The Panic Virus

by Seth Mnookin; Dan B. Miller

  That summation made it sound as if the group was just one more organization testing the boundaries of modern medicine—but out of all the things the AAPS has been accused of, trafficking in nontraditional healing methods barely makes the list. It was founded in the 1940s as an extreme-right-wing organization, and over the years its leadership has overlapped with that of the ultraconservative John Birch Society. It has compared electronic medical records to the files kept by the German secret police, linked abortion to breast cancer, and claimed that illegal immigration leads to leprosy. For years, AAPS officials worked with Philip Morris on a junk science campaign attacking indoor smoking bans; as recently as the fall of 2009, it claimed cigarette taxes actually led to a “deterioration in public health.”

  And those are actually some of the group’s more moderate stances. One month before the 2008 presidential election, it published an article on its Web site speculating that Barack Obama might be “deliberately using the techniques of neurolinguistic programming (NLP), a covert form of hypnosis.” (The repetition of numbers in his speeches was one of Obama’s “techniques of trance induction”; another was hand gestures that functioned as “hypnotic anchors.”) These tactics were most effective when employed on the weak-willed, non-Christian members of the cultural elite:

  Obama is clearly having a powerful effect on people, especially young people and highly educated people—both considered to be especially susceptible to hypnosis. It is also interesting that many Jews are supporting a candidate who is endorsed by Hamas, Farakhan, Khalidi, and Iran.

  Indeed. In a four-hundred-plus-page book in which Kirby took pains to outline all the potentially compromising aspects of organizations like the CDC, the worst thing he could bring himself to say about the AAPS is that it is “considered by many experts to lie on the fringe.”

  While Kirby was careful to avoid looking like he had an allegiance to one side or the other in official statements and media appearances, he was not shy about trading on his ties with the anti-vaccine community. Nowhere was the symbiotic relationship between Kirby and the people about whom he had written more apparent than on a Yahoo!-hosted members-only forum called EOHarm. Soon after it was established, EOHarm took on the feel of a virtual autism advocacy conference. Like-minded parents talked about what avenues of research should be pursued (“moving the paradigm away from chasing the illusive [sic] autism gene . . . is of paramount importance”) and rallied each other about the prospect of litigation (“once causation is established in vax court or state/federal court, then we will be able to place overwhelming political pressure to amend vica”).48 The forum was also a venue for Kirby to make thinly disguised requests for support: When his publisher bought an ad in The New York Times, Kirby posted a downloadable copy with the message, “Please feel free to share, post, whatever. Some parents said they would buy space for it in their local papers, which is great, but I am certainly not asking anyone to lay out cash to promote the book, I just think it is a really cool ad!”

  If there was ever any doubt that the anti-vaccine community saw Kirby as one of their own, and that he was more than happy for the embrace, it disappeared in the thousands of pages on the Yahoo! Message Board. (As of September 2010, the group’s 2,320 members had posted a total of more than 106,000 messages.) In response to a message Kirby posted about future sales projections, one of the group’s members wrote, “Two years ago this was the province of the loonie fringe. EOH has put us in the mainstream. Our main job is to destroy the credibility of the vaccine industry and that’s just what EOH has done. . . . And don’t forget the paperback is coming, and hopefully a movie too.”

  The impact of this grassroots support extended far beyond a community of die-hard activists: “Somehow,” Kirby says, Deirdre Imus, the wife of radio and TV host Don Imus and a proponent of the thimerosal hypothesis, “got ahold of one of my galleys.” The evening of March 9, 2005, Kirby spoke on the phone with the couple. The following day, he appeared as an in-studio guest on Imus in the Morning, which was nationally syndicated on WFAN–New York and also aired on MSNBC. At the time, Imus’s show reached more than three million Americans, an audience that had earned the host a spot on Time’s list of the “25 Most Influential People in America.”

  The twenty-three-minute segment could hardly have gone better if Kirby had scripted it himself. Imus gave Kirby immediate credibility by introducing him as a “contributor to The New York Times, where he writes about science and health.” (Since he’d started work on the book, the only health-related story Kirby had written for the Times was a June 21, 2004, piece about how “young men” were using Viagra “as an insurance policy against the effects of alcohol or for an increase in prowess.”) After that introduction, the radio host prompted Kirby to hit all his main talking points. He asked about the book’s name:

  IMUS: Let me start with first—where did the title come from?

  KIRBY: The title sort of emerged out of the text itself. . . . That actual term, it appears about seventeen times in the book, and the reason I chose it is “evidence” I think is the proper term. There is evidence of harm; there is a growing body of evidence of harm. Proof of harm is a loaded word and I didn’t want to go quite that far.

  IMUS: Evidence of harm linking thimerosal to autism.

  KIRBY: To autism and other neurological disorders—ADD, ADHD, etc.

  He asked Kirby why the CDC refused to acknowledge the error of its ways:

  KIRBY: People at the CDC—the CDC recommended these vaccines very aggressively. . . . So the CDC has some blame to share here, and I don’t think they’re quite motivated to admit that they might have made a terrible blunder. . . . If what I write in the book is all true, we have just experienced one of the largest medical catastrophes of our time and put a generation of American children at terrible risk with possibly devastating results.

