The Real Problem With Anti-Vaxxers

Whooping cough under a microscope

Earlier this year, I blogged for Boise Weekly about a whooping cough outbreak in Idaho and eastern Washington. The disease, which is highly contagious and particularly dangerous to infants, had been pretty much cornered in the 20th century by a vaccination campaign. In late 2013, however, it had cropped up near Pullman, Wash., and in Idaho's Marsh Valley. At the time, I wondered why, when we can imprison people for knowingly transmitting HIV, we can't do the same to parents who pose a health risk to their communities by deliberately not vaccinating their children.

Failing to vaccinate disgusts me. We walk past idiots every day—people who deny the authenticity of Barack Obama's birth certificate, who claim the Earth is 5,000 years old, or aren't climate scientists but are pretty sure global warming, er, climate change is a liberal scare tactic—but they pose no immediate threat to anyone. Anti-vaxxers are a different breed of idiot. They're a direct threat to everyone around them. If an anti-vaxxer picks her nose and uses a handrail or a doorknob, that doorknob or handrail becomes a public health hazard. They do this because they mistrust the medical establishment, and couch their ugly gripe with modern medicine in terms of reasonable doubt and "researching both sides of the issue." 

While randomly surfing social media this afternoon, I noticed that a friend had posted a link to an Atlantic article containing an interview with the son of polio vaccine-developer Jonas Salk. According to the article, in 1952, there were 60,000 reported cases of polio in America. 3,000 of those cases were fatal, and another 21,000 left victims paralyzed. In 1955, Salk developed a vaccine for the illness, and less than a decade later, the disease had all but disappeared. Oct. 28 would have been Salk's 100th birthday.

Below my friend's link was a comment that read:

"This is a really heart felt article! I'm researching both sides of the argument currently. Here's an article that talks about the downside of those very same polio vaccinations that were given to children in 1950-1963 that contained SV40 which doctors discovered later on in brain tumors of their patients and which was also linked to cancer of the bones. I'm not entirely against vaccinations, but it seems very hard to know the long term effects of many of the vaccinations that are being rampantly given to people these days [sic]"

It was followed by a second comment made by the same person:

"On the flip side there are other studies that will claim SV40 can't be proven to have ever been linked to cancer. I guess that's the beauty of medicine and science; It's all based on hypotheses! I'd love if more people posted about this argument."

To be completely fair, this person never said she wasn't vaccinated, or hadn't vaccinated any children she might have. But if you feel like banging your head against the wall when people say liberals are intolerant of conservatives' point of view (I personally have this argument frequently w/r/t climate change), try convincing someone that the vaccine movement wasn't a secret vehicle for cancer, autism, or God knows what. Science and medicine aren't based on hypotheses—it's propelled by them. Disciplines like science and medicine are based on facts, and when it comes to vaccines, the proof is in the pudding: Tens of thousands of people contracted polio, smallpox and whooping cough in America every year, and within a few years of a vaccine being developed, those diseases were largely relegated to the history books.

Did a virus sneak its way into polio vaccines? Was the virus used as a vehicle for the vaccine in some way, but was later found to cause dangerous genetic mutations in the vaccine's recipients? These question's don't cast doubt on inoculation; rather, they give us cause to look back and learn from our mistakes. In the mid-1950s, trucks cruised down residential streets spraying pesticides while children, unaware that these chemicals might be toxic to more than insects, ran and rode their bikes in tow, huffing the white fog that billowed out of tanks stored in the trucks' beds. Handling mercury with bare skin, and sometimes even tasting it, was a fairly common practice in high school chemistry classrooms. Today, we're learning that plastics can release bisphenol A (BPA), which can cause genetic mutations that affect fetuses, but only the Michael Jordan of self deception would say, "I'll never touch plastic again."

Science can prove that BPA is bad for our collective health, but it can't give anti-vaxxers proof that vaccines don't cause cancer, or whatever. You can't prove a negative. But logical impossibilities are what they demand because the world must contradict itself in order for them to be right. (How rarely, during these conversations, do we think to ask these people why they insist on disagreeing with scientific consensus?) Every day, science and its children, medicine and technology, become more encompassing; and we shouldn't be surprised that there are a lot of people who resist being enveloped in the modern world, convinced as they are that change brings more harm than good. It's natural for anyone to feel this way sometimes, but like the nasty bug that's going around, some people can't keep that feeling to themselves.

