My Dear Fellow Lefties,
I’ve always been proud to be called “liberal,” even when the term is hurled as an insult. Hell, especially when it’s hurled as an insult. It’s usually hurled that way by the kind of purposely vapid, proudly ignorant crazy-uncle types who serve as living reminders of why the Founding Fathers chose to build a constitutional republic instead of a popular democracy. To hear it means I’m pissing off the right people.
But every once in a while, the term does connote something of which I’m ashamed. Usually it’s something pretty benign, like the vague condescension of the Whole Foods regular or the humorlessness found on Salon. Sometimes, though, we drift into territory as genuinely harmful as that of our Tea-Partying political foils. We don’t do it often—nothing is more vacuous than “both sides” equivocating—but when we do it, we do it with the kind of conviction that comes from usually being right.
I’m talking about vaccines. This week, the organizers of the Tribeca Film Festival were (thankfully) forced to pull the documentary film Vaxxed from the lineup, after some well-earned backlash from the public. Festival co-founder Robert DeNiro initially defended the film, which pushes the long-discredited connection between vaccines and autism. As the father of a child with autism, DeNiro cited a need for open dialogue on the subject.
Fortunately the outcry—including that from other parents with children on the spectrum—was severe enough to change DeNiro and other organizers’ minds. The anti-vaxx crowd reacted predictably, falling back to the usual formula of seeing any evidence against their beliefs as further proof of the grand conspiracy against them.
The film was directed by Andrew Wakefield, the doctor-cum-grifter originally responsible for the debunked theory. Wakefield’s research, published in the medical journal Lancet in 1998, first drew the connection between vaccines and autism. It laid the foundation for a tin-foil-hat movement that went on to attract legions of largely liberal followers, including celebrities.
Of course, Wakefield’s “research” was bunk. An award-winning investigation by the London Sunday Times unearthed the real conspiracy: one between Wakefield and his business partners. Wakefield was hired by an ambulance-chasing attorney to manufacture damning evidence against the MMR (measles, mumps, rubella) vaccine for use in a class-action lawsuit against the shot’s manufacturers.
The lawsuit went nowhere, but by the time of the Lancet article, Wakefield and a group of investors had already put their money into developing an alternative drug; meaning Wakefield had a clear financial interest in scaring the public away from the vaccine.
Investigations into the study itself found it to have been largely falsified. The Lancet retracted the article, and Wakefield lost his license to practice medicine. Subsequent, larger studies (the Wakefield study included only 12 families), conclusively disproved any link between vaccines and autism. Repeatedly. But the ghost of Wakefield’s fraud lives on, thanks in large part to Kombucha-swilling proselytizers of “alternative” medicine.
Liberals, we’re supposed to be the rational ones. While the right perverts the science around everything from cigarette smoke to global warming to evolution, we’re the alleged defenders of reason. We’re the ones who understand that the American Revolution was an outgrowth of the Enlightenment, not the will of the Baby Jesus. We’re the ones whose dinosaurs don’t wear saddles. We’re the ones who’ve recognized fraudulent “science” from the likes of the Heartland Institute as corporate propaganda in a costume-shop lab coat.
If we abandon that commitment to reason, how are we different from the creationists and moon-landing deniers of the gullible right? How can we decry the magical thinking that produces ideas about border walls and sharia law and trickle-down economics if we refuse to smell our own bullshit?
The vaccine cover-up is no more real than the cover-up of Obama’s Kenyan birth or the War on Christmas. The nefarious autism-spreaders of the medical industry are no less imaginary than the jihadist under your bed or the Welfare Queen in her Cadillac. If we succumb to liberal-friendly magical thinking about drugs and other “unnaturral” things like GMO’s and non-hemp underpants, we’re not fighting for the truth anymore. We’re only fighting for the right to be moronic in our own way.
With vaccines, this is extremely, undeniably, objectively dangerous. Children will die if we allow ourselves to be this committed to fighting our own invisible boogeymen. We liberals are supposed to be the ones willing to set individual preferences aside for the greater good. That’s why they’re always calling us communists, right?
I love our team, guys. I want to see us save all the whales and redistribute all the wealth and snuff out all the bigotry and divisiveness that empower the forces of the right. But to do that requires a commitment to one thing above all else. It requires a commitment to logic. When we prevail, we prevail because we make sense, not because we exploit irrational fears or ignorance. That’s the Republicans’ job.
Let’s not do it for them.
Love,
Conor
