Bad Science

For all that it may seem trite and voyeuristic to you, this event was central to the coverage of MMR. 2002 was the year of Leo Blair, the year of Wakefield’s departure from the Royal Free, and it was the peak of the media coverage, by a very long margin.

What was in these stories?

The MMR scare has created a small cottage industry of media analysis, so there is a fair amount known about the coverage. In 2003 the Economic and Social Research Council (ESRC) published a paper on the media’s role in the public understanding of science, which sampled all the major science media stories from January to September 2002, the peak of the scare. Ten per cent of all science stories were about MMR, and MMR was also by far the most likely to generate letters to the press (so people were clearly engaging with the issue); by far the most likely science topic to be written about in opinion or editorial pieces; and it generated the longest stories. MMR was the biggest, most heavily covered science story for years.

Pieces on GM food, or cloning, stood a good chance of being written by specialist science reporters, but for stories on MMR these reporters were largely sidelined, and 80 per cent of the coverage of the biggest science story of the year was by generalist reporters. Suddenly we were getting comment and advice on complex matters of immunology and epidemiology from people who would more usually have been telling us about a funny thing that happened with the au pair on the way to a dinner party. Nigella Lawson, Libby Purves, Suzanne Moore, Lynda Lee- Potter and Carol Vorderman, to name only a few, all wrote about their ill-informed concerns on MMR, blowing hard on their toy trumpets. The anti-MMR lobby, meanwhile, developed a reputation for targeting generalist journalists wherever possible, feeding them stories, and actively avoiding health or science correspondents.

This is a pattern which has been seen before. If there is one thing which has adversely affected communication between scientists, journalists and the public, it is the fact that science journalists simply do not cover major science news stories. From drinking with science journalists, I know that much of the time, nobody even runs these major stories by them for a quick check.

Again, I’m not speaking in generalities here. During the crucial two days after the GM ‘Frankenstein foods’ story broke in February 1999, not a single one of the news articles, opinion pieces or editorials on the subject was written by a science journalist. A science correspondent would have told his or her editor that when someone presents their scientific findings about GM potatoes causing cancer in rats, as Arpad Pusztai did, on ITV’s World in Action rather than in an academic journal, then there’s something fishy going on. Pusztai’s experiment was finally published a year later – after a long period when nobody could comment on it, because nobody knew what he’d actually done – and when all was revealed in a proper publication, his experimental results did not contain information to justify the media’s scare.

This sidelining of specialist correspondents when science becomes front-page news, and the fact that they are not even used as a resource during these periods, has predictable consequences. Journalists are used to listening with a critical ear to briefings from press officers, politicians, PR executives, salespeople, lobbyists, celebrities and gossip-mongers, and they generally display a healthy natural scepticism: but in the case of science, they don’t have the skills to critically appraise a piece of scientific evidence on its merits. At best the evidence of these ‘experts’ will only be examined in terms of who they are as people, or perhaps who they have worked for. Journalists – and many campaigners – think that this is what it means to critically appraise a scientific argument, and seem rather proud of themselves when they do it.

The scientific content of stories – the actual experimental evidence – is brushed over and replaced with didactic statements from authority figures on either side of the debate, which contributes to a pervasive sense that scientific advice is somehow arbitrary, and predicated upon a social role – the ‘expert’ – rather than on transparent and readily understandable empirical evidence. Worse than this, other elements are brought into the foreground: political issues, Tony Blair’s refusal to say whether his baby had received the vaccine, mythical narratives, a lionised ‘maverick’ scientist, and emotive appeals from parents.

A reasonable member of the public, primed with such a compelling battery of human narrative, would be perfectly entitled to regard any expert who claimed MMR was safe as thoughtless and dismissive, especially if that claim came without any apparent supporting evidence.

The story was also compelling because, like GM food, the MMR story seemed to fit a fairly simple moral template, and one which I myself would subscribe to: big corporations are often dodgy, and politicians are not to be trusted. But it matters whether your political and moral hunches are carried in the right vehicle. Speaking only for myself, I am very wary of drug companies, not because I think all medicine is bad, but because I know they have hidden unflattering data, and because I have seen their promotional material misrepresent science. I also happen to be very wary of GM food – but not because of any inherent flaws in the technology, and not because I think it is uniquely dangerous. Somewhere between splicing in genes for products that will treat haemophilia at one end, and releasing genes for antibiotic resistance into the wild at the other, lies a sensible middle path for the regulation of GM, but there’s nothing desperately remarkable or uniquely dangerous about it as a technology.

Despite all that, I remain extremely wary of GM for reasons that have nothing to do with the science, simply because it has created a dangerous power shift in agriculture, and ‘terminator seeds’, which die at the end of the season, are a way to increase farmers’ dependency, both nationally and in the developing world, while placing the global food supply in the hands of multinational corporations. If you really want to dig deeper, Monsanto is also very simply an unpleasant company (it made Agent Orange during the Vietnam War, for example).

Witnessing the blind, seething, thoughtless campaigns against MMR and GM – which mirror the infantile train of thought that ‘homeopathy works because the Vioxx side-effects were covered up by Merck’ – it’s easy to experience a pervasive sense of lost political opportunities, that somehow all of our valuable indignation about development issues, the role of big money in our society, and frank corporate malpractice, is being diverted away from anywhere it could be valid and useful, and into puerile, mythical fantasies. It strikes me that if you genuinely care about big business, the environment and health, then you’re wasting your time with jokers like Pusztai and Wakefield.

Science coverage is further crippled, of course, by the fact that the subject can be quite difficult to understand. This in itself can seem like an insult to intelligent people, like journalists, who fancy themselves as able to understand most things, but there has also been an acceleration in complexity in recent times. Fifty years ago you could sketch out a full explanation of how an AM radio worked on the back of a napkin, using basic school-level knowledge of science, and build a crystal set in a classroom which was essentially the same as the one in your car. When your parents were young they could fix their own car, and understand the science behind most of the everyday technology they encountered, but this is no longer the case. Even a geek today would struggle to give an explanation of how his mobile phone works, because technology has become more difficult to understand and explain, and everyday gadgets have taken on a ‘black box’ complexity that can feel sinister, as well as intellectually undermining. The seeds were sown.

But we should return to the point. If there was little science, then what did appear in all these long stories on MMR? Going back to the 2002 data from the ESRC, only a quarter mentioned Andrew Wakefield, which seems odd, considering he was the cornerstone of the story. This created the erroneous impression that there was a large body of medical opinion which was suspicious of MMR, rather than just one ‘maverick’. Less than a third of broadsheet reports referred to the overwhelming evidence that MMR is safe, and only 11 per cent mentioned that it is regarded as safe in the ninety other countries in which it is used.

It was rare to find much discussion of the evidence at all, as it was considered too complicated, and when doctors tried to explain it they were frequently shouted down, or worse still, their explanations were condensed into bland statements that ‘science had shown’ there was nothing to worry about. This uninformative dismissal was pitted against the emotive concerns of distressed parents.

As 2002 wore on, things got really strange. Some newspapers, such as the Daily Mail and the Daily Telegraph, made MMR the focus of a massive political campaign, and the beatification of Wakefield reached a kind of fever pitch. Lorraine Fraser had an exclusive interview with him in the Telegraph in which he was described as ‘a champion of patients who feel their fears have been ignored’. She wrote a dozen similar articles over the next year (and her reward came when she was named British Press Awards Health Writer of the Year 2002, a gong I do not myself expect to receive).

Justine Picardie did a lavish photo feature on Wakefield, his house and his family for the