Poor Julia: liberals and conservatives wrangle over the life of a fictional character

The campaign season is officially––finally––underway, and I for one am preparing for the canned barbs, moments of honesty we call "gaffes," and pissy little Facebook arguments the way I would for the fiftieth installment of the American Pie franchise. There's really only one issue worth talking about this election, and that's the economy. And even though the job market has begun to heal after years of stagnation, the most recent employment numbers suggest that the road to recovery may still be long.

Nevertheless, I'm a bit disappointed that the economy is the marquee issue. Surely the president's job is more expansive than the shepherding of economists and businessmen.

Barack Obama's campaign team seems to think so. One of its propaganda tools is The Life of Julia, a story about a woman whose life is enriched by Barack Obama's health care, economic, and education reforms. "Julia joins thousands of students across the country who will start kindergarden ready to learn and succeed," the first slide reads. Like most propaganda, it's short on facts and long on meaningless platitudes.

Hidden beneath the surface of this otherwise Dick-and-Jane-ish tale is the implication that this election, more so than many before it, has long-term consequences. George Bush's eight years in office were defined early on by terrorist attacks and the two wars they spawned, and the political conversation has been a reaction to the Republican party line ever since. This election will decide if Barack Obama was an experiment or a reflection of dissatisfaction with the increasingly erratic and fractured conservative ideology.

Conservative groups like the Heritage Foundation have responded by turning––as they are wont to do––towards the strategies that worked in the past. They've united under the anti-Obama banner, and wheeled out the key terms that make up their ideology: Everything Barack Obama does hurts you in the pocketbook and offends your personal dignity.

Enter A Better Life for Julia, in which our heroine's life, as envisioned by Obama's campaign staff, is turned on its head. Obamacare is an insult to her financial and religious freedom. The president's policies have laden her with debt, and her family's wellbeing is hampered by a sputtering health care system, inadequate (but somehow overfunded) schools, and exorbitantly high taxes.

Never mind that, in this alternate universe, the president is somehow to blame for using the same tools a Republican would have used in the same position. And take care to overlook the Heritage Foundation citing itself in its own propaganda. Oh, and forget that Obamacare is modeled after the health care reform program Mitt Romney put into place in Massachusetts. All you have to know is, Obama wants to make the government so big, and the economy so small, that smart, conscientious people like you will be crushed under the weight of the common interest.

This is an election with consequences, and the fate of America can't be trusted in the hands of the man who brought you the corpse of Osama bin Laden, military drawdown, a slowly-but-surely recovering economy, and the repeal of Don't Ask, Don't Tell.

Media law wrangling in the New Wild West

The Internet is the new Wild West. Sure, there are huge expanses of uncharted territory left in the real world––Alaska, the deep sea, Antarctica––but charting something isn't the same as taming it, and the West was wild long after we'd mapped and criss-crossed it with railroads. The entrepreneurial spirit has always sought frontiers, and where there are frontiers, is the law ever far behind?

That's why I talked with Lisa McGrath, Boise NM law guru. She sees a lot of people treating new and social media like the traditional rules don't apply. Some of these rules, like copyrights, trademarks, and the general applicability of judiciously-drawn legal documents, seem intuitive; and yet she sees these rules being broken all the time.

But an unforeseen challenge to companies using NM may arise from an unexpected quarter: their own employees. The problem, she says, is pure common sense. Companies working with new media don't invite their legal departments to the table when drafting new and social media policies, or (worse) don't have policies at all.

What is a social media policy, you ask? It's a lot like a sexual misconduct or workplace discrimination policy, insofar as it informs the less-than-totally-formal functions of the workplace––a careful outline of the dos and don'ts for how a company's employees may use social media in their capacity as employees to A) protect that company's brand, and B) provide liability shielding. They also firmly establish access privileges and ownership of social media––something that can affect even small companies.

The failure to clearly establish ownership and access can play out like it did at The Bench Commission, where the employee responsible for updating the Commission's Facebook page left his job and took the Facebook password with him. Now, that local furniture store can't even update its page, and has to start from scratch––a tough thing to do when there's already a Commission Facebook presence.

I would have liked to include The Bench Commission in my article, but the owner, professing ignorance of social media, didn't feel he would be qualified to discuss the issue on record. This is unfortunate, because the article would have benefitted from the insights of someone licking his wounds over a SM misstep. 

