CJR - Measles, Whooping Cough, Mumps, Rubella - Brought To You By "Balanced" Reporting
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In the US, Wakefield’s paper didn’t garner much media attention at first. Concern about a link between vaccines and autism had quietly built among parents and some physicians throughout the 1990s, but it revolved around vaccines containing the preservative thimerosal, not around Wakefield’s specific concerns about the MMR vaccine. It wasn’t until a year later, when the Food and Drug Administration recommended removing thimerosal from childhood vaccines as a precautionary measure—stressing that it could find no positive link with autism—that the American press tucked into the debate. In 2000, Dan Burton, a former Republican Congressman from Indiana who believes that vaccines caused his grandson’s autism, held congressional hearings wherein he asked the Department of Health and Human Services to study the alleged link, and Wakefield made his way into The New York Times for the first time. The 820-word story, buried on page 20, emphasized the danger of sowing mistrust of vaccines and the fact that the mainstream medical community considered them safe. Then, six months later, Wakefield appeared on 60 Minutes, where he linked vaccines to what he called an “epidemic of autism.” In 2002, Burton held more hearings that led to more stories on the dangers of vaccines. Major reports from the Institute of Medicine, part of the National Academy of Sciences, in 2001 and 2004, rejected the link and drew a lot of coverage, but the level of concern among the public remained on the rise.
A number of studies linked coverage by the British media in that early period to declining rates of vaccinations and outbreaks of rare diseases. But again, the effect was slower to take hold in the US. In 2008, a group of epidemiologists in Philadelphia compared annual mmr immunization rates from 1995 to 2004 to coverage that mentioned a link with autism. Their study, published in the journal Pediatrics, found that MMR vaccinations started to decline in the US years before news coverage took off in 2001, suggesting “a limited influence of mainstream media on mmr immunization in the United States.”
That influence soon began to grow, however. In 2005, an unvaccinated Indiana teenager returned from a church trip to a Romanian orphanage, where she’d unknowingly contracted measles. The next day, she attended a gathering of fellow congregants, many of whom were also unvaccinated, and triggered what at the time was the largest measles outbreak in the US in nine years. “Concern about adverse events, particularly related to media reports of a putative association between vaccinations and autism and of the dangers of thimerosal, appeared to play a major role in the decision of these families to decline vaccination,” according to a 2006 study published in The New England Journal of Medicine.
The year of the Indiana outbreak was a banner year for promoting the autism-vaccine link in the media. That summer, Rolling Stone and Salon published Robert Kennedy Jr.’s article alleging that the federal government covered up the danger of vaccines. A laundry list of corrections and clarifications followed, and in 2011, Salon retracted the article (Rolling Stone never did). But it was the work of two veteran journalists, not Kennedy’s shameful piece, that really kept the story simmering. In February 2005, St. Martin’s Press published Evidence of Harm by journalist David Kirby, in which Kirby didn’t reach any specific conclusions about a link but presented a litany of parental suspicions that suggested one. And that winter, Dan Olmsted, a senior editor at United Press International, turned out a series called “Age of Autism,” for which he conducted an admittedly unscientific survey that found lower autism rates among ostensibly unvaccinated Amish communities (other studies found that vaccination rates are high in those communities). Few newspapers picked up Olmsted’s articles, but they got the attention of Representative Carolyn Maloney, a Democrat from New York. In March 2006, Maloney held a briefing at the National Press Club, where she cited Olmsted’s work as her motivation for drafting legislation that would compel the federal government to study autism rates in unvaccinated populations.
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http://www.cjr.org/feature/sticking_with_the_truth.php