away from important autism research. he spoke at the university of wisconsin in madison for a little over an hour. >> i am going to talk briefly about how the book came about and some themes that, that i try and deal with in the book and then leave as much time as i can for questions because i've spoken with a number of different types of groups, and it's been very hard for me to anticipate what the questions are going to be outside of them always being provocative and interesting. and so, and i expect that will be even more true tonight at a university where people are coming at it from all sorts of different angles. as opposed to a nursing coalition or a center for inquiry or different places i've talked.

.. >> i heard about whether kids were getting too many too soon, about whether there was mercury in vaccines that was causing

developmental disorders, and what struck me right away was that when i asked people how they would go about making up their minds, i kept hearing again and again that these were decisions that people were making herbally on gut instipght. they said it feels like a lot to give a kid. it doesn't feel safe. it seems like there's too many chemicals in there. that struck me not because i knew at the time that there was evidence on one side or the other and one who spent his career as a reporter and an investigator reporter, i was willing to believe that drug companies and government were engaged in a massive coffer -- cover up, and there were profit

motives combined that creates a health problem. that seems like a great story potentially, but i was surprised that many people i knew were not making these decisions based on an analysis of the evidence, and it especially struck me because it was the same group of people, my peers essentially, that were very, very dismissive and disstaining of controversies about other issues like climate change and evolution where they felt like people who they disagreed with were ignoring the sin tisk evidence -- scientific evidence, so there seemed to be this great disconnect to me, and one of the reasons i should say at the time that it was probably starting to come up a lot is because jenni

mrk car thy -- jenny mccarthy came out with the fourth of her books with the belief that the vaccine caused or triggered her son's autism, and she said -- i try to be careful how i say this, but her story has not remained completely consistent over the years, so i started looking into it, and i spent most of the last three years reading scientific studies, interviewing people, interviewing parents, parent whose children had died of vaccine preventable diseases, parents whose children were very severely affected by autism. scientists, doctors, public health officials, activists, and

i also read what ended up to be thousands and thousands of pages the court transcripts for an ongoing trial around this issue, and in the end it seems really very clear to me that this wasn't a case where there was a legitimate debate that i felt about where the evidence actually lay. this was a situation in which there was an overwhelming amount of evidence on one side, and a tiny number of discredited studies on the other side, so at that point, what i really felt like was there were two things i had to address. one of them is why is there this sense in our society and culture that this is such a debate and continues to be. there was a harris poll taken a

number of weeks ago in which only 52% of people believed that vaccines did not cause autism. it didn't mean the other 48% did, there was 30-something percent that said they were unsure. after a decade after this whole vaccine scare started, there's still an enormous amount of the population who thinks there's legitimacy to that. the things i wanted to explore is one, why is that? both from a media angle and an information consumer angle and also from sort of an individual ang m. why -- angle. why is it that we as individuals create narratives that we use to convince ourselves of things that appear not to be true and

actually are. that, little did i know at the time exactly how much that was to bite off. this was a project that initially started as a hopeful magazine story, and i couldn't interest any magazine editors in writing it. that's less rare than you think. you can't sell a magazine article, but you can get somebody to write a book. that strikes me as -- we don't want to read 5,000 words, but 130,000 words, great. [laughter] but i ended up writing -- this is a little bit less than half of what i ended up writing which is good. it definitely should not have been the length it was, but i'm just saying that as an illustration of the ways in which i felt like this one issue

permeated through other things we're dealing with as a society and as a culture. it's also the reason why neither the word autism nor vaccines appears in the title which i had some spirited debates with my publisher who kept saying i believe books should say what they're about, and i kept saying, realm, it's not just about that, and we don't want to give people the impression it's about this one specific topic, so what i'm going to do is use some events that occurred recently in the past months that some people might be familiar with to show some of what i'm talking about in that before i open it up. now, i guess about four weeks ago, there was a series of reports in the british medical journal about a 1998 study that appeared which was the first

study targeting a link between vaccines and autism. that was the first time there was a potential connection. before that, for decades and for centuries, there have been different concerns and fears about vaccines and their links to other physical or developmental disorders, but there was the first time there was a special link drawn to awe tim. that paper involved the measles and mumps vaccine, and the lead author was a british gastro introologist named andrew wakefield. excuse me. he was one of 13 authors on the study, and what the british medical journal reported, or a three part series that started

coming out a month ago, said that wakefield committed outright fraud when he submitted this report. the stories that then resulted on tv and in the newspaper, these papers was report that the initial report that linked autism and vaccines debunced that is both completely inaccurate. this is a story that was debunked years ago. andrew wakefield lost his license as a result of the tests he performed on children in this study that did not hold up. we've known for years that he had taken out a patent for an alternate measles vaccine before he published this article.