  He even repeated Kirby’s canard about needing to prove a negative:

  IMUS: When you look at evidence on both sides, the studies that the CDC and IOM and others have done, where they suggest carefully that—I’ll have to paraphrase what you wrote—where they found no causal link and no evidence of harm, what you point out I thought brilliantly is that that doesn’t suggest it’s completely safe or safe at all.

  A quarter of the way through the interview, Imus, going along with Kirby’s claim that he hadn’t yet made up his mind on the subject, asked the author, “Which argument is most persuasive to you?” Kirby proceeded to summarize the theory that he focused the most attention on in his book. The typical person, he explained, has enough “sulfur-based proteins” to “sop up” the mercury that enters the body. In kids with autism, he said, “we now basically know” that those proteins are present in diminished amounts. The answer reflected an insight gained from the SafeMinds “Autism: A Novel Form of Mercury Poisoning” paper: Throw around some impressive-sounding scientific-sounding terms and very few people are going to feel comfortable calling you on the specifics. In this instance, Kirby’s “we . . . basically know” would have been more accurately phrased as “there’s no legitimate research that indicates this is the case.”

  After Imus announced Kirby’s time on air was coming to a close, the author asked if he could “just mention a couple of other websites.” He then gave a hat tip to the various organizations that had helped catapult him to one of the highest-profile appearances in the media world: He promoted the National Autism Association for “people interested” in mercury-related legislation, SafeMinds as a resource for “scientific research,” and a group called Generation Rescue, which had been launched by a private equity manager and his wife in response to their son’s diagnosis of autism, for anyone curious about “treatment and recovery.”

  Within minutes of arriving back home, Kirby discovered just how valuable a high-impact media appearance could be. Before he left his apartment, he says, he “happened to check Amazon.” His book was not in the online retailer’s top 30,000 sellers. After he returned from the interview he
checked the site again: “It was at number eight.”

  There was no reason to expect Don Imus to do independent research about the vaccine debate—he made no bones about the fact that he was a radio talk show host and not a newsman. Tim Russert was another matter. As the doyen of the Washington press corps, he had developed a reputation as a relentless interrogator whose grasp of the issues allowed him to cut through the spin peddled by his high-profile guests.

  In August, Kirby appeared on Russert’s Meet the Press opposite Harvey Fineberg, the president of the IOM. While Fineberg, a medical doctor who had been the dean of Harvard’s School of Public Health from 1984 to 1997, had the advantage of more than three decades of experience working in science and medicine, it was clear that Kirby was much better at making his case to a television audience. He spoke in easily digested sound bites that steered clear of eye-glazing details. He described the epidemiological studies that had been the foundation of the IOM committee’s report as “rang[ing] from severely flawed to seriously questionable,” without offering any further explanation. He claimed that in the fourteen months since the IOM report was published, the story had been “moving very, very fast.” He repeated what had become a standard talking point among activists: There was “a small subset of children with a certain genetic predisposition, they are unable to properly process the mercury that they are exposed to,” a theory whose appeal lies in the fact that it is both untestable and impossible to refute.

  Fineberg, in contrast, sounded like he was participating in a graduate-level seminar in statistical analysis. He looked uncomfortable in his chair, his speech was filled with hesitations, and his language had enough qualifications to make his argument appear less strong than it was. The closest Fineberg came during the entire segment to making a definitive statement was, “We have now a growing body of evidence that while imperfect [is] altogether convincing and all reaching the same conclusion, even though they vary in their methods and in their approaches. And that conclusion was no association between the receipt of vaccines containing thimerosal and the development of autism.”

  Under these circumstances, it was Russert’s responsibility to make sure that the truth was not a victim of his guests’ respective skills in front of the camera. This was not, as Kirby had argued in his book, a political campaign—it was an important scientific debate in which one side had verifiable evidence and the other did not. Unfortunately, Russert didn’t seem to have his bearings on the issue, which left the field open for Kirby to spout a series of baseless claims. “We know that certain children with autism, again, seem to have higher levels of mercury accumulating in their body,” Kirby said. Later in the show, he built on that point: “Inorganic mercury basically gets trapped in the brain, and there’s evidence to suggest that, in an infant brain, in the first six months to a year when the brain is still growing, when inorganic mercury gets trapped in that brain, you’re going to have this hyper neuroinflammation, or the rapid brain growth that we see in autistic children.” Kirby was confident this was true, he said, because of “a whole lot of new biology. This has all been published. None of the biology was published at the time of the IOM hearing. It has since been published, and I actually wonder if the IOM would consider reconvening a new committee or a new hearing to consider the evidence that’s come out in the year and a half since the last report.”49

  Russert turned to Fineberg, who seemed simultaneously exasperated and astounded. It was as if he was being confronted by someone who argued that research done by people who believed the sun orbited around the earth had in fact proven that very thing. At the same time, he knew that simply stating that what Kirby was saying was ludicrous would make him seem arrogant and condescending—which would not have helped to sway the public to the side of science. Fineberg did his best to stammer out a response that was respectful and forceful at the same time: “Mr. Kirby’s description about the certitude of this evidence, I think, exceeds the actual balance of evidence that is produced when you look at the totality.” It wasn’t a very convincing line, nor was his protestation that “other avenues of research looking at other possible causes today are much more promising ways to spend our precious resources.”

