Among the Truthers (21 page)

M
c
C
ARTHY
: “Parent after parent after parent says I vaccinated my baby, they got a fever and then they stopped speaking and then became autistic.”

K
ING
: “Is your link scientific or statistical?”

M
c
C
ARTHY
: “Well, I believe that parents' anecdotal information is science-based information. And when the entire world is screaming the same thing—doctor, I came home. He had a fever. He stopped speaking and then he became autistic. I can't—I can see if it was just one parent saying this. But when so many—and I speak to thousands of moms every weekend and they're all standing up and saying the same thing. It's time to start listening to that. That is science-based information. Parents' [anecdotes] is science-based information.”

A whole book could be written about the conspiracy theories that traffic on “alternative medicine” websites. These include the idea (as already discussed) that water fluoridation is a plot to destroy our minds; that the contrails emitted by passenger aircraft contain exotic chemicals—“chemtrails”—designed to alter human behavior; that wi-fi computer signals are eroding our children's brains; and that AIDS and other serious diseases were designed by the U.S. military for the purpose of culling the world's population. But of all of these, the most durable and widespread is the notion that vaccines cause autism. This is in large part thanks to the advocacy of celebrity laypersons such as McCarthy and their media enablers at
The Oprah Show
and, until recently,
Larry King Live
. Since 1998, when the theory was first put forward in a (since debunked) study published in
The
Lancet
medical journal, millions of parents across the Western world have avoided vaccinating their children, leaving them exposed to deadly, and entirely preventable, diseases such as measles, pertussis, and Hib influenza. A disproportionate number of the parents opting out of vaccinations are from wealthy areas of the country, such as Marin County in California, where McCarthy's brand of quackery has gained a foothold among web-surfing soccer moms.

Vaccines typically are administered to small children in the first two years of life, at around the same time that the first behavioral symptoms of autism manifest themselves. Many doctors believe autism is a genetic disorder programmed into a child's brain before birth. But parents cannot
see
their child's genes. What they can see is the steel needle that penetrates their then-apparently-perfect bundle of joy, injecting a mysterious foreign substance that (according to strangers wearing white lab coats), prevents an as-yet hypothetical medical condition. When this experience is closely followed by a devastating diagnosis, a link is forged between the two experiences in the minds of many parents—a link that, as many will confess quite candidly, can never be shaken by science. “I know what happened to my son after he got his [measles, mumps and rubella] shot,” the mother of an autistic child told science writer Arthur Allen. “I have no doubt. There's no way they'll convince me that all these kids were not damaged by vaccines.”

The myth that vaccines cause autism permits emotionally vulnerable parents to blame politically accountable, human evildoers—the big pharmaceutical companies, and their apologists at the Food and Drug Administration—for a trauma that might otherwise be seen as a mere act of God. As religious martyrs and psychologists alike can attest, virtually any amount of suffering can be endured if the one enduring it feels it has a purpose. What I call “damaged-survivor” conspiracism emerges out of the mind's subconscious understanding of this fact: It is a quest to situate one's travails amid a meaningful struggle against some oppressive evil. The more oppressive the evil, the more meaningful the struggle.

Such myths provide another psychotherapeutic dividend, too: hope. The bogus vaccine-autism link is actually two conspiracy theories in one. Not only do McCarthy and her followers believe that the medical establishment is covering up evidence that its drugs are wrecking children's brains; they also promote the piggyback conspiracy theory that vitamins and other natural remedies can be used to “heal” the damage done by vaccines, but that this cure is falsely discredited by the very same medical-establishment evildoers. McCarthy, for instance, promotes something called “chelation therapy,” which removes heavy metals from the body. Other parents have turned to more exotic remedies. As Allen reports: “In the homes of autistic children, it is not unusual to find cabinets filled with 40 different vitamins and supplements, along with casein-free, gluten-free foods, antibiotics, and other drugs and potions. Each is designed to fix an aspect of the ‘damage' that vaccines or other ‘toxins' caused.”