we also know that the 12 children who appeared in that study had not been consecutively referred as was initially claimed, and we know that there have not been any studies that have been able to replicate his findings, and, in fact, there's studies involving millions and millions of children that have shown the exact opposite that there's not a direct connection between the mmr vaccine and autism. when the media went forward and framed this as studies debunked and then as we, the media, want to do had segments with andrew wakefield on the one hand and somebody from the ama on the other hand, that gave and gives the impression that this is on the one hand on the other hand debate, which it is not, and

that's a fundamental problem with the way the press acts specifically around medicine and health, and it's also an issue with politics, and i'm not saying that obviously or maybe not obviously, but i'm not saying that reporters should come out in favor of one candidate or another. i'm saying when someone says barak obama was not born in the united states, you do not then run a story that says x person claims that he was not born in the united states and barak obama says, yes, in fact, i was. that's not a legitimate story to run. it's legitimate to say i don't know whether candidate x or candidatey's positions are going to be better for the country. i don't know if this or that economic policy is the right policy, but to take statements of fact and because it's either controversial or you have someone controversial saying it

and to present that then as on the one hand or on the other hand is incredibly irresponsible of the media and does a disservice to us all as information consumers, so you have this happening here in the last month, and this time around it is definitely true that reporters were harder on andrew wakefield than a year earlier when they retracted the story and he lost his medical license. as all of the revelations about his initial work came out, the media consistently did less of the on the one hand on the other hand. however, similar to the movement, i still don't think that's the responsible way to cover a story like that.

we -- there has been many studies. there was one at the university of michigan in 2008 that gave test subjects, 20 statements, 10 of which they said were true, 10 of which they said were false. 10 minutes later there was a very high degree of accuracy i guess. that's not the exact word i'm looking for i guess, but in the text's subjects ability to correctly to remember what was present the them as true and what was presented as false. that went very clearly down over time, so even if taking this as a story now, 13 years after the study came out, and saying that, well, we're going to give all of this attention just so we can say, well, now this has been debunked i also think is not really legitimate. it's a little bit like the

political tactic of saying, well, i have no reason to suspect that my candidate beats his wife or that you introduced that concept into a population, and then, you know, when you see that candidate, you start to think, well, you know, yeah, i have no reason either, but i wonder if that's true. [laughter] it's very, very hard to unscare people. i think we can look at any number of things for any parents out there. have any of you ever let your child have an apple that they got on halloween? has anyone ever gotten an apple then? probably not. [laughter] there is no documented case of getting a razor blade in apples.

if we all gave apple the out on halloween, the net result wob positive -- would be positive and it's highly unlikely to get a razor blade. it's an urban myth that somehow cropped up, but, and even knowing that over even after all my research on this, if my son came home with an apple, first, i would say how is a 14 month old out trick or treating on his own -- [laughter] but i wouldn't let him eat it because there's a gnawing doubt that it was there. so i think that there are a couple of ways -- there are a couple of -- well, let me back up one more second and talk about one more way in which the

current situation we find ourselves in now could have been avoided, and it gets to the big scenes of my book which is scientific literacy, both on the part of the population and the assumed ability of the population to understand science on the part of the public health apparatus, the medical community, and the journalistic community. i think that there's an assumption that the public in general is much stupider than we actually are. one thing i heaver a lot -- i hear a lot is -- excuse me -- you can't explain to someone that it's impossible to prove a universal negative proposition which is a fundamental sort of ten innocent of the scientific method, and it's why you can

never go on tv saying i know that vaccines do not 100% cause autism and will never be shown to. it's the same reason i can't go on tv and say i know that human beings will never be able to fly. all you can do is no human being has flown and because of that we're fairly confident that as we go forward, no human being will be able to fly, and so we do not recommend that people jump off their houses with hopes that they then will be able to be superman, but for some reason, there's there sense around that and other scientific con cements that it's something that's impossible to convey to the public. another problem in the communication effort is that journalists, the -- as a group, we are not do not treat science

and health with the same degree of seriousness that we would expect of subjects like business or even sports or ballet or, you know, if i was and when i was working on newspapers, no one would come to me and say, oh, there's this performance of the ballet tonight, will you go and write about it? i know nothing about ballet. i'm inexe tent to deal with that. all the time i would get press releases about a health department initiative or a medical initiative. this was in south florida so a lot of about aging that i also had no knowledge or experience with and was told, okay, well, you go write this up. i wouldn't be given an assignment to cover a hockey game or football game because i don't know enough about it to speak confidently on it, but for some reason we don't hold our

