The power of CHARISMATIC
LEADERSHIP
to derail science has
                  become a
FAMILIAR PHENOMENON

The Post-Truth priorities have driven the rise of SCIENTIFIC DENIALISM:
growing conviction that scientists, in league with governments and Big Pharma are at war with nature and the best interests of humanity.

For some, the necessary response amounts to nothing more than eating organic food, buying local produce and taking large doses of vitamins and supplements every morning – hardly objectionable behaviour, whatever its merits. But the recoil from science becomes dangerous when it threatens public health, or the safety of others.

There is no better example than this than the sustained modern campaign against vaccination.

This egregious form of denialism – a case study in Post-Truth – was triggered by a single study, published in the Lancet in 1998. On the basis of its findings, Dr. Andrew Wakefield, one of the report's authors, told a press conference that there was a potential link between the measles, mumps and rubella vaccine, introduced in the UK ten years previously, and the rising incidence of diagnosed autism.

As the press investigated the original study in more detail, Wakefield's methods were found to be wanting and conflicts of interest revealed. The paper was eventually retracted, ten of thirteen authors withdrew their contributions and Wakefield's license to practice medicine was withdrawn. But the verification process that had discredited him was weaker than the virus of fear he had injected into the popular bloodstream.

In 2001 Marie McCormick, professor of pediatrics at the Harvard School of Public Health, was asked to head the Immunization Safety Review Committee established by the Institute of Medicine (IOM). Though McCormick was not a specialist in the science of vaccination, this proved no impediment to her appointment. Indeed, it was the reason why she had been selected. As Antony S. Fauci, the head of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, explained:
Politically, there is simply no other way to do it.
Experts are often considered tainted. It is an
extremely frustrating fact of modern scientific life.

McCormick's committee delivered its report,Vaccines and Autism, in 2004, establishing beyond any reasonable doubt that there was no link between the two. Crucially, the committee found that unvaccinated children developed autism at the same or a higher rate than those who had been vaccinated. But the report was no match for the hysteria that had now consumed the public debate. The committee was forced to take extraordinary security measures during its final public meeting, after its members were subjected to plausible threats of VIOLENCE, and even advised to keep the location of their hotel accommodation secret.

What followed was an early parable in Post-Truth.

It was beyond rational dispute that, in the developed world at least, vaccination had wiped out cholera, yellow fever, diphtheria, polio, smallpox and (pre-Wakefield) measles. But scientific evidence proved no match for the charisma of celebrity.
In 2007, the model and television personality Jenny McCarthy, whose son Evan is autistic, appeared on Oprah Winfrey's show to take a stand on vaccination. Against the full might of the scientific establishment, she pitted her mommy instinct. Challenged to produce her own evidence, she said: 'My science is named Evan, and he's at home. That's my science'.

In the course of the controversy, doctors had often complained that the web had digitally turbo-charged false science.
McCarty turned this allegation on its head.

The University of Google is where
I got my degree from                                                                   , she declared.

The power of charismatic leadership to derail science is a familiar phenomenon. Thabo Mbeki, the former President of South Africa, gave immense emotional force to the bogus claim that HIV does not cause AIDS – and to the appalling epidemic in his country that remains a crisis to this day.

To the anti-vaccine crusade, Robert F. Kennedy Jr also brought the tinsel of political glamour. The IOM's report, he said, had sought to whitewash the risks of Thimerosal. This was not true, but the charge, made by a Kennedy, had an undoubted impact.

When truth falls in social value, the continuities in social practice it has supported are put in danger.

Before the anti-vaccination movement arose, the diseases against which children were routinely inoculated were widely assumed to be a thing of the past. But, in public health as in politics, Post-Truth breeds ASTONISHING VOLATILITY. When evidence-based research is trusted less than anecdotage, and institutional authority is heeded less than conspiracy theories, the consequences can be upon herd immunity: that is, a level of uptake so high that the illness ceases to spread. Whether that immunity will survive the continuing hysteria over vaccination is an open question.

Source:[1]