  In the months to come, Kirby would receive similarly credulous treatment from dozens of outlets. “The press was great, the reviews were great,” he says. “I did not have a single hostile interview—not one.” The narrative he laid out—proud, independent-minded mothers doing battle with greedy drug companies and corrupt government agencies—was, to quote an old journalistic cliché, a story that was too good to check. Reviewers treated the book more as if it were a John Grisham potboiler than a real-life story with enormous public health consequences. Again and again, they repeated Kirby’s version of events as if it were the gospel truth. A full-page write-up in The New York Times Book Review was typical in this regard: Kirby was applauded for the “admirable job” he’d done “clarifying most of the scientific background” even as he resisted the temptation to “offer his own verdict on the debate.” The book’s “smoking gun,” the Times wrote, was the Journal of American Physicians and Surgeons piece written by the Geiers. The IOM report, meanwhile, was relegated to a single sentence in the 1,200-word piece: “Despite their efforts, in May 2004 a committee from the Institute of Medicine found no ‘causal relationship’ between thimerosal-containing vaccines, or the MMR vaccine, and autism.”

  Over the years, Kirby’s relationship with the movement he wrote about has become even more intimate. He was named a contributing editor at a SafeMinds-sponsored blog called Age of Autism, which bills itself as “The Daily Web Newspaper of the Autism Epidemic.” (On Thanksgiving Day 2009, the site ran an illustration of health officials, science reporters, and vaccine advocates feasting on the corpses of dead babies.) He regularly covers autism and vaccines for the blog and news aggregator The Huffington Post. (Here are three headlines, chosen at random: “Autism, Vaccines, and the CDC: The Wrong Side of History,” “The Autism Vaccine Debate—Anything But Over,” and “Up to 1-in-50 Troops Seriously Injured . . . By Vaccines?”)

  In outlets such as those, as well as during media appearances and speeches, Kirby has helped to ensure that the story he says “cries out for answers” will never end. In the epilogue to his book, Kirby quoted a parent saying that if the thimerosal theory was correct, autism rates should start to go down by 2005, which was four years after thimerosal had been removed from childhood vaccines. Then in 2005, he told Don Imus, “It’s going to take another two years before we know whether [thimerosal] has been causing the rise.” In 2007, autism diagnoses were still going up; since then, Kirby has advanced an array of new theories to replace the ones that failed to materialize. His latest is that myelin, which forms a protective sheath around the part of a nerve cell that conducts electrical impulses, can be damaged by viruses, including the measles virus used in the MMR vaccine. Kirby has also displayed a recent preoccupation with aluminum, which is the latest bogeyman of vaccine denialists. “It is used in vaccines as an adjuvant to increase, to boost the immune response to the vaccine,” he said as part of a recent presentation on “several pathways to autism.” “Aluminum in and of itself is neurotoxic. Aluminum is very damaging to mitochondria. And aluminum is synergistic with mercury.”

  Kirby has also taken the lead in spreading misinformation about the Vaccine Court case of a girl named Hannah Poling. In 2000, when Hannah was nineteen months old, she received five vaccines during a wellness visit to her pediatrician. Not long afterward, she came down with a fever; by the time she was two years old, she’d begun a developmental decline that eventually left her unable to speak. In 2002, Hannah’s parents, Jon Poling, a neurologist at Johns Hopkins, and his wife, Terry, filed a Vaccine Court claim.

  Five years later, the Department of Health and Human Services conceded the Polings’ assertion that as a result of an “underlying mitochondrial disorder,” Hannah had a reaction to vaccines that “manifested as a regressive encephalopathy with f
eatures of [an autism spectrum disorder].” This was not seen as a particularly controversial decision: Since encephalopathies are recognized by the Vaccine Court as table injuries, in the absence of overwhelming evidence to the contrary, the court is mandated to grant an award for any encephalopathy that follows a vaccine within a set period of time.

  Then, in February 2008, Kirby wrote about the case in a Huffington Post article headlined, “Government Concedes Vaccine-Autism Case in Federal Court.” In his piece, Kirby described a study that had appeared in the Journal of Child Neurology in 2006 that seemed to support the notion that children with mitochondrial disorders could be especially susceptible to vaccine-induced encephalopathies. Kirby did not report that the piece’s lead author was Hannah’s father; that the paper’s sole subject, an unidentified “19-month-old girl,” was, in fact, Hannah Poling; or that the study was submitted for publication three years after the Polings had filed their initial claim and two years before the government’s concession. When that news was eventually revealed, it came as a surprise to the Journal of Child Neurology’s editor, Roger Brumback, who called Jon Poling’s behavior “appallingly troubling” in a published editorial. In the future, Brumback wrote, “statements from all authors concerning potential conflicts of interest” would appear with each article. “However, no written statement can substitute for honesty, good faith, and integrity on the part of authors.”