coverage of science to that same level. we don't expect that same level of expertise or even minimal competency when dealing with science, and i think this is a situation in which that minimal level of competency could have altered the entire shape of this discourse, and i'll explain what i mean. the initial study that andrew wakefield did in 1998 was based on 12 children, a 12-person case study, and he said that these 12 children, their parents had given him after the fact recollections of changes in their children's behavior and the correlation with when they got the mmr vaccine. i don't know home people are here today or here in that

third, let's say 25, and one, two, three, four, five, six, seven, eight of you are men, you know, there's a case study of the percent of the population that's male and female. i didn't pick out special groups. i said that third. if i said, well, 70% of the population is female based on this case study i did, that would clearly will ridiculous. the most i could say from a case study is, well, that's interesting. there's this very isolated situation that i'm dealing with, and because the results seem to be statistically significant, that's something that maybe we should look at more and try to look at over a population with more, with a wider subset of people. i also -- if you have a case series or a case study that is

based on after the fact recollection, that's another reason. that's another reason why you would say, well, okay, this again might be an interesting starting point, but we know so much now about the unreliability of memory, eye-witness testimony. it's a huge issue in courts. it's a huge legal issue. there's so much evidence about how easy it is for us to reformulate things in our mind to create a coherent narrative that it's irresponsible of me to take people's recollections of a very emotional event and use that as a basis of conclusion, so neither of those concepts require an incredible amount of expertise or advanced scientific training or advance the scientific knowledge, so i think what would have been a responsible way to cover the

initial study and even more than that, and this is probably more detail than you want at this point, but the initial press conference where andrew wakefield came and said i don't think parents should give their children the mmr vaccine. i'm worried, and i think we should space it out. we should have said what is this guy doing saying that based on absolutely nothing, based on a 12-person case series? what is a hospital doing holding this press conference? you know, you want a controversial story. that's a controversial story, and one that accurately represents what the situation was. instead, what you got the next day was all throughout london, all of the papers had stories that said prominent researcher says that the mmr vaccine might cause autism, and then it had the standard on the one hand on the other hand thing. what you saw very quickly, unfortunately there, was what

happens when you inject a fear into the population. the measles vaccine uptake rate fell from above 90% to under 80% and people started dying of measles. the fact that's happening in the # 1st century is -- 21st century is astounding i think. the effect in the u.s. is more diffuse because the u.k. for a number of different reasons doesn't have mandatory school age vaccination laws so it's much easier for something like this to see an immediate drop. what you've seen here is over the past 10 years, and i don't know now exactly the number of states, but it's somewhere between 70%-90% of states have now passed what is called the philosophical exemption law relating to vaccination meaning that in order to have your child

go to a public school and not be vaccinated, you used to need a religious exemption, so, you know, a christian scientist could get a religious exemption. i could not go in as a reformed jew and say, oh, it's against my religion to get vaccinated, but now with a philosophical seemings, excuse me, all you need to do is say i don't believe in vaccines, and then you can go to school. your children can go to school without being vaccinated, and so there are now pockets around the country where there are communities with incredibly low vaccination rates, 60%-70%, which is much, much lower than needed to keep a given infectious disease out of that area, and so one thing that i hear a lot when i talk about

this is, well, isn't it true that the overall vaccination rate in the country is still around 90% which is high, and for many diseases is a high enough level to essentially keep it from spreading across the country as a whole. well, yes, that's true, but that's a little bit like saying to someone without a job, well, the overall unemployment rate is 90% in the country, and so that should be fine. in those communities in which it's 60% or 80%, it's up credibly ease my -- easy for a disease to get a choke hold. there's a epidemic in california that started when a patient of bob sears who wrote the vaccine book, not a fan, one of his patients intentionally unvaccinated, caught measles,

came back, lived in an area with a lot of intentionally unvaccinated children. that cost $10 million to contain. an infant was hospitalized for weeks. dozens of children had to be qawrn teened. that's one the most infectious diseases. this kid was in trader joe's, and that was a quarantine on everybody who was in that trader joe's. i asked how do you know, you know, if you're finding what communities are at risk, and he said, well, take a map, put a pen where there's a whole foods, and draw a circle around it. [laughter] i'm waiting for the day when i

get or delivered a lawsuit from whole foods for defaming that. [laughter] i'll also throw in prius owners. i'm not knocking that, my mom has a prius. those are areas where it tends to be in communities where there's more of an emphasis on natural or organic living, much more affluent communities. if you talk to anybody who works in public health in the third world, there's, you know, there's a moral outrage, deservedly so, that, you know, they are struggling to get vaccine, to get someone to send the .20 cents or .40 centings to areas where diarrhea is still the leading cause of childhood