McGrath also encourages social media training for employees, and I'm blown away that major users of social media like hospitals, airlines, and software companies don't train their employees to understand their media policies or how to use media effectively. What good are policies if you don't know they exist, or how they work?

The Idaho Democratic Caucus

I grew up in Portland, and my dad used to joke that Oregon liberals there were so tight-assed that there were permanent finger grooves in the steering wheels of their Volvo station wagons. Other adjectives he could have applied were "square," "ordnung," "straight-laced," "dour," and "prim." None of them are particularly positive adjectives.

For some reason, these Oregon-type liberals seemed to be the only ones in attendance at the Idaho Democratic caucus today at the Morrison Center. And since Boise is a pretty cool town, there were very few of them. I suppose it's the prim, ordnung ones who are procedure-oriented enough to actually vote to get the sitting President back on the ballot for the general election. 

I reported on the caucus for Boise Weekly with a motley crew of other reporters. Our job was to write stories on who was in attendance, and how attendees were keeping busy, since there was really only one candidate on the ballot. What surprised me––and what this blog post is about––is who wasn't there. 

Who wasn't there turned out to be practically everyone I know, even the most dyed-in-the-wool Democrats, from the dreadlocked guy who works at the Co-Op to the bartenders to the "Blue Women living in a Red State." The list of people who should have been at the Morrison Center is quite long, while the list of people who were actually there is quite short.

This isn't a new problem for Democrats. Voter turnout, in fact, is the Democrats' biggest problem. It's the fatal flaw that probably cost Al Gore the 2000 election, and is likely the secret weapon Mitt Romney is hiding under his coat for December, when he hopes to beat Obama in the general election.

I don't think Romney even has a fighting chance. For one thing, the cobwebs he's putting up aren't going to hold back the Sherman tank of Obama's war chest. For another, the two candidates are practically indistinguishable on many issues, and to court the socially conservative fringes of the Republican party, Romney's going to have to break from Obama in ways that are going to make him look utterly insane.

But I digress. The only way I see Romney winning is if, on election day, Democrats simply don't show up to vote. I would be shocked––really, really shocked––if Barack Obama doesn't bury Mitt Romney in a landslide victory later this year. I suppose I'm disappointed that, with so many passionate liberals in Idaho, so few of them thought it was worth their time to at least check the event out.

The problem with Bill Maher

Yesterday, Boise Weekly announced that Bill Maher, a darling among cable television's politically-minded comedians, will be visiting Boise on August 18. This is what Idaho conservatives would call shooting fish in a barrel.

Maher's draw is obvious: His brand of comedy mixes a reasonable outlook on politics with biting scorn for stupidity and counterproductive thinking. Or so his fans think. Other people––the people who leave comments on my Facebook wall, for example––think he's an asshole.

That Maher can be combative and unfair isn't what worries me. What worries me is that so few of his fans see him for the pundit that he is. In a recent episode of The Colbert Report, anchor Stephen Colbert defines, with his usual grinning sarcasm, what that means. Pundits have to have an opinion on everything; they have to be be right, even when they're wrong; they have to be loud and quotable.

The problem is that the man fosters a combative consensus. Where Jon Stewart looks at through the news through a set of values we think of as common to the human race, frequently coming across as more compassionate and even-keel than his audience, and Stephen Colbert satirizes punditry by exaggerating the moves of men less aware of their ridiculousness than himself, Bill Maher casts himself as a smarter, funnier, liberal version of Bill O'Reilly.

I sometimes wonder what would happen if he were put into a room full of people who didn't necessarily agree with him. His show is full of canned, sycophantic laughter, and his guests are hand-picked to either agree with him and laugh at all his jokes, or be dumb enough to lose to him in an argument. He puts on a self-satisfied face after his one-liners, and pauses while his fans shower him with their agreement.

Just watch to see how insufferable he is.

Real Time with Bill Maher is political humor in a bubble, and I think Maher's smug sense of self-righteousness underscores the thickness and insularity of that bubble. What the man doesn't seem to realize is that good political humor isn't about being right, it's about following the conventional rules of humor, and that means giving the other side (those people he's so good at lampooning) a fairer shake than he does.

Take your smartphone into the bathroom

During an interview I conducted yesterday on the topic of companies using social media to promote branding, a local freelance social media coordinator who will remain nameless told me she takes her smartphone into the bathroom.

"Everybody knows it already," she said, adding that she didn't mind if that information found its way into the article. (It won't.)

