents”.
Science-Based
Medicine.
Joel
A. Harrison, PhD, MPH is a retired epidemiologist who has been writing
articles over the past years supporting vaccinations for Every Child By Two, an excellent non-profit founded in 1991. Every Child By Two has changed to Vaccinate Your Family,
expanding its mission to include vaccines for people of all ages. You
can find Executive Summaries of his previous ECBT articles that
hyperlink to the complete articles as well as his brief biography on the
archived ECBT Expert Commentaries
page. Dr. Harrison has studied and worked in several countries,
including Sweden (where he earned his doctorate) and Canada (where he
earned a Masters degree). Having experienced both the Swedish socialized
health care system and the Canadian non-profit single-payer system,
over the past 30 years he has devoted considerable time to studying
health economics and health care systems, concluding that, though the
Swedish system is excellent, given American culture, he believes that a
non-profit single-payer system would be best option for the United
States. Dr. Harrison is a long time member of Physicians for a National Health Program.