death, and here we are told to hide in the herd if we don't want to vaccinate your children, so there's a lot i didn't talk about. there's one more thing i just want to address before i open it up, and, again, this is partially blamed on the microbe living in my stomach at the time. [laughter] i had a lot of conversations with my peers and with other parents or parents to be or young parents or who've said, well, you know, i just don't feel -- i'm just not going to vaccinate my kid, and i'm willing and do have conversations with them and explain my view. what gets me really upset is when those people aren't honest

with themselves and the people around them about the repercussions of their actions. when i hear things like, well, it's my personal choice what i do, it's my choice what happens to my kid. if you want to go live on an island, then it's your choice, but if you're going to live in a society where you come in contact with pregnant women and infants and immune challenged people who can't get vaccinated, it is not morally honest, i think, to say to yourself this is a public -- this is a private decision i'm making. it's akin to saying it's a private decision to get drunk and get behind the wheel of my car. your putting everyone you come this contact with -- come in contact with at risk. i've talked to parents whose children were too young to be vaccinated and died of whooping cough. in this country, 10 kids in california died of whooping

cough, nine of them under six months old. that's not only heart breaking and tragic, but i think reflects poorly on us as a society that that is still happening, and, you know, i have no -- i don't make suggestions about legal remedies or whether this should or shouldn't be something that is, there there's a law for againstment i don't feel like that's my place, but it makes me crazy when parents make these decisions and aren't honest with themselves or the people around them with how that decision ripples out and affects everyone else. it makes me all the more crazy now that i have a son. there was someone at our pediatrician's office who again, i don't know why switzerland, i

feel like their tourist board will file suit against me. [laughter] someone who was vacationing there had measles and just came into our pediatrician's office, walked into the office and said, well, i'm worried my son has measles, what can you do? it meant that the entire office was shut down and every kid there had to be either, you know, had to be guaranteed or tested. it's not like, oh, you know, do, do, do, i think my kid has strep throat. i'll go and bring him here. no, this is something that's potentially lethal that killed more children than any other disease in the history of the world. that can blind you, lead to lifelong complications. if i had known who that person is, i would have said very mean things to them.

[laughter] yeah, there's about six more topics that i wanted to hit on, but, again, because the areas people are much more interested in oftentimes don't coincide with what i feel like people might be interested in, i'm opening it up. i mean one last thing i didn't touch on at all is as little sympathy i have for parents who just decide, you know, this is something i'm going to do, i feel almost the opposite about parents who are dealing with, who have children who have very serious developmental disorders and are believed that it's the result of vaccines. as much as i feel like it's a tragedy that children are dying, i think that the safeguards and

support there are for families dealing with series developmental disorders is always really disgraceful. i spent a lot of time at conferences, a lot of time with parents, and i am very much convinced that one of the reasons that the anti-vaccine movement has got such a hold in these communities is because that is -- it's a community that gives them all support. it's where people understand what they're going through and say, oh, yes, i can help you do this. i can be there for you. i can give you advice about, about what might happen next. you have a child that you can't bring out in public or that soils himself or that's violent. here's what has happened to me,

and here's what you might want to try. this is thankfully changing, but i talked to a loot -- lot of parents, and others i've talked to that basically they got the diagnosis, and it's like, okay, here's your pamphlet, so you have a child with autism, and, you know, all right, good luck. i don't deal with disorders, and it's nothing i can deal with, and that's it, so, you know, i feel like it's unfortunate that because of the way this debate has evolved, it's very difficult to talk about to be a supporter of vaccines and not have that end up being framed as being somehow an enemy of parents who are dealing with this, and i think that's another one of the -- something that's really awful about this, and that you

have groups of parents who all wants same thing which is to protect children that are absolutely set at each other's proverbial throats. i'll open it up for as long as you guys want to ask questions, and then hopefully you'll all buy 10 books. [laughter] yeah, so, have at it. all right, well, good being here -- [laughter] yes. >> well, one of my jobs in public health is to promote prevention activities like vaccinations, and i was very intrigued by your early mention of conspiracies among, you know, pharmaceutical companies. one of the challenges about communicating about science is

that science is deliciously gray. >> right. >> and the narrative around gray is a very hard narrative to sell to people, and it becomes troubling when you literally are unable to say, well, this is 100% safe. this is 100% effective. nothing is 1 00% safe or effective, and there's people who get vaccines and still get the flu. >> definitely, there's side effects, yeah. >> so one of the problems to me was particularly and in "news week" there was a two page article about the quality of medical research, and it was quite critical, and the part of it that i paid a lot of attention to is what the

pharmaceutical companies seem to be doing to sort of suppress research. >> right. >> and i just wonder how to fold what may, in fact, be a conspiracy theory. >> with reality. >> how to deal with that. >> i think it's certainly i think it's a scenario in which we have to take the company's word in which vaccines are safe. if it were so, i'd have a problem with it too. i think the way that medical testing and medical research done is hugely problematic. the peer review process, you know, is problematic. the ways in which drug companies have relationships with review articles that are disclosed, i

