Lopate v. Jacoby on Vaccination

Leonard Lopate of WNYC interviewed Susan Jacoby, author of The Age of American Unreason, this week. Mr. Lopate generally draws his subjects out in his interviews – giving them broad range to discuss their views. He has a classic NPR voice and style – non-confrontational and laid-back.  I don’t know much about Susan Jacoby – but by her interviewee style, she seems to be shrill and a bit of a bully – not someone who attacks other people harsher than they deserve, but one who can never understand why they believe what they do – and so, who denigrates them, puts them down, and looks down on them while never understanding where they stand.  After hearing about one minute of the interview, I already knew I didn’t like her style of speaking or reasoning.  She has an interesting case – in a similar way to Michael Gerson – one that is ambitious and interesting yet obviously flawed.  Below is an exchange – which takes place about ten minutes into the audio on the site – in which Mr. Lopate reveals that he has a personal stake in the issue which Ms. Jacoby is mocking…

Lopate:

You also talk about junk thought and junk science…Does that also grow out of poor education?

Jacoby:

Of course it grows out of poor education. And here’s where poor education meets the media and it may also be why people want both creationism and evolution taught in schools. There is this powerful idea of bogus objectivity which is more powerful because everybody is getting most of their hits of news from video rather than reading anything about it which is that truth is always equidistant from two points; that there is never any issue in which there really is a right side and a wrong side, so that for example, I turn on the television new shows over and over, and there is a powerful anti-vaccination movement in this country. It is a movement largely spurred by parents who tragically have autistic children and one of the things that has happened is that autism has risen as the number of immunizations has risen. Now this is again a fundamental failure of thinking; what happens is that at about age two is when the symptoms of autism are first noticed by parents. Around age two is when children are getting a lot of their shots. But there have been rigorous scientific studies showing that the rate of autism is no different in the immunized and non-immunized children. But every time the TV presents something on this there is a crying parent on one side and a cold-hearted scientist on the other saying, “That isn’t so.” And the television throws up his hands and says, “Well, you know, this person says this and this person says that…”

Lopate:

Susan…Susan…I am the parent of an autistic son. He is thirteen years old. He got his shots at eighteen months and suddenly stopped talking. I think it is quite reasonable for people who have witnessed that and have witnessed the change from 1 in 10,000 to 1 in 150 in the time when we suddenly started giving kids the MMR shots with mercury in it to make that kind of connection. There are doctors who do believe it is true. I think there are a lot of people who for all sorts of reasons believe…I’m just not gonna let you get away with that one. It was too simple. But I go along with your general premise here in this book. This is just one case where I think that there are just too many conflicting desires and people and people in medicine and the pharmaceutical industry and in politics to just simply say that the parents are wrong.

Jacoby:

Well, first of all, I am very sorry that I unadvertantly [sic] touched on something that touches on your so personally, but I do think – and I’ll move on to another analogy, because I really regret this, that you’ve been personally touched by this – but I do think that the scientific evidence…and mercury has also long since been removed from these vaccines so there also have been studies on that…

Lopate:

No – not even there – it’s been removed but the vaccines continue to be used with the mercury until they finish up the complete amount. Anyway, it’s a whole other thing and whether some people are predisposed to be able to handle heavy metals and some are not; whether there are all sorts of genetic predispositions at play hjere. There is a whole…a very complicated argument. It’s not a simple one.

Jacoby:

Well, it’s not argument that’s every presented as complicated on television…

Lopate:

Alas.

Jacoby:

If you had said that it’s a very complicated argument and I have oversimplified; but what television does is it oversimplifies it!