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-Measles, the most contagious disease in the world,
spreading in hot spots around the country.
-In 2019, the United States hit an alarming new record.
-Measles surges to a 25-year high.
-It's the latest in a series of outbreaks
that are drawing attention to a growing problem.
-Some people are deciding they're afraid of vaccines.
-The return of measles isn't just a danger
to those who refuse to vaccinate.
Newborns who can't get inoculated
and other vulnerable people
depend on something called herd immunity to protect them.
Take whooping cough.
It requires one of the highest percentages of the population
to be immunized to prevent the disease from spreading.
If not, the consequences can be dire.
-[ Coughing ]
-The risk of whooping cough
may sound like something from the past,
but it's still very real.
Today, California reported more than 4,200 cases.
Nine people have died, all of them infants.
-Whoo!
-For San Francisco mother Mariah Bianchi,
those numbers are more than just statistics.
When her son was born in August 2005,
as a nurse, she realized something was wrong.
-It was just like he was so lethargic,
and I knew that there was just something.
I'm like, "I can't keep him awake."
We went to the doctor, and she said,
"I want you to go to the hospital."
As soon as he got there, he went into cardiac arrest.
-What she didn't realize was that the immunity
from her own whooping cough vaccine had worn off,
and her newborn was too young to be inoculated.
-And they started CPR right away
for probably about 45 minutes or so.
As a nurse, I'm thinking, "I know what that means."
Your brain is not getting oxygen.
Your body is failing.
And, um, the surgeon came out,
and he said his chance of survival is very low.
We made the most compassionate decision you could,
but we just said, "No, don't -- Don't do it. Just stop."
-Dylan Bianchi died 17 days after he was born.
So, how does society get to the point
where some populations are left vulnerable?
Vaccines are one of the greatest achievements in public health.
-Dr. Jonas Salk discovers the vaccine that promises
to wipe out childhood crippling and killing enemy polio.
-Polio, smallpox, diphtheria --
no longer a threat in the U.S. because of vaccines.
And, in 2000, another watershed moment.
-The CDC reports the measles
practically wiped out tonight in the United States.
-But that report proved overly optimistic.
-The measles vaccine has been so effective, it doesn't seem
like something we need to protect our children from.
You have this sort of fundamental paradox of vaccines
that they become a victim of their own success.
-Science writer Seth Mnookin
examines the fear about the measles vaccine
in his book "The Panic Virus."
He says it can be traced to a moment in the late 1990s.
-The current vaccine scares and controversies
that we're still dealing with today
stem from a 1998 paper that appeared in The Lancet,
a very respected medical journal published out of the U.K.
-The paper, written by Dr. Andrew Wakefield,
claimed there might be a connection between
the measles, mumps, rubella vaccine and autism.
-In his press conference, Andrew Wakefield stood up
and said, "Parents should not give their children
the MMR vaccine, period,
until we are able to get to the bottom of this."
-The MMR vaccination in combination --
that I think that it should be suspended
in favor of the single vaccines.
-And what the media in the U.K. did was they ran with that.
-Doctors at the Royal Free Hospital believe
they may have discovered a link between the combination vaccine
and a bowel disease that can progress to autism.
-The notion that you would take a 12-person case study
and make claims about a population as a whole
is ridiculous.
This paper was historically bad.
-It was later revealed that Wakefield also had
a financial stake in trying to establish a connection
between the MMR vaccine and autism.
Wakefield denies the allegations,
but records show he was paid more than £435,000.
-Andrew Wakefield was receiving money
from a lawyer who was working with parents
intent on suing vaccine manufacturers.
Perhaps the most shocking revelation
is that he faked some of the data.
He's lost his medical license.
The Lancet paper has been retracted.
But he had very effectively positioned himself as a martyr,
and, in some odd way,
every piece of evidence that comes out against Wakefield
sort of solidifies his standing in the community
that still pays attention to him.
-Follow-up studies of hundreds of thousands of children
did not find any evidence that the MMR vaccine causes autism,
but, early on, fears about vaccine safety took hold
because complicated science proved difficult
for public-health institutions to communicate.
Case in point, their response when concerns were raised
over a vaccine preservative called thimerosal,
which contains ethyl mercury.
-Children are getting mercury injected
into their bodies with vaccines.
-That's right -- mercury, a known neurotoxin.
-But ethyl mercury in thimerosal
is not the same as the toxic methyl mercury,
which is found in fish and accumulates in the body.
Nevertheless, the Public Health Service
and the American Academy of Pediatrics
recommended thimerosal be removed,
and their messaging backfired.
-In 1999, health officials
denied a link between vaccines and the autism epidemic
yet urged vaccine makers to take out the mercury just to be safe.