mean, there's a huge amount of things problematic and there's case after case after case over the last decade where something is brought to market and asked then later it was either brought to market before it was fully researched or, in fact, when there was indications that there was some serious side effects. in this situation, i think that, you know, you don't need to worry about telling people you should take the mmr vaccine and be confident it's safe because of merk. you can be confident it's safe because of studies done by governments around the world and researchers around the world on tens of millions of children, so i think, you know, one of the effects of now, you know, this is 13 years of this cycle, is that vaccines in the vaccines on

the schedule are the single most studied health initiative, children public health initiative, that's in use today, so i think, you know, i think from my perspective when people say to me, well, you know, a, b, and c, are all things the drug companies did, and i don't argue that at all because it's usually true, and i'm thankful here we don't need to rely on the drug companies. i think getting to your sort of point about how do you deal with gray. i think that is also a real problem and not just around medicine, but in science generally, and an example of it really helped clarify my thinking around was was climate change. you know, just numbers one i'm pulling not out of thin air,

but, you know, so there's like 89 or 93 or whatever percent of research that has strong indications that human beings have a very large role in the climate change that's going on, and then there's 11 or you know, 7 or whatever percent of studies that either have results that contraindicate that or are much more ambiguous, so there has been in the climate community for a long time this incredible anxiety that if there was an acknowledgement it's 93% of the evidence opposed to 100% of the evidence, global warming denied that there would never be any way to move forward with initiatives and environmental initiatives, so instead we had discussions that it was 100%, and then when we all found out that, in fact, it wasn't, the rebound was much, much greater

than, i think, the initial -- it's like the cover up is greater than the crime. you know, if as a scientific community, there was more honesty from the outset, i think more people would feel comfortable saying, okay, 93%, that's a figure i'm feeling confident with, then, oh, well, wait, why were they lying to me about this? then, is it going from 9 #% to 83% to 72%? you know, why should i now start to believe them when they tell me this is true? that's also something that's happened with vaccines. there's been a fear about accurately communicating the risks to the public, and people have negative reactions to vaccines. there's no question about that. people have negative reactions

to seat belts. a certain number of people die every year because their sternum is crushed from the seat belt. i'll wear a seat belt because of how many times out of how many times, a seat belt is going to protect me, but, you know, nothing works 100% of the time. yes? >> so, seth, i think the book is well done. >> thank you. >> have you considered a career of an epidemiologist? [laughter] i'm impressed on how you blended your understanding of science process but also journalism. >> right. >> one question somewhere in the book, i can't remember where, you brought the issue of having science processed in the public. >> right. >> so that as people are debating whether transfats are

good or bad, a study comes out this way, that way, and eventually we settle the issue. >> right. >> we do that in the public. you commented that why don't scientists do this behind closed doors, and then when they have the answer, tell us? >> i mean, well, right. i mean, you know, one easy answer to that is because you never come up with the answer. i mean, you know, newton was right until he wasn't, until einstein showed that he wasn't right. you know, we come up with hopefully a series of increasingly better answers and more refined answers, but science is really about, and this is something i talk about in my book, science is really about being wrong, about, you know, you come up with a theory, and then you sort of say, all right, everyone have at it, and

all you can do because of the inability to prove universal negative proposition, all you can do is show that there have been x number of very comprehensive efforts to show that it's wrong, and they've all failed, and so it seems to indicate that it's right. you know, again, i think the public is more capable of understanding some nuance and risk than they often or we often get credit for or give credit for. you know, i was watching cnn before i came over here, and that makes me doubt that sometimes, but, you know, i think in general we take risks every day. you know, and we do things that make no sense on a logical level, and we do them because we understand that there are

scientific evidence for supporting them, like flying, like chemotherapy. there are all sorts of things that we accept as part of our every day life because on some level we obviously have faith in science, and i think that, so i think that there actually is more respect and understanding for science on a scientific process out there, but it's very easy to harm that, to hurt that, and when there's a sense of there being a cover up or of something going on behind the scenes, i think it's much, much harder to get that trust back than it is along the way to sort of say, okay, well, this is what's going on. >> the truth is that a lot of science is not very good quality. >> that's a whole other issue.