Many conspiracists I've met have themselves experienced a traumatic, life-threatening medical crisis that knocked them out of their normal mental orbit. Often, their stories follow the same pattern: Doctors tried to cure their condition with expensive drugs and painful surgical procedures—but failed. It was only once they'd turned to a “natural” cure—faith healing, homeopathy, Gerson Therapy, or some other kind of placebo-based remedy—that their condition was cured. In the aftermath of this experience, they become convinced that profit-obsessed pharmaceutical companies and the medical establishment more generally have been conspiring to prevent Americans from discovering the power of these natural cures. From their personal experience, they extrapolate to the notion that all of corporate America is engaged in active conspiracy against ordinary American citizens.

In fact, hostility toward conventional medicine is a popular theme in just about every modern conspiracist movement—including Scientology, UFO groups, and 9/11 Truth. Even right-wing conspiracy theorists, no enemies of the free market, tend to embrace herbal miracle-cures and other forms of quack medicine more commonly associated with the vegan Left.

During my interviews in the New York City area, I met a variety of Truthers who fell into the damaged-survivor category: emotionally traumatized parents, children, siblings, or spouses of 9/11 victims, including one genuinely pitiful middle-aged protestor who carries a sign featuring a picture of a handsome young man alongside the words “The NWO [New World Order] murdered my cousin Bradley Van Hoorn.”

Other Truthers in this category include some of the “Jersey Girls” whose activism helped spur the creation of the independent 9/11 Commission; Manny Badillo, a leading New York City-based Truther whose uncle and mentor, Joseph Sgroi, died on 9/11; and Bob McIlvane, a former Philadelphia schoolteacher who became a spokesmen for the Truth movement after losing a son in the North Tower.

Damaged survivors are particularly effective as recruiters for conspiracist movements because the spectacle of their grief short-circuits our intellectual faculties—much in the same way that graphic testimony from a crime victim can sway a jury to convict an innocent defendant. “When I saw Bob [McIlvane] cry at the commission hearings in New York in 2004, it broke my heart,” Pennsylvania-based 911blogger.com founder Jon Gold told me when I asked him what drove his activism. “The anger I felt when I saw we were lied to was enormous. I couldn't imagine how much extra pain must have been felt by those who actually lost people. I believe they deserve better.”

All of which to say: It is not just because Jenny McCarthy is attractive and famous that she is permitted to promote nonsense medical theories on national television. It is also because she has experienced suffering, a subject that usually can be counted on to arouse the interest of American television viewers, even as it blunts their critical faculties.

I
n November of 2008, around the time Barack Obama was winning the White House, former
Three's Company
star and Thighmaster pitchwoman Suzanne Somers awoke in a state of terror. She was covered in welts, and could barely breathe. By the time her husband had rushed her to the nearest emergency room, she was nearly dead.

When Somers recovered from this genuinely terrifying ordeal, doctors administered a CAT scan. The results were devastating. She'd survived an episode of breast cancer a few years before, and the disease apparently had returned with a vengeance, metastasizing throughout her innards. The tumors were literally too numerous to be counted. One doctor who saw the images told her flatly: “I've never seen so much cancer in my life.”

Somers was stunned. She'd done everything right—eaten nothing but natural foods and natural dietary supplements, avoided stress, exercised regularly. Two years before, she'd published a
New York Times
number one best seller about how to live a long, healthy life. She'd been tested by doctors just three months previous, and come out clean. “How could I have cancer?” she thought to herself.

In fact, Suzanne Somers didn't have cancer. The images doctors saw on her CAT Scan apparently were the result of an exotic fever she'd contracted while working in her organic garden, possibly exacerbated by an alternative therapy to treat the effects of menopause.

