Agnotology 1: Vaccines

Agnotology is the study of culturally induced ignorance or doubt, particularly the publication of inaccurate or misleading scientific data. 

In my last post I discussed whether or not we were living in a post-truth era and compared the present times to the past. While it may be true that lying has increased and certainly it is true that liars have new megaphones which transmit their lies to many far-off listeners, I argued that the important difference between the present and the past has been the increased willingness of people to accept lies, and part of reason for that is that truth is harder to identify.

There are a number of reasons for our growing ignorance. A major reason is the fact that we are becoming relatively stupider. The world’s knowledge continues to increase exponentially (there are between 600,000 and one million books published in the United States every year), and each of us falls further behind in the amount of knowledge we accumulate compared to the amount of knowledge that exists.  Secondly, the world is becoming more inter-connected and more complex, so that simple answers no longer suffice. 

Understanding this increasing ignorance is the study of “agnotology,” which Robert Procter has defined as “the study of ignorance making, the lost and forgotten.”  It’s not that we can’t keep up with the creation of knowledge, it is also that ignorance is being created as well.  His 2008 book, Agnotology, the Making and Unmaking of Ignorance,” has as its purpose “to explore how ignorance is produced or maintained in diverse settings, through mechanisms such as deliberate or inadvertent neglect, secrecy and suppression, document destruction, unquestioned tradition, and myriad forms of inherent (or avoidable) culture-political selectivity.

Let’s look at a couple of examples.  In this post we’ll examine the topic of anti-vaxxing, and in the next we’ll look into climate denying.

Anti-Vaxxing.  Vaccination was first scientifically documented in 1798. Agnotology with respect to vaccines followed soon after.  Ella Stewart-Peters and Catherine Kevin document the anti-vaccination movement during the 19^th century. Then, as now, there was distrust in the medical establishment, a strong push-back against compulsory vaccination, and a belief that there was a conspiracy between the government and the medical profession to foist dangerous vaccinations upon ignorant parents and their children.

The impacts of vaccines have been studied after the 1979 eradication of polio in the US and the 1980 eradication of smallpox worldwide, as well as the prevention of cancer of the liver and the cervix. While anti-vaxxers may dispute the fact, there is little doubt that vaccines are effective.  CDC data, presented in the figure below, shows the dramatic decline in prevalence of measles, rubella, and polio a few years after vaccines were introduced.

Despite their effectiveness, some voices arose, which argued that the side effects of vaccination were being ignored and were extremely harmful. This was particularly important in the linking of autism to vaccination. Vivian Chou writes “This argument [that vaccines cause autism] was popularized by British surgeon Andrew Wakefield, ‘the father of the anti-vaccine movement’ in his 1998 article in the prestigious medical journal, The Lancet, that claimed a link between autism and the measles, mumps and rubella (MMR) vaccine. The article describes a study of twelve children who had begun exhibiting symptoms of autism, as well as gastrointestinal issues, shortly after receiving the MMR vaccine. The paper, and Wakefield’s bold assertions to the media of an MMR-autism link, sparked immediate controversy and quickly became a rallying point for parents opposed to the MMR vaccine, or vaccinations in general.”

However, other researchers were unable to confirm Wakefield’s study.  For example, Australian scientists analyzed ten prior studies investigating this question (studies that covered over 1.2 million children), and found no relationship between vaccines and autism.  Moreover, British journalist Brian Deer found that Wakefield may have falsified his data. Again, according to Chou, “Questions against Wakefield’s findings continued to mount, until January 2010, when the General Medical Council [UK] ruled that Wakefield was guilty of serious misconduct, and The Lancet retracted the original 1998 article. A few months later, Wakefield was removed from the UK medical register and barred from practicing medicine in the UK.  

The anti-vaccination movement has convinced some people that vaccines are dangerous. A Zogby poll in 2018 found that the percentage of people who say that deciding not to vaccinate puts their children and other people at risk had declined to 61% in 2018 from 51% in 2008.  Other findings;

• 70 percent say vaccinations are “very important” to the health of society, compared to 80% who answered the same question in 2008.
• 59 percent believe they have benefited from vaccines, down 16 points from 2008.
• 71 percent said it’s “very important” to have their children vaccinated, down 11 points from 2008.
• 28 percent said it should be up to parents to decide whether to vaccinate their child.

Some populations in America have proved particularly vulnerable to the anti-vaccination movement.  In particular, some Hassidic Jews living in Brooklyn and New York’s Rockland County, refused to vaccinate their children for measles, and a mini-epidemic of measles followed in these areas. Many parents opted out of measles vaccinations because of the anti-vaccination campaign.  A group called PEACH — Parents Educating and Advocating for Children’s Health — is discouraging vaccination through a hotline and magazines. Rabbi William Handler of Brooklyn insists — contrary to established medical consensus — that there is a connection between the measles vaccine and autism. A children’s book about Hanukkah stirred controversy because it compared a young boy who got a booster shot to the Jewish hero, Judah Maccabee. Some lies are difficult to kill.

To summarize, Americans have become more ignorant about the effectiveness of vaccines since Wakefield published his now discredited 1998 article. One article among thousands, based on faulty or malicious research, had the effect of convincing millions that the scientific community was lying or covering up the truth when it promoted, indeed mandated, certain vaccinations.  That ignorance of the facts has persisted for twenty years in the face of numerous rigorous refutations. This is one more arena where truth dies in the face of a big lie.