Among the Truthers by Jonathan Kay

Author:Jonathan Kay
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
Publisher: HarperCollins US

The Damaged Survivor

On April 2, 2008, World Autism Awareness Day, Larry King devoted his nightly CNN program to “Jenny McCarthy’s Autism Fight.” Anyone who’d followed the debate over the devastating neurological condition instantly knew what to expect from McCarthy that night: Since 2007, the former Playboy model had become the world’s most influential spout of autism misinformation.

Sure enough, a few minutes into the broadcast, McCarthy began telling King about the miraculous autism discoveries she had made on alternative health websites, which, she claimed, had allowed her own son to “recover” from the incurable condition. She also launched into familiar, discredited theories linking autism to vaccines:

McCARTHY: “Parent after parent after parent says I vaccinated my baby, they got a fever and then they stopped speaking and then became autistic.”

KING: “Is your link scientific or statistical?”

McCARTHY: “Well, I believe that parents’ anecdotal information is science-based information. And when the entire world is screaming the same thing—doctor, I came home. He had a fever. He stopped speaking and then he became autistic. I can’t—I can see if it was just one parent saying this. But when so many—and I speak to thousands of moms every weekend and they’re all standing up and saying the same thing. It’s time to start listening to that. That is science-based information. Parents’ [anecdotes] is science-based information.”

A whole book could be written about the conspiracy theories that traffic on “alternative medicine” websites. These include the idea (as already discussed) that water fluoridation is a plot to destroy our minds; that the contrails emitted by passenger aircraft contain exotic chemicals—“chemtrails”—designed to alter human behavior; that wi-fi computer signals are eroding our children’s brains; and that AIDS and other serious diseases were designed by the U.S. military for the purpose of culling the world’s population. But of all of these, the most durable and widespread is the notion that vaccines cause autism. This is in large part thanks to the advocacy of celebrity laypersons such as McCarthy and their media enablers at The Oprah Show and, until recently, Larry King Live. Since 1998, when the theory was first put forward in a (since debunked) study published in The Lancet medical journal, millions of parents across the Western world have avoided vaccinating their children, leaving them exposed to deadly, and entirely preventable, diseases such as measles, pertussis, and Hib influenza. A disproportionate number of the parents opting out of vaccinations are from wealthy areas of the country, such as Marin County in California, where McCarthy’s brand of quackery has gained a foothold among web-surfing soccer moms.

Vaccines typically are administered to small children in the first two years of life, at around the same time that the first behavioral symptoms of autism manifest themselves. Many doctors believe autism is a genetic disorder programmed into a child’s brain before birth. But parents cannot see their child’s genes. What they can see is the steel needle that penetrates their then-apparently-perfect bundle of joy, injecting a mysterious foreign substance that (according to strangers wearing white lab coats), prevents an as-yet hypothetical medical condition.

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