Rambling Thoughts for a Sunday

Seth Mnookin has written The Panic Virus, a study of broad public acceptance of a vaccine-autism link.

Here is the Amazon page for the book.
I've written on this and related subjects before in this blog, the first time almost four years ago now, when I was as I said at the time only vaguely aware that there was a controversy underway.

When I first heard about this, though, my thoughts focused on the name "Seth Mnookin." Who the heck is he? It took some wracking of the brain but I eventually realized where I had first encountered that name. He wrote a (fascinating) account of the Jayson Blair scandal back in 2004. Here's a review of that book, by Michael Getler.

Getler called Mnookin's book "a must-read for anyone interested in this episode and what it says about the larger issues of journalism today."

Going back a bit further, Mnookin is a former heroin addict. Not long after the Jayson Blair book had made Mnookin famous he recounted his experiences along that line in SLATE.

He tells in that article for example about the time he was thrown out of the "hard-core treatment center in Boca Raton" for having sex with one of the other patients there (that's a no-no? even though she was 18?) and tells of being "given two black Hefty bags filled with my clothes and told I had 10 minutes to get off that property." Fortunately, things headed up for him from there.

So, what does Slate have to say about Mnookin's latest? You can find out here.

Even before all of that, Mnookin was a writer for Addicted to Noise, an online music magazine. You can read about A to N here.

I was planning to bring all this back to the issue of an alleged vaccine/autism link. Really I was. But now I'm thinkiing ... to heck with that. Enjoy your Sunday, everyone.

Kudos to Brian Deer

Who is Brian Deer? He is a reporter who works for the SUNDAY TIMES, who did a thorough investigation of the alleged connection between the MMR vaccine and autism, an investigation that forced the Lancet into its retraction on January 28 of this year.

I had heard of that retraction, of course. I noted the news thereof casually in stories like this one soon after it happened. But Deer's role had not registered for me, until I saw a write-up in the latest issue of Health Care News, a publication of The Heartland Institute.

Heartland quotes Trisha Greenhalgh, a professor of primary health care at University College, London: "The hero of this story is Brian Deer, who persevered for years even after the Lancet editors had apparently done their investigation. Increasingly the knowledge to nail people like Wakefield is in the public domain, so journalists can play the 'free market' to their advantage."

Greenhalgh is referring there to the fact that back in 2004, the Lancet ran an internal investigation and issued a partial retraction. But Deer continued to research the matter for six years, producing in time a full retraction.

The cause of autism remains unknown, but the notion that it is due to vaccines seems to derive its plausibility from the matter of timing -- symptoms manifest themselves at around that time in a growing child's life when he receives these shots. One might as plausibly say, though, that going to junior high school causes acne, on precisely the same evidence.

Anyway: Kudos for Deer.