"Building bridges" to the leaders of the anti-vaccine movement? [Respectful Insolence]

Thanks to Andrew Wakefield, it’s been pretty much vaccine week for me. Well, mostly anyway, I did manage to have some fun with Mike Adams and the immune system, but otherwise it’s been all vaccines all the time this week. As I mentioned yesterday, at the risk of dwelling on one topic so long that I start driving away readers, I’ve just decided to ride the wave and go with it until it’s over. Unless something blows up over the weekend, I rather suspect that, for all intents and purposes, it’ll be over as of today and I can move on to other topics starting Monday. At least I hope so.

But there’s one more issue related to the Andrew Wakefield case that I feel I’d be remiss not to cover, as it’s a very important issue. I was reminded of it by Chris Mooney in a post entitled Will the Vaccine-Autism Saga Finally End? He and I both know the answer to this question (no), but in discussing why neither the General Medical Council’s finding Andrew Wakefield to have behaved dishonestly and unethically in doing the “research” that led to his 1998 Lancet paper that launched the MMR scare in the U.K. nor the decision of the Lancet’s editors to retract said 1998 paper would end the vaccine autism manufactroversy, Mooney suggested a way out of this problem that is profoundly misguided, naive, and reveals a profound misunderstanding of the anti-vaccine movement.

Before I explain what it was he said and why I find it so problematic, let me just point out that I was actually surprised at his post, because Chris has done good work before. I like Chris, by and large. I’ve gone drinking with Chris before (in Washington, DC three years ago, when I was at a conference). Moreover, last year Chris published an excellent overview of the anti-vaccine movement and why it is a danger to public health for the June issue of Discover Magazine, entitled Why Does the Vaccine/Autism Controversy Live On? (In the interest of full disclosure, I’ll point out that Chris interviewed me for the article, and I did my best to give him as much background as I could, but he also interviewed numerous other people.) In rereading it, saw the germ of a promising idea for how to try to restore public confidence in vaccines, but in reading Mooney’s latest, I wonder if he’s taken that idea too far. I’ll explain.

Read the rest of this post… | Read the comments on this post…