-What the American Academy of Pediatrics said is,
"We are recommending this step
so we can make safe vaccines even safer."
As a parent, if you tell me something's safe,
I don't think that's on a sliding scale.
I assume that if you say it's safe,
it is safe for my child.
It's not safe, safer, safest.
There are almost two languages here.
There's the language of science, and then there's English,
and in the language of science, you have these signifiers like
"to the best of our knowledge," "as far as we know"...
-Based on the available scientific evidence...
-Because you can't say anything with 100% --
You can't prove a negative.
And so when scientists speak in their language
and the rest of us translate that into English,
it sounds like they're saying
something very different than they're saying.
-Based on what we know right now,
we don't think that there is an association.
-But that's not saying with 100% certainty there isn't one.
-That is saying that based on the evidence
that we have right now, we don't think that there is one.
-Either because the reporter doesn't understand
what's actually going on
or because they're looking to generate a story,
they then take that and make it seem
as if the scientist is saying,
"I think there's a possibility that vaccines do cause autism,"
when, in fact, that's not it at all.
-News organizations should exercise judgment
about what goes out over their air.
-Brendan Nyhan is a professor at the University of Michigan
who studies how misinformation spreads
and the role of the media.
-What's particularly important is to think about
the overall scientific consensus --
where is the weight of the evidence,
and is our reporting reflecting that or not?
That's what's often gone astray in the vaccine debate.
-It's time for everyone to redirect the questions
toward finding the cause of autism.
It is not, however, vaccinations.
-Controversial subject. -Not controversial subject.
-Well, but controversial for parents who still believe.
-It is not controversial, Matt.
It's time for kids to get their vaccines.
-If it weren't controversial... -Everyday people can't be
fact checkers for every story about vaccines,
and when journalists don't give people the weight
of the scientific evidence, they're letting them down.
-She got her vaccinations, she ran a low-grade fever,
she had a little rash, and then she stopped talking.
-A false sense of balance was also created
when scientific evidence
was equated with people's personal experiences.
-Reporting fell into this
"on the one hand, on the other hand" fallacy,
this notion that if you have two sides that are disagreeing,
that means that you should present
both of them with equal weight.
-We vaccinated our baby, and something happened.
That's it.
-Jenny McCarthy has had more to do
with popularizing the notion that vaccines are dangerous
than any other single person in the United States.
-We begin, of course, with Jenny McCarthy,
the actress and entertainment personality.
Her son, Evan, has autism.
-She's very smart. She's telegenic.
-Lookit! It's plain and simple! It's [bleep]!
-No, it's -- -Yes, it is!
-When I look at clips of her, it's a completely unfair fight.
-My science is named Evan, and he's at home.
That's my science. [ Cheers and applause ]
-Jenny McCarthy has said many times,
and oftentimes very loudly,
that, you know, her child is her scientific fact.
Any scientist or any science reporter
who's familiar with how science works
would say that, no, any one person is an anecdote,
and the plural of anecdote is not data.
You know, it's just a story.
-But stories are powerful.
While vaccination rates are high nationwide,
there are some religious enclaves
and communities of well-educated upper-middle-class people
where vaccine hesitancy runs strong.
-I was interviewing an epidemiologist, and he said,
"Oh, yeah, we completely know we're gonna have communities
that have issues with vaccine uptake.
We take a map and stick a pin
wherever there's a Whole Foods and draw a circle around it,
and that's where we're gonna have problems."
He was obviously being facetious.
-Exasperated health officials are trying to come up
with new ways to communicate with the public.
Brendan Nyhan conducted a study
and watched how hesitant parents reacted
when they were shown information from the CDC website,
stating there's no evidence the MMR vaccine causes autism.
-The good news was it did cause parents
to be less likely to believe in the myth
that the MMR vaccine causes autism.
The bad news is, however, that it made them less likely
to say they would vaccinate a child,
which is precisely the opposite of what we would hope to see.
What we found is that telling people
the correct information wasn't actually effective.
-That highlights how susceptible people can be
to misleading information.
A recent investigation found that Internet trolls from Russia
targeted Americans
and used the topic of vaccines to create division.
Some states are weighing in and taking action.
-California now has one of the strictest
school vaccination laws in the country.
-There will no longer be religious exemptions.
There will no longer be personal-belief exemptions.
After an outbreak linked to Disneyland in 2014,
California enacted
one of the toughest vaccine laws in the country.
Still, some parents are trying to circumvent the law.
For Mariah Bianchi, the notion of leaving
some people vulnerable is hard to understand.
-What does it take?
How many times do you have to tell people or talk about it?
We all have a role in helping each other
to protect each other.
A vaccine-preventable disease should not have killed my son.
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