>> i think you raised that. a lot claims to be evidence and it's actually not evidence. >> that's true. >> it's not very good at keeping our own house in order in a way as scientists. >> not me, i'm not a scientist. [laughter] come on, we have no problem in journalism. [laughter] wow, that got -- i mean, yes, i agree, and again, it's one of the reasons why it's so difficult to -- i mean, when you find out there's doctors that have been putting their names on journal articles that never read the article and had nothing to do with it or, yeah, it hurt, you know, it definitely, that becomes negative for the entire field. you know, and maybe it's because

i'm not a scientist, but i think that the same way that i think overall people going into politics because they want to and believe in public service, and people go into law enforcement because they want to protect the people around them. i think that, the vast majority of scientists are in the field because they're interested in intellectual exploration, and i think their -- well, i always say to myself don't make pronouncements, and then i always fail, but how can i phrase this? in my experience and from my research, i think that scientists and the scientific community would benefit by holding itself to higher standards.

i mean, i think when someone is revealed to have had their name on an article that they had nothing to do with, that should be so humiliating that then they have a hard time going to the next faculty meeting, and that's not what you get a lot of times. you know, i think that that is something that could be very beneficial, and, you know, when i was talking about journalism earlier, i'll very much oblige to my field. i think people should be embarrassed to have written the stories that they wrote about the wakefield studies in 1998, and they are not. up stead, now, -- instead, now, they are just writing the next story about that, and i think we should hold our colleagues to those types of standards. yeah. yeah? >> you mentioned the movement

and the way it was covered about the example of how journalism of obama not being an american citizen. >> right. >> but aren't journalists just trying to tell a story? suspect that a story -- isn't that a story in itself that the president wasn't born in america? >> the question was in relation to the berther movement, correct me if i'm phrasing this wrong, but how do you draw a distinction between covering a story that's a story because there are people who believe this versus covering a story as if it's a story because it's a legitimate question. i think that's a very good point. the coverage of the berther movement and i shouldn't say

all, but i think the reason that took off so much is because it wasn't covered under a framework of why is it that some people believe this. it was covered under why won't he show us his birth certificate. it was covered well, can we believe the honolulu star advertiser's birth announcement or does the conspiracy on the part of nigeria date back to when he was born? you know, you have lou dobbs day after day after day on cnn talking about this. i think cnn should be embarrassed and should have been embarrassed and should have said, shut up, you can't say that on our air waves. there was -- i said that to someone, and someone said, well, that's impension on freedom of speech.

freedom of speech don't mean you get a talk show on cnn. [laughter] laura after she was throwing around racial quotes it was about how her 1st amendment was violated. she can say that in her own home as much as she wants. she doesn't have a right to a talk show about it. the other thing i'd say is there are lots of crazy things that people believe that we don't cover as stories. you know, the flat earth society , there's not a going to be a story on cnn tomorrow night and people who believe the cia is implanting radio chips in their brain, so, but, yeah, i think there is a way to cover some stories that does it in more of that light, and i think if they are covered in that light, you wouldn't see them, you know, you wouldn't have seep the berther

story sort of take off the way that it did, and i think, you know, in the wakefield, yeah, i think that's what could have been done right off the bat with the big wakefield study. the study could have been why is it that someone is saying this and not that there's a 50% chance that this is true. yes? >> i apologize because i just bought the book this morning and vice president read it. >> what do you mean you apologize? [laughter] >> as a historian, did you really find this story starts in 1998 or is it traced back further to other episodes around vaccines or medical science, you know, including 1976 with the flu? >> right, right. so the question was did i feel like this debate started in 1998 with the wakefield paper or did

it go back further and the reference was two 18976 -- 1976 effort by president ford on the swine flu. this specific fear about autism started here, but i think your point is absolutely correct that there has been cyclical scares about vaccines as long as there's been vaccines. most of the time what happens when a disease is epidemic in a society, everybody wants the vaccine, and when it's effective, people then start to, people then start to become more concerned about the vaccines' potential repercussions. it's a vicious cycle or paradox of vaccines. the more effective they are, the

less necessary they seem, and so then there have been, again throughout history, incidents in which vaccines safety was poorly handled or communication about vaccine efforts were was poorly handled, and because what i'm about to say is probably a situation people are more familiar with than the swine flu situation in 1976, an example that i bring up is the current situation we face with the hep titus b vaccine. it was recommended to be given at birth. it is primarily, but not solely, a blood born disease. a common mode of transportation

is unprotected sex, neither of which newborns of at high risk. the reason or one of the reasons and one the strongest reasons for giving that vaccine at birth is that the populations that are most at risk of giving their children that through breast milk or because they are carriers is also the population least likely to come in for follow-up pediatric care. they want to give the vaccine as there they are in the hospital. you can't say in a public health setting we recommend this. if you're poor or disadvantaged or live in or area where there's high drug abuse, you know, that doesn't fly, and people are

there for skeptical and when people -- you know, when people ask their doctors where their child is to get that vaccine at birth, there's really not a very good answer, and a lot of doctors that i know that are incredibly, incredibly passionate about vaccines say you don't need to give that at birth, but the net effect of that is, okay, well, then, why do i need to do this? why not that and why this? that's, that. i think that has been a consistent problem ring that type of communication has been a consistent problem. you know, with the hep titus b situation, i have no idea how one might handle that. you know, i mean, i see why

