war. so, one big white race is an idea based in politics. ... to stop vaccinating children, which mr. mnookin said is a troubling development. mr. mnookin argues this focus on vaccination has diverted money 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 i try and deal with in the book, and then sleep as much time as i can for questions. because i have spoken with a number of different types of groups and it has been very hard for me to anticipate what the questions are going to be outside of them always being provocative and interesting, and i expect that will be even more true tonight at a university where people are coming out from all sorts of different angles as opposed to a nursing coalition or a center for inquiry or different places i have talked. so, i will also be sipping a lo.

so, this book, this project started for me about three years ago, a little more than three years ago, and at that time i was newly married. my wife and i had just moved into brooklyn, into an area where there were a lot of young parents, a lot of parents to be, and i started hearing more and more discussion about this issue, about whether or not parents should vaccinate their children, about whether kids were getting too many, too soon, about whether there was mercury in vaccines that could cause 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 essentially on gut instinct. they would say things like well, it just feels like a lot. it feels like a lot. it doesn't feel safe. it seems like there are too many chemicals in there, and that struck me. not because i knew at the time that there was evidence on one side or the other necessarily and as someone who has spent much of his career as a reporter and an investigative reporter, i was very willing to believe that drug companies and the government were engaged in a massive cover-up and you know, there were profit motives and incompetence combined to create a real public health problem.

that to me seems like a potentially great story, frankly but, but i was surprised so many people that i knew were not aching 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 disdaining of controversies about other issues like climate change or evolution, where they felt like people who they disagreed with were ignoring the 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 jenny mccarthy had just come out i think with a second that now her for books,

focusing on her belief that the measles-mumps-rubella vaccine had either caused or triggered her son's autism and -- i have to be very careful with how i say this but her story has not been entirely consistent over the years. i started looking into it and i spent most of the last three years reading scientific studie, interviewing parents, parents whose children had died of vaccine medical 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

of court appearances for an ongoing series of trials on this issue. and at the end, it seemed 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 the 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 there were two things that i had to address. one of them is why is there in our society, a culture that this is such a debate and there continues to be. there was a harris poll taken two weeks ago in which only 52% of people said that they

believed that if vaccines did not cause autism. that doesn't mean the other 40% did. there were 30 something% that said they were unsure, but you know, more than a decade after this whole specific vaccine scare started, there were still an enormous number of the population that thinks that there is a legitimacy to that. so that things -- one, why is that? both from a media angle and an information consumer angle and also from a sort of personal, from an individual angle. why is it that we as individuals create narratives that we use two combatants ourselves of things that appear not to be true, actually are. 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 into writing it. is actually less rare than you think. you can't sell a magazine article that you can get somebody to say they will write a book. we don't want to read 5000 words by 130,000 words, great. but i ended up writing. this is a little bit less than half of the book that i ended up writing, which is good. it definitely should not have been the link that was, but i'm just saying that as an illustration of the ways in which this one issue permeated through other things we are dealing with as a society and a culture.

it is also the reason why neither the word autism nor vaccines appears in the title, which i had some spirit of debates with my publisher, who kept saying i believe you should see what they are about. i kept saying it is not just about that. i don't want to give people the impression that it is about this one specific topic. so, what i'm going to do is use some events that have occurred recently in the past month that some people might be familiar with to show some of what i'm talking about and then before i open it up. now i guess about four weeks agf reports in the british medical journal about a 1998 study that had appeared which was the first study positing a link between vaccines and autism. that was the first time there

have been a connection, 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 this was the first time that there is a specific length drawn to autism. that paper in the "lancet" involved the measles mumps rubella vaccine, the mmr vaccine and their lead author was a british gastroenterologist named andrew wakefield. excuse me. he was one of 13 authors on the study, and by the british medical journal report, or three-part series that started coming out about a month ago, said that wakefield had committed outright fraud when he