What I'm learning is that social media are a lot like a yappy little dog that will literally follow you onto the shitter if you let it, and a lot of people do. It doesn't make for a good Tweet to observe that one's having a particularly satisfying bowel movement, but anymore, information is instantaneous, and passing information and insight along can take seconds. My nameless SM coordinator calls this being "plugged in."

I don't have a smartphone. I have a dumbphone that's mostly good for making phone calls and sending text messages. Doing the journalism thing, I realize that not only does everyone around me have a smartphone––everyone around me is using smartphones to tremendous effect, sending Tweets, updating Facebook, etc. I'm a little jealous, but I think I can hold out a little longer.

That isn't to say that I'm unconnected to SM. If you're reading this, you likely found a link to it on my Facebook page or on Twitter. What amazes me is that so many companies aren't plugged in. One friend called a company's failure to engage Facebook "amateur hour," and since speaking with him, I've been trying to tease out of my interviewees the notion that there's something lazy about not taking advantage of free advertising.

My SM coordinator tells me that's not necessarily the case, that you should engage SM iff you have the time and inclination. She also told me that any business can find some way to make being plugged in a valuable business strategy. For some, that strategy can be public communication, as it is with the Idaho vodka distillery 44 North; other companies use it to advertise, like The Bench Commission. Goody's candy shop "buys" its Facebook fans with the promise of a scoop of ice cream.

Social Media's wide applicability, low cost, and relatively low time investment have made them virtually inescapable. Writing my story, I realize the hard part is going to be finding someone who will argue against them.

Is Erast Fandorin the hero Russians have been waiting for?

If there's a lesson behind the tumultuous prelude and nail-biting conclusion of the Russian presidential elections, it's that Russia yearns for new heroes. The likes of Gorbachev and Yeltsin––reformers with an ear for the democratic values prized so highly here in the West––are remembered as ineffective and disastrous. To educated city dwellers, President Putin is a corrupt oligarch putting on a macho front.

It would seem that Russians are looking for someone to look up to: someone with a strong hand and an easy touch. And with so few real-life role models forthcoming, Russia's literati has had to invent one.

Enter Erast Petrovich Fandorin, protagonist of the riveting and unpredictable The Winter Queen (Azazel in the original Russian). The plot centers around Fandorin's first adventure: Seeing that a Moscow bon vivant's suicide is more than an isolated case, security services greenhorn Fandorin pursues a conspiracy bent on upsetting the global balance of power.

Set in the mid-1870s, the mystery takes place amid a period of rapid technological and political innovation, giving the reader the sense that the best tools for investigating crime in an era of progress––reason, quick wits, and a lot of luck––never change.

The author, Boris Akunin, says he began writing mystery novels in the 1990s, when cheap, gore and sex-filled thrillers achieved extraordinary popularity in Russia. His wife, so embarrassed by the content, would hide the books when reading them in public. Akunin's response was to write detective and spy thrillers that people would be unafraid to pull out of a pocket or purse on a train, highly readable but with artistic merit.

That artistic merit extends beyond passing references to the beloved Russian classics. Akunin shows a knack for creating scenes without detracting from The Winter Queen's ripping pace, painting London gothic and a sticky Moscow spring with equal ease.

What brings the novel to life is its protagonist, who has a preternatural gift for the deductive method. Like any budding genius, he's ingratiatingly naive, and his intellect gets him into more than a little trouble. His unaffected patriotism never wavers despite the corruption and entitlement surrounding him, and his love for truth-with-a-capital-T makes that patriotism more substantial than a pair of rose-tinted glasses. 

Russians love him, and Akunin's Fandorin novels have sold about 18 million copies in Russia so far. 

Perhaps the reason for this love is that Fandorin can be masculine (a la Putin) without being macho, while being dedicated to Russia (a la Gorbachev) without destroying everything he touches. He's effective and smart without being overly clever, and his mild personality makes him an ingratiating analog to Sherlock Holmes. 

Akunin's novels have been received a lukewarm reception here in the States, however, for perhaps this very reason. Fandorin doesn't stand for truth and justice with the same zealotry Lisabeth Salander does in The Millennium Trilogy, nor does he indulge in pulpy conspiracy theories found in the likes of The Da Vinci Code. 

Instead, Fandorin is firmly rooted to his time and place, a bridge between the generations that came of age in the Soviet Union, and the high tide of the Russian Empire.