that's a difficult, hard to make a pronouncement about that, but i do think that's a situation in which there is less than total transparency and honestly with the patient population, and when you are dealing with a kid, especially a newborn, that sets off alarm bells. yes? >> i'm curious. what type of reaction has this jeep rated in the anti-vaccine circles? >> the question was what type of reactions has have generated in the anti-vaccine circles. the type of reaction that has led me to take pictures of my family offline and i don't have a listed phone number or, you know, i get a lot of and the

lord's vengeance will be mine e-mails and accusations of having a child in order to sell a book and poisen my child so that i can sell a book, you know, very angry e-mails, and, again, you know, it can be very difficult when you feel like your family is being, you know, not threatened, but when people are talking about your family like that, but i have spent time with a lot of people who feel very passionately about vaccines and about what they believe the effects of their children have been, and i try to remember that they're coming from a place of fully and honestly believing

that vaccines are essentially poisen that is being injected into infants, and it's harming them, and, you know, so i try not to, i try to either not respond or respond in a way that will start a dialogue, and usually when i do that, i jus don't hear back. ..

and there are people who are very very concerned and i think probably there's a somewhat legitimate concern that, you know, when you have children dying of whooping cough, when you have measles outbreaks, there is the potential for a backlash against you know, against autism research. so, ian, you know, the reaction from anti-vaccine advocates i guess. but i mean, you know there are people who say you need fbi protection and i'm clearly not in that situation. she is the fbi agent. >> to see other programs related to this topic, visit booktv.org and search vaccines or autism in the upper left-hand

corner of the page. m.i.t. american history professor pauline maier is on booktv's in-depth this sunday. if somebody had told me a number of years ago at any point in my life that i would have written a book about andrew johnson, i would have told them they were crazy. it is not that i don't think he is an interesting person. he really is an interesting person. not that i didn't know anything about him, but for most of my career as a historian i have tried to avoid the period of

period of reconstruction and sound strange for someone who writes about slavery, which is a difficult topic to write about. but i find it easier to deal with the 17th century and the 18th century and attitudes about race and slavery than i do dealing with reconstruction. there is something about it that is just maddening to me and i think what it is is that it was a moment of opportunity. when i think of the people in the 17th and 18th history who have very primitive ideas about many things in the world and you know there are lots of things they don't know, i cannot totally forgive them but it is not his as his era taping to me, exasperating to me as the period of time when you had photographe part of the modern era and you feel poster to those people, the people in that time period. they seem more like us than someone in in the 18th century

and 19th century when i'm writing about the development of slavery in virginia or jefferson's monticello even. so when i read about reconstruction in this moment of hope, it makes me angry. i'm able to be detached. the further back you go at that moment it makes me really angry when i think about what could have happened and what did not happen and how close we were, how close the country was to a period of time when we really could have done something to begin the process of racial healing, the process of make in america really one for every one. so, johnson would not have been my topic of choice. i read about that era because they have to but it wouldn't be something -- i would never have thought i would have actually studied it and actually write something about it. but i got a phonecall one morning from arthur schlesinger jr. and telling me that i was going to be getting a letter from him and sort of talking just in general and i did get

this letter from him in which he asked me to write a biography of of androgen -- johnson for the american presidents series which is a nice series, very short concise book about american presidents. they get people sort of, well sometimes people will actually fit some unlike george appleby did thomas jefferson. of course she's a great jefferson scholar and gary hart in a book. george mcgovern did lincoln i think so there is a mix of historians and non-historians, looking at these presidencies, telling the basic stories but also giving their own sort of individual spin on it. and he asked me to do this -- to do the johnson book and i guess he figured i would put my individual spin on it. i agree to do it because arthur asked me to do it if i had great respect for him. i knew him from the papers of thomas jefferson. we were both on the advisory committee for that and also because paul golf was the editor who is also the general series

editor for the series was my editor for the book i did with burnham jordan. burnham can read. so this is to friends. you now how does when friends ask you to do things. who asked me to do this and i said sure. i put aside my misgivings. i know is a fascinating topic and they were so much material, very rich but i wondered if i would be able to sort of curve my natural feelings of antipathy about looking at this particular period in american history and i agree to do it. that was many many years ago. this book is i have to confess long overdue. in between saying i would do that i work the hemingses of monticello which took a lot of time and energy and then i came back to this seriously unfinished at. i am very very glad that i did. >> you can watch this and other programs on line at booktv.org. >> there is a new on line enterprise just starting up and it is called the washington

independent review of books. david stewart is the president of this organization. mr. stewart what is your organization? >> well it is a group of writers and editors and similarly minded people mostly in the d.c. area who are very dismayed by the shriveling of book reviews space and sort of the standard media. a lot of book review sections have been folded. they have shrunk, and it is just harder to find information about what is going on in the world of looks these days. the coverage of the publishing industry has shrunk. so we decided to try to do something ourselves. this is really sort of from the old judy garland mickey rooney movies where they say let's put on a show. we decided well we would create their own book review and it is about 70 of us that have been engaged in it. we have just launched it and had a great response.

