Bad Science (24 page)

Concerns were particularly raised by the ubiquity of Cherie Blair’s closest friend and aide. Carole Caplin was a New Age guru, a “life coach,” and a “people person,” although her boyfriend, Peter Foster, was a convicted fraudster. Foster helped arrange the Blairs’ property deals, and he also says that they took Leo to a New Age healer, Jack Temple, who offered crystal dowsing, homoeopathy, herbalism, and Neolithic-circle healing in his back garden.

I’m not sure how much credence to give to Foster’s claims myself, but the impact on the MMR scare is that they were widely reported at the time. We were told that the prime minister of the United Kingdom agreed to Temple’s waving a crystal pendulum over his son to protect him (and therefore his classmates, of course) from measles, mumps, and rubella and that Tony let Cherie give Temple some of his own hair and nail clippings, which Temple preserved in jars of alcohol. He said he only needed to swing his pendulum over the jar to know if their owner was healthy or ill.

Some things are certainly true. Using this crystal dowsing pendulum, Temple did claim that he could harness energy from heavenly bodies. He sold remedies with names like Volcanic Memory, Rancid Butter, Monkey Sticks, Banana Stem, and, my own personal favorite, Sphincter. He was also a very well-connected man. Jerry Hall endorsed him. The duchess of York wrote the introduction to his book
The Healer: The Extraordinary Healing Methods of Jack Temple
(it’s a hoot). He told the
Daily Mail
that babies who are breastfed from the moment of birth acquire natural immunity against all diseases, and he even sold a homoeopathic alternative to the MMR jab.

Cherie Blair was also a regular visitor to Carole’s mum, Sylvia Caplin, a spiritual guru. “There was a particularly active period in the summer when Sylvia was channelling for Cherie over two or three times a week, with almost daily contact between them,” the
Mail
reported. “There were times when Cherie’s faxes ran to 10 pages.” Sylvia, along with many, if not most, alternative therapists, was viciously anti-MMR (over half of all the homeopaths approached in one survey grandly advised against the vaccine).
The Daily Telegraph
reported:

It was also reported—doubtless as part of a cheap smear—that Cherie Blair and Carole Caplin encouraged the prime minister to have Sylvia “douse and consult The Light, believed by Sylvia to be a higher being or God, by use of her pendulum” to decide if it was safe to go to war in Iraq. And while we’re on the subject, in December 2001
The Times
(London) described the Blairs’ holiday in Temazcal, Mexico, where they rubbed fruits and mud over each other’s bodies inside a large pyramid on the beach, then screamed while going through a New Age rebirthing ritual. Then they made a wish for world peace.

I’m not saying I buy all this. I’m just saying, this is what people were thinking about when the Blairs refused to clarify publicly the issue of whether they had given their child the MMR vaccine as all hell broke loose around it. This is not a hunch. Of all the stories written that year about MMR, 32 percent mentioned whether Leo Blair had had the vaccine or not (even Andrew Wakefield was only mentioned in 25 percent), and it was one of the most well-recalled facts about the story in population surveys. The public, quite understandably, was taking Leo Blair’s treatment as a yardstick of the prime minister’s confidence in the vaccine, and few could understand why it should be a secret if it wasn’t an issue.

The Blairs, meanwhile, cited their child’s right to privacy, which they felt was more important than an emerging public health crisis. It’s striking that Cherie Blair has now decided, in marketing her lucrative autobiography, to waive that principle, which was so vital at the time, and has written at length in her heavily promoted book not just about the precise bonk that conceived Leo but also about whether he had the jab (she says yes, but she seems to obfuscate on whether it was single vaccines and indeed on the question of when he had it; frankly, I give up on these people).

For all that it may seem trite and voyeuristic to you, this event was central to the UK coverage of MMR. The year 2002 was the year of Leo Blair, and 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 percent 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 genetically modified (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 percent 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 that has been seen before. If there is one thing that has adversely affected communication among 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 his scientific findings about GM potatoes’ causing cancer in rats, as Árpád Pusztai did, on ITV’s
World in Action
, rather than in an academic journal, 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, have predictable consequences. Journalists are used to listening with a critical ear to briefings from press officers, politicians, PR executives, salespeople, lobbyists, celebrities, and gossipmongers, and they generally display a healthy natural skepticism, 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 be examined only in terms of who they are as people or perhaps whom 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 lionized “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 that 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 hemophilia 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 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 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 that 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.