And with good reason.

I am a bit late to the latest round of this party, but as I have previously pointed out, The Huffington Post has been since its inception a bastion of pseudoscience, especially in the medical field. Like distressingly many news outlets, it has decided to abandon all pretense of being “fair and balanced” in its actual content when it comes to its ideological stance.

Arianna Huffington clearly is enamored of anti-scientific pseudomedical nonsense. Earlier in her career she wrote for and frequently appeared on Politically Incorrect with Bill Maher – another quack-friendly media personality.

So it is no surprise that the HuffPo has been a haven for unscientific dangerous medical misinformation. Specifically, writers for the HuffPo, including David Kirby, have consistently taken an anti-vaccine stance.

The science blogging community just can’t keep up with the steady stream of medical stupid coming from the HuffPo, but occasionally an article or group of articles reaches a critical mass of stupid and triggers a response. Such is the case recently.

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I applaud the recent attempts by the American Academy of Pediatrics to fight back against the anti-vaccine misinformation scare-mongering machine. As part of that goal August is Vaccine Awareness Month. However, this just brought home for me how much better the PR machine is on the anti-vax side than on the side of science. Here we are half way through August and I am just learning it is Vaccine Awareness Month. This is a topic I track quite closely, and blog about frequently. Where was the media blitz? Where was the rallying of troops?

The Good

OK – it’s not all bad. They did put out an open letter with a fair number of authoritative signature. Here is a brief excerpt:

We, the undersigned, support immunizations as the safest, most effective way to control and eradicate infectious diseases. This August, as another National Immunization Awareness Month comes to a close, we are reminded that diseases such as smallpox and polio were once commonplace in the United States. Thanks to vaccinations, we have not seen or experienced many of the infectious diseases that gripped past generations, but other countries have not been so fortunate and outbreaks continue in the United States.

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I have been critical of the Huffington Post’s anti-scientific editorial stance. Since the beginning of this online news source it has been a home to the anti-vaccination movement, featuring articles and blogs by David Kirby, Jenny McCarthy, Jim Carey, and RFK Jr. The health section of the the HuffPo is largely composed of credulous promotion of unscientific health claims and gross misinformation. In fact, this has led me to criticize the HuffPo’s de facto  “war on science.”

Recently Dr. Rahul K. Parikh has written an excellent criticism of the Huffington Post for Salon.com. The full article is worth a read, but here are his main points.

He convincingly demonstrates that the anti-scientific editorial stance of the HuffPo comes directly from its founder, Arianna Huffington. She is hostile toward scientific medicine and enamored of so-called “alternative medicine.” Further, she has recruited health bloggers and editors in a scattered fashion, mostly on her personal whim, and has not taken care to provide even a balanced approach to health reporting, let alone a scientific or responsible one.

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In 1918 the Spanish Flu (named after the country of origin of the first identified case) swept the globe, killing 20-40 million people – more than the First World War (which killed 15 million) which was just ending. When an epidemic spreads to multiple regions, especially multiple countries or continents, it becomes a pandemic. Flu pandemics happen every 40 years or so, and we are due for one now.

This is probably partly why there has been so much news attention, even some mild hysteria, surrounding recent outbreaks of swine flu, beginning in Mexico. It is hard to say how many cases and how many deaths there have been so far, because information from Mexico is spotty. Specifically it id difficult to say if people who have died with flu-like symptoms really had the swine flu or something else. Estimates are that about 150 people have died in Mexico with the swine flu. It is clear that we are dealing with a new strain.

Some Background on Influenza

But first, a little background. The influenza or flu virus is an RNA virus that comes in three genera – A, B, and C. Influenza A is the most common type. It can infect mammals and birds, with aquatic birds being its natural endemic host. Each year there is a seasonal epidemic of Influenza A, infecting millions of people and killing 100-200,000 – mostly the very old, the very young, and the sick.

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OK, not really. But in reading Srinivasan Pillay’s latest column in the Huffington Post it struck me that if you remove the headline and the first and last paragraph, the meat of the article is very skeptical. In fact many if not all of the specific points he makes are nearly identical to ones I have made in this blog. His only problem is that he comes to the exact wrong conclusion from the facts he presents. So his essay is almost skeptical if you go by word count.

Readers will recall that last week I blasted Pillay for defending distant healing with horrendously pseudoscientific arguments.  So it’s a bit surprising that he seems to understand many concepts critical to the skeptical perspective. In my opinion this make Pillay a crank – he has the facts at hand, but twists them in service to an agenda of scientifically bizarre conclusions.

Rather than extensively quoting (you can read the original article) I will summarize Pillay’s points:

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It is without controversy that the number of autism diagnoses being made is on the rise. In 1991 there were about 6 cases per 10,000 births, and in 2001 there were about 42. This number continues to rise at about the same rate.