hidtas been a lot of fun and very gratifying. >> and what kinds of books we'd be reviewing on the site? >> a wide range. we are going to really review nonfiction and fiction. we suspect for now we are not going to be looking at children's books and we won't be looking at romance literature. but beyond that, we are quite open. and we will be reviewing recently released books. we hope to get our reviews up within the first 30 to 45 days after publication. so you can come to us for current information about what are the new books out there. >> now, can people submit books to be reviewed as well? >> we would rather not get the books but they can certainly bring them to our attention, because we will have to decide if we want to review them. you can get a lot of looks that way that are hard to deal with, so we certainly invite people to e-mail us, bring their bookstore

attention, send us their publicity packets so we know in plenty of time that it is coming and we can decide whether it is one we want to take a shot at reviewing. >> mr. stewart you said that a lot of your reviewers and people involved in the washington independent review of looks that background in writing and publishing. what is your background and give us a snapshot of some of the people who will be participating. >> well, my background is i was a lawyer for many years but i'm now an author. i've done a couple of books on american history, one on the writing of the constitution in the summer of 17871 on the impeachment trial of andrew johnson and i have a new one coming out this fall on aaron burr's western conspiracy called american emperor. the other folks involved come from journalism. there are book writers as well. we have been so lucky in recruiting. we have a book on the eichmann

trial in israel. we were able to get judge patricia wald's who was on the war crimes tribunal for yugoslavia. we have been able to get a leading constitutional scholar, irwin chemerinsky to look at a first amendment book for us. we have just had a terrific response from people. just as an example pauline maier who has a wonderful book out about the ratification of the constitution is going to review a new book on the revolution by gordon wood, so we have really been able to get top-notch reviewers and it is an exciting thing. everybody in this operation works for the same amount of money. nobody is paid and that includes a reviewer so it is just wonderful to see people willing to pitch in to create this conversation about the world of looks, which is really what we are all about. >> and there has been a decline in traditional media review of

books, but on line there is quite an active marketplace of reviewers. what do you bring to the table that is different? >> well i think we are going to bring the death in the quality of our reviewers. we also are doing features. we are going to have author interviews and q&a's. we have a couple of radio interviews, partners who will be putting out podcast, so we will provide a full range of information and i think the other operations that are trying to do the same thing are doing the lord's work as well and i certainly support what they are up to. but i think there is room for a lot of voices and that is important when you are reviewing books, that there are a lot of voices. so you were not just duck with one or two reactions to a new book. which may be idiosyncratic in their reactions. >> will you be looking out politically slanted books as well and will you be looking at

both books from the left and from the right and from the middle? >> of course. you know, we are predominantly with washington area writers. we have a lot of interest in political and historical topics and we will take them all on from every point on the spectrum. >> and how often we be putting up new material? >> we will have new content up every day. either a new interview or a new review. here now you know in the early days we were trying not to set the bar too high for cells but as time goes on we expect the content to become richer and richer and i'm really looking forward to that. >> mr. stewart you say in their web site that you got your seed money through the aiw freedom to write fund. what is that? >> well it is associate with american independent writers which is a writers organization here in the d.c. area and the

freedom to write fund is a 501(c)(3) affiliated with the aiw and we have done a lot of fundraising. we need to do more but enough to get us up and running and it is men a great sponsorship. >> david stewart is the president of the washington independent review of books. washington independent review of books.com is the web site. >> we are here talking with lindsey boyd of the independent institute about the upcoming books they have coming out. >> we have got a number of exciting new books coming out. we have got to nail, two new books that are being re-release. we have got the on politics and we are going to be releasing a coming early april. we will be doing some heavy promotion for that.

it is a classic look. do something that all students should read. students are interested in learning more about free market principles and they pump -- foundations of our democracy and how the principles apply to the current political atmosphere. beyond politics is absolutely essential. we just released the new holy war with bob nelson and he did an event featuring the dichotomy between economic religion and environmental religion. so, we have also got habeas corpus coming out with anthony gregory he was a new author so we are very excited about that. and we will be -- we will be investigating some new works early in the fall but we have got some exciting, exciting projects on the horizon. want to look out for next year with e. a book that we are