submitted this report. the stories that then resulted on tv and in the newspaper, newspapers, was a report, that linked autism and vaccines debunked, which is both completely inaccurate and i think completely irresponsible. this was a study that had been debunked years earlier. and are wakefield had lost his medical license as a result of the test that he performed on children in the study that did not hold up. we have known for years that he had taken out a patent for an alternate measles vaccines just before you publish this initial study in the "lancet." we also know that 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 have been studies involving millions and millions of children that have shown the exact opposite, that there is not a connection between the mmr vaccine and autism. so when the media went forward, and frame this as the study as debunked and then as we, meaning the media, want to do would have segments where you would have andrew wakefield on the one hand and then you'd know someone from the cdc or the ama on on the other hand. that gave and gives the impression that this is on the one hand on the other hand to be, which it is not. and i think that is a fundamental problem with the way

the press asked specifically around medicine and health. it also oftentimes is an 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 that when someone says barack obama was not worn in the united states, you do not then run a story that says x person claims he was not born in the united states and barack obama says yes, in fact i was. that is not a legitimate story to run. it is legitimate to say i don't know whether candidate x or candidate wimax's positions will be better for the country. i don't know if this or that economic policy is right but to take statements of fact and because it is either controversial or you have someone controversial saying it and to present that then is on the one hand, other hand is

incredibly irresponsible on the part of the media and i think a disservice to 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 much harder on andrew wakefield and i have been for instance a year earlier when the "lancet" officially retracted its story and he lost his medical license. i think as all of the revelations about his initial work have come out, the media has consistently done less of the on the one hand, on the other hand. however, similar to the coverage of the birther movement i still don't think that is a responsible way to cover a story like that. there have 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 and 10 of which they said were false. 10 minutes later there was a very high degree of, a high degree of accuracy i guess. it is not exactly the word i'm looking for but in the test subjects ability to correctly remember what had been presented to them as true and what have would have been presented as false. that went very clearly down over time, so even in taking this as a story now 13 years after the study came out and saying we are going to give all of this attention just so we can say well now this has been debunked, i also thing it is not really legitimate. is really like the political tactic of saying well, i have no

reason to suspect that my candidate beats his wife. you introduce that concept into a population and then you know, when you see that candidate do you start to think like well, yeah i have no reason, but i wonder if that is true? it is very very hard to understeer people. i think we can look at any number of things for any parents out there. heavy it any of you ever let your child have an apple that they got on halloween? has anyone ever gotten an apple on halloween? probably not. [laughter] there is no documented case of a kid getting a razor blade in an apple. you know, if we all gave out apples and all the children ate apples on halloween, then it would be incredibly positive as opposed to having them all eat

candy and it is highly unlikely that anyone would have actually gotten a razor blade. it is an urban myth that somehow cropped up. but, and even knowing that and even after all my research on this, if my son came home with an apple, first of all i would say how was it that a 14-month-old is out trick-or-treating on his own? [laughter] but i am sure i would let him eat it because in the back of my mind there would read this nine doubt that 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 -- one more weight in which i think the situation in which we find ourselves now

could have been avoided and it gets to what i think is another one of the big themes 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 there is an assumption that the public in general is much stupider than we actually are. one thing i hear a lot is, you can't explain to someone that it is impossible to prove a universal negative proposition, which is a fundamental sort of tenant of the scientific method and it is why you can never go on tv and say, i know that vaccines do not, 100% did not

cause autism and never will be shown to have any connection to autism. it is the same reason i can't go on tv and say i know with 100% certainty that human beings will never be able to fly. all you can do is say no human being has flown. because of that we are barely 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 the hopes that they then will be able to act like superman. but for some reason, there is this sense around scientific concepts that it is something that is impossible to convey to the public. another problem in the communication effort is the journalists, as a group, we for some reason did 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 in when i was working in newspapers no one would come to me and say i'll cook, there is this performance of the ballet tonight. we go and write about it? because i know nothing about l.a.. i am completely incompetent to deal with that. all the time i would get press releases about a health initiative, a medical initiative a lot about aging that i had no knowledge or experience within would be told okay we you go right this? i wouldn't be given an assignment to cover a hockey game or a foot all 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 the same level