The cause of this rise, however, is very controversial. There are basically two schools of thought: 1 – that true autism rates are on the rise, and 2 – that the measured rise is an artifact of increased surveillance and a broadening of the definition. A new study published today in the journal Epidemiology lends support to the school claiming that autism rates are truly rising – or at least that is how proponents are interpreting it. After a closer look, I am not so sure.

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There is a dedicated fringe anti-vaccine movement. They are dedicated to some permutation of the collection of beliefs that vaccines are: 1) not effective; 2) have not reduced or eliminated any infectious disease; 3) are not safe; and 4) are a conspiracy of Big Pharma, the government, and paid-off doctors. Specific claims have wandered over the years, but they have as a central theme that vaccines are bad. When one specific claim collapses, they will move on to the next anti-vaccine claim.

While anti-vaccine cranks have been around as long as vaccines, it is only recently that they have captured the attention of the mainstream media and the skeptical movement and the battle has really been engaged.

Anti-vaccinationists have focused much of their recent efforts on the claim that vaccines cause autism. At first the MMR vaccine was blamed, sparked by a now-discredited study performed by Andrew Wakefield. This led to declining vaccination rates in the UK and a resurgence of measles.

As the MMR claim was in decline (although by no means abandoned), attention shifted to thimerosal – a mercury-based preservative in some vaccines. There are many flaws with the thimerosal hypothesis, and numerous studies have shown no link between thimerosal and autism or any neurological disorder. But the fatal blow to the thimerosal hypothesis was struck when thimerosal was removed from the routine childhood vaccine schedule (thimerosal, incidentally, was never in the MMR vaccine) in the US by 2002. In the subsequent 6 years the rate of autism diagnoses kept increasing at their previous rate, without even a blip. Only the most rabid (or scientifically illiterate)  anti-vaccine fanatics still cling to the thimerosal claim.

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In response to my blog post on Monday, David Kirby wrote a response in the Huffington Post and Dr. Jon Poling (father of Hannah Poling) wrote an open letter to me, placed in the comment section and posted at Age of Autism. It seems only polite that I respond to their kind attention.

The primary focus of my original post (which I further developed yesterday) was that the media is focusing too much attention on what celebrities and politicians are saying about the controversy surrounding the discredited notion that vaccines are a significant cause of autism. Over the past year Jenny McCarthy (now joined by her boyfriend Jim Carrey) has become the major spokesperson for a movement that, at its core, is anti-vaccine and is dedicated to the scientific opinion that vaccines are toxic and cause autism. Recently actress Amanda Peet joined the fray, professing her belief that vaccines are safe, are not associated with autism, and that parents who do not vaccinate their children are “parasites” for depending on other parents who do. (She later apologized for that remark, calling it “divisive”.)

While I appreciate Amanda Peet’s support, I feel strongly that scientific questions should be handled by the scientific community. Celebrities are great when they support causes – but when they second guess the scientific community and decide to advocate for their own scientific conclusions, they are more likely to cause harm than good. Continue Reading »

I have bemoaned in the past the celebrity culture in which we grant more weight to the opinions of celebrities than they deserve. It seems to be part of human nature to idolize and hero-worship. It can be benign, even healthy. Young athletes idolizing the talent and hard work of sports stars may be spurred on to greater achievement themselves. I also think that intellectual heroes, like Carl Sagan and Stephen J. Gould, can have an enormously positive influence on culture and society.

TV and movie stars, however, are famous because their profession involves public performance in a medium that potentially reaches millions. This is fine as far as it goes – I have no problem admiring stars for their entertainment value, their charisma, and their artistic talent and skills. It is reasonable to admire artists for their art.

The problem comes, in my opinion, when actors and actresses feel that their political opinions or ideology are somehow more valuable than anyone else’s because of their fame. I don’t necessarily blame them – they have a right to express their opinions and their fame gives them an outlet. I do think that if they are going to trade on their fame then they have a responsibility for what they promote, but I am not questioning their right to promote whatever they choose. Rather I maintain that the public should largely not care what celebrities think about issues that have nothing to do with their art and profession.

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Writing for the Huffington Post (an online news outlet that regularly hosts pseudoscience and anti-vaccinationist ravings), Deepak Chopra seeks to inform us: Why the Paranormal is Normal. What he actually demonstrates is his ability to twist and abuse language in an attempt to distract and confuse his reader. At this verbal deception Chopra is truly the master.

Language is important- words matter. Anyone who has studied a technical field should appreciate the need to use precise and unambiguous terminology. Good writers will also carefully choose words to illuminate, rather than obfuscate, what they wish to convey. It is also true that humans generally think in words. Language is closely tied to conscious thought. We therefore need clear language in order to think clearly. Words are also handle-bars with which we can grab hold of concepts – therefore by expanding our vocabulary we can expand our intellectual horizons.

Those who wish to push a claim or point of view that is illogical, at odds with reality, or simply does not make sense will often use language to force-fit their ideas to reality. They will use ambiguous terms, or will shift the definition of terms as needed, for example. This is exactly what Chopra does in order to make his dubious point.

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