My approach was certainly based on a concrete controversy: do vaccines cause autism? It was to a large degree set off by a man who was paid by barristers looking to sue MMR vaccine manufacturers, and Wakefield cherry-picked his data to arrive at the vaccines-and-autism link. Thimerosal was fingered as the likely culprit, though follow-up studies failed to show the link, inasmuch as you can prove a negative. As these studies have been published, those looking for the link between autism and vaccines have moved to new causes, with some such as Jenny McCarthy saying, in effect, it was never about the thimerosal.

Part of my frustration is that there needs to be a good debate about vaccines. Every vaccine carries with it a risk, and it’s hard enough sorting through the data and factoring in that companies producing vaccines have money riding on us using them without a lot of chaff thrown into the mix. Arguments such as those produced by the most vocal of the anti-vaccine crowd do little but polarize, so that those who might have been willing to have a thoughtful discussion of vaccines and their dangers feel they have no choice but to support vaccines completely in hopes of keeping the population above the herd immunity limit.

To Kate, I have studied scientific research methodology at postgraduate level. I understand how science works, but as someone who also has a background in social research I also have an appreciation of how ‘truth’ (scientific or otherwise) is increasingly becoming something that is sold to the highest bidder.

If you don’t understand the vested interest pharmaceutical companies have in selling their products (with vaccines a particularly profitable pursuit) then you are the one demonstrating the most common way Americans fail to understand their reality – that almost everything around them has been subverted or co-opted by commercial interests. I suggest you go have a look at the links between pharma investors, the mass media, the FDA and the government.

To be fair, humans overall are bad at risk assessment. We overemphasize rare risks and downplay common ones. Decoupling correlation from causation is also hard for us — we’re pattern-matching machines. That serves us well in some cases, and not so well in others (hi there, face on Mars!).