One would imagine Somers being overjoyed by the news that she was cancer-free. But her dominant reaction was fury—not only at the doctors who'd misdiagnosed her, but at the Western medical establishment itself, which, she believes, is conspiring to destroy our health with chemotherapy and other “poisons.” Days later, when Somers was discharged from the hospital, one of the first things she did was throw out the medications she'd been prescribed by hospital doctors. Eventually, the whole experience would find its way into her 2009 alternative-medicine book,
Knockout
:
Interviews With Doctors Who Are Curing Cancer
.

Like McCarthy and other radicalized critics of modern medicine, Somers has come to view the human body in essentially medieval terms. According to this view—of which there are endless variations, each with its own cult following and mail-order industry—the human body is powered by a natural energy field that becomes compromised when exposed to artificial Western foods, medicines, and medical therapies. Vitamins, obscure extracts, oils, balms, herbs, and meditation are presumptively good. Prescription drugs, radiological treatments, and surgical interventions are presumptively bad. It is a distinction upon which Somers herself is willing to stake her life: She tells readers that, if again faced with a cancer diagnosis, “my choice overwhelmingly would be to use only alternative treatments.”

Knockout
promotes a variety of dubious therapies—such as laetrile, an apricot extract that was proven ineffective decades ago; and “the Gonzalez protocol,” a bizarre regimen involving twice-daily coffee enemas. If only the medical establishment and the FDA took these treatments seriously, Somers argues, researchers would receive the funds needed to prove their effectiveness. Instead, the health care industry and its cynical government allies conspire behind closed doors to protect the cash cow of conventional cancer therapies. “Pharma is not interested in anything that comes from nature. Anything from nature cannot be patented,” Somers writes. “That is why so often many natural alternatives to serious diseases never see the light of day.”

Before dismissing Somers as a Hollywood know-nothing, it's worth understanding her frame of mind, and how she came to it. The unfortunate fact is that a lot of her impressions about conventional, hospital-based health care practices ring true. The tests and treatments we receive for cancer and other serious ailments are painful and humiliating, just as she says. Often, they aren't even necessary, but are carried out simply to satisfy the preprinted checklists set out by hospital managers and insurance companies. Many doctors are brusque and patronizing. As anyone who's spent time with a cancer patient going through chemotherapy and radiation can attest, it's also true that there is—in Somers' words—a certain “hopelessness that accompanied so many of today's approaches to health. Even when they worked, there seemed to be an undesired reaction to the body. Somehow, you weren't the same person anymore; you became slowed down, aging faster, fragile.” Chemotherapy—which Somers describes, not inaccurately, as “poison therapy”—can be especially traumatic.

Somers' mistake—the same one made by many alternative-medicine advocates—is to assume that something that
feels
artificial and degrading must somehow be harmful to our bodies; and, likewise, that something that
feels
natural and uplifting must somehow be beneficial. Obviously, every cancer patient in the world would prefer to be drinking vitamin cocktails at a California sweat lodge than lying under a CAT scanner. But that doesn't mean the former treatment will help us live longer than the latter: The human body is a complex machine, and sometimes the treatments that help us most in the long run are the most excruciating—and even inhumane—in the short run.

Most people have difficulty dealing with random, purposeless suffering—whether it's in the form of a great depression, a collapsing skyscraper or a chemo ward. As already discussed in this chapter, medical conspiracy theories of the Suzanne Somers/Jenny McCarthy variety ease our psychic torment in two ways. First, they provide a politically accountable villain. Second, they hold out the possibility of a healthy utopia once the villain's malign influence has been exposed.

Best of all, we're assured, all we need to find this utopia are the five senses: Central to the argument in
Knockout
and other alternative-health guidebooks is the idea that our own personal intuition about what is right for our bodies, not the scientific analysis provided by the medical establishment, should guide our health choices. Jenny McCarthy encapsulated this approach in 2010, when she airily dismissed a new
Pediatrics
study authoritatively debunking her theory that autism can be treated with special diets. “We [parents are] the ones seeing the real results. And until doctors start listening to our anecdotal evidence, which is, ‘This is
working
,' it's going to take so many more years for these kids to get better. Every parent will tell you something different that helped their child.”