of expertise or even minimal competency when we are dealing with science and i think this is the situation in which that minimal level of competency could have altered the entire shape of this discourse. and i will 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 temporal correlation with when they got the mmr vaccine. i don't know how many people are here roughly today or how many people are here in that third, but say 25 and one, two, three,

four, five, six, seven, eight of the worm in. there is a case study of the percent of the population that is male and female. that is the equivalent of eating consecutively referred. i pick up special groups. if i then went and said okay 70% of the population is female based on this case study i did, that would clearly be ridiculous the most i could say from a case study is that it's interesting there is this very isolated situation that i am dealing wits seem to be statistically significant data something maybe we should look at more and try and look at over a population with a wider subset of people. i also -- if you have a case series or a case study that is based based on after-the-fact recollection, that is another

reason, that is another reason why he you would say okay this again might be an interesting starting point but we know so much now about the unreliability of eyewitness testimony, a huge issue in courts and a huge legal issue, there is so much evidence about how easy it is for us to reformulate things in our minds to create a coherent narrative that it would be responsible of me to take people's recollections of a very emotional event in use that as a basis for a conclusion. so neither of those concepts require an incredible amount of advanced scientific training or dance scientific knowledge. so what i think would have been a responsible way to cover the initial study and even more than that, and this is probably more

detailed than you wanted but the initial press conference were andrew wakefield came and said i don't think parents should give their kids the mmr vaccine. i am worried and i think we should space it out. a legitimate way to cover that would have been to say what in the hell is this guy doing saying that they some absolutely nothing, based on a 12 person case series? what is the hospital doing holding this press conference? you want a controversial story, that is a controversial story and one that accurately represents what the situation was. instead what he we 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 he saw very quick and fortunately there was what happens when you inject fear into the population. the measles vaccine in the u.k.

fell from 90% to under 80% of people started dying of measles. the fact that is happening in the 21st century is astounding i think. the effect in the u.s. has been a little bit more diffuse because the u.k. for a number of different reasons doesn't have mandatory school-age vaccination laws so it is much easier form something like this to see an immediate drop. what you have seen here over the past 10 years, and i don't know now exactly the number of states, but it is somewhere between 70 and 90% of states have now passed what is called the philosophical exemption laws relating to vaccinations, which means that in order to have your child go to a public school and

not be vaccinated, you just need a religious exemption. so a christian scientist can obviously give a religious exemption. i could not go in as reformed and say it is against my religion to get vaccinated, but now with the exemption -- the philosophical exemption all you have to do is go in and say i don't believe in vaccines and then you can go to school, your children can go to school without being vaccinated. 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 is needed to keep a given, to keep a given infectious disease out of that area. and so, one thing that i hear a lot when i talk about this as well, isn't it true that the overall vaccination rate in the

country is still around 90%, which is very high and for many diseases is a high enough level to essentially keep it from spreading across the country as a whole? yes, that is through, but that is that little bit like saying to someone without a job, well the overall employment rate is 90% in the country so that should be fine. in those communities in which it is 60, 70 or 80% it is incredibly easy for disease to get -- and we have seen that. we have some -- there was a measles epidemic in california that happened recently that started when a patient of bob searcy wrote the vaccine book, not a fan, one of his patients intentionally unvaccinated, caught measles in switzerland, came back within an area with a lot of other intentionally

unvaccinated children. that ended up costing $10 million to contain. and invent was hospitalized for weeks. there were dozens of children who had to be quarantines at an average cost of between $701,000 per family. and this was all literally within a matter of days. i mean, the measles is the most infectious microbe, one of the most infectious microbes known to man. in a sense this kid was in trader joe's into quarantine everyone that came into contact with him at trader joe's. i asked the california department of public health official howdy know a few are trying to find what communities are at risk are the figure this out? he said take a map and put a pin wherever there is a hold food then draw a circle around it. i'm waiting for the day when i get like i am delivered a lawsuit from whole foods for defaming them.

i also throw in prius owners and there. [laughter] and we shop at whole foods. my mom has a prius and i'm not knocking them. so those are the communities where it tends to be, it tends to be in communities where there is more of an emphasis on natural or organic living, much more affluent communities. if you talk to anyone who works in public health in the third world, there is a moral outrage, deservedly so, that they are struggling to get someone to spend 20 or 40 cents to get vaccines to these areas where is still the leading cause of childhood death and here you know bob sears has been telling people to quote hide in the herd if you don't want to vaccinate

your children. so, there is a lot i didn't talk about. there is one more thing i just want to regress before it opened it up and again this is a little bit circuitous and i will partially blame that on the infectious microbes living in my stomach at the time. but relating back, you know, i have had a lot of conversations with my peers and with other parents or parents to be or young parents, who have said well you know i don't -- i am 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 is my personal choice what i do, it is my choice what happens to my kid. if you want to go live on an island, then it is your choice but if you are going to live in a society where you come in contact with pregnant women and with infants and with immune challenge people who can't get vaccinated, it is not morally honest i think to say to yourself, this is a private decision i am making. it is akin to saying it is a private decision to get drunk and get behind the wheel of my car. you are putting everyone you come in contact with at risk. i have talked to parents whose children were too young to have been vaccinated and died of whooping cough in this country. 10 kids last year in california died of whooping cough. nine of them were under six months old. that is not only heartbreaking

and tragic, but i think reflects poorly on us as a society, that is still happening. and you know, i don't make suggestions about legal limits or whether they should or should do something that there is a law for or against. i don't feel like that is my place, but it makes me crazy when parents make this decision and aren't honest with themselves or the people around them with how that decision trickles down and affects everyone else. and 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 the tourist board is going to file a suit against me

but someone who has been on vacation had the measles and just came into our preacher shins office, walked into our pediatrician's office and said i'm worried my son has the measles. can you check them out? which meant the entire office had to be shut down in every kid who was there had to be either quarantined or tested. you know, it is not like a the oh, you know, i think that maybe my kid has strep throat or something and i will go and just bring him over here. no, this is something that is potentially lethal that has killed more children than any other disease in the history of the world. that can blind you and lead to lifelong complications. if i had known who that person is, i would have said very mean things to him. [laughter] so, yeah.

there are about six more topics that i wanted to hit on but again, because they areas in which people are interested in oftentimes don't coincide with what i feel like people might interested in. i'm going to open it up and one less thing that i didn't touch on at all. as little sympathy as i have for parents who just decide this is something i should do, i feel almost the opposite about parents who are dealing with, who have children who have very serious developmental disorders dam believe that is the result of vaccines. as much i feel like it is a tragedy that children are dying, i think the safeguards and supports there are for families

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

this is thankfully changing but i have talked to a lot of parents and i know people even before this that it has happened to the a sickly they got the diagnosis and was like okay, you know, here sure pamphlet so you have a child with autism and you know, all right, good luck. i don't do was developmental disorder so it is not something that i can deal with and that's it. so, you know i feel like it is unfortunate that because of the way the debate has evolved, it is 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 is another one of, something that is really awful about this and that you have groups of parents who all

want the same thing, just to protect children that are absolutely at each other's proverbial throats. so i will open it up for as long as you guys want to ask questions, and then hopefully you all by 10 book's. yeah? so, have at it. are right, well. yes? >> one of my jobs in public health is to promote prevention activities like becks at -- and i was very intrigued by your early mention of conspiracies among pharmaceutical companies. one of the challenges of communicating about science is that science is deliciously grad

gray is a very hard narrative to sell to people, and it or ticket really becomes troubling when you literally are unable to say well, this is 100% safe. this is 100% effective. nothing is 100% safe and nothing is 100% effective. there are people who will get the flu vaccine who will get the flu. >> there is definitely that side to it. >> so one of the problems to me was particularly thrown into light this week in "newsweek". sharon bigley had a two page article about the quality of medical research and it was quite critical. the part of it that i paid a lot of attention to is what the pharmaceutical companies seem to be doing to sort of suppressed the research.

and i just wonder how to fold what may in fact be a conspiracy theory. >> with a reality, yeah, yeah. >> how to deal with that. >> i think it is certainly, i think it fortunately, this is not a scenario in which we need to take the drug companies were that vaccines are safe. if that was who we were relying on i would have a problem with the too. i think the way that medical testing and medical research is done is hugely problematic. the peer review process you know, is problematic. the ways in which drug companies have relationships with review articles that aren't just close. there a huge amount of things that are problematic and there has been case over case upper

case or the last decade where something has been brought to market and we have been later found that it was either brought to market before it could be fully researched or in fact when there was indication that there was some serious side effect. 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 that it is safe because of mark. you can say, you can be confident that it is safe because of studies done by governments around the world, by researchers around the world on tens of millions of children. so i think one of the effects of now 13 years of this current sort of cycle of scares is that vaccines in the vaccines currently on the schedule are probably the single most studied public health initiative,

childhood public health initiative use today. so, i think you know, i think from my perspective, when people say to me well, you know, eight b. and c. all things the drug companies did, i don't argue that at all and it is usually true, and i'm thankful that here we don't need to rely on the drug companies. i do think, to get into your sort of point about how do you deal with gray, i think that is also a problem not just around medicine but science generally and an example that really helps clarify what i am thinking of around this is climate change. you know, this number is one i am pulling out of not thin air but not exactly what the number is. so, there is like 89 or 93 or

whatever percent research that has strong indications that human beings have a very large role in climate change going on. and then there is 11 or seven or whatever percent of studies that either have results that contraindicated at or are much more vigorous. so there has been in the climate community for a long time this incredible anxiety that if there was acknowledgment that it was 93% of the evidence as opposed to 100%, you know global warming denied, there would never be any way to move forward with initiatives, and berman tell initiatives. so instead we had discussions that this was 100% and then when we all found out that in fact it was the rebound was much much greater than i think the initiae cover-up is greater than the

crime. you know, if it's a scientific community there was more honesty from the outset, i think our people would feel comfortable saying okay 93%, that is a figure that i can feel pretty confident with, then oh wadewait, why were they lying to me about this and then is it going to go from 93% to 84% to 74%? why should i now start to believe them when they tell me that this is true? so, and that is also something happening with vaccines. there is any fear about accurately communicating the risks to the public. and people have negative reactions to vaccines. there is no question about that. people have negative reactions to seatbelts. a certain number of people every year die because their sternum

is crushed because of a seatbelt. i will always wear a seatbelt because you you now, however may times out of 100, 99-point whatever is the elvis going to protect me, but you know nothing works 100% of the time. >> i think the book is really well done. have you considered a career as an epidemiologist? because what i'm impressed by his how you blended the science, your understanding of the scientific process that also journalism. one question somewhere in the book, i can't remember where, he you brought up the issue of having science process and the public, so that his people are debating whether trans fats are good or bad, a study comes out this way, that way and

eventually we settled the issue but we do that in the public. i think someone in the book or you commented that, why don't scientist just do this behind closed doors and then when they come up with the answer tell us. >> right. i mean you know, one easy and should you 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. we come up with hopefully a series of increasingly better answers and more refined answery about, and this is something i talk about him i'd look, science is really about being wrong, about you know you come up with a theory and then you sort of say alright everyone have at it and all you can do, because of

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

flying. you know, like chemotherapy. there are all sorts of things that we accept as parts of part of our everyday life because on some level we have as we have faith in science, and i think that -- so i think that there actually is more respect and understanding the scientific ross is out there but it is very easy to harm that into her bed and when there is a sense of there being a cover-up of something going on behind-the-scenes, i think it is much much harder to get that trust back then it is along the way to sort of say okay well this is what is going on. >> the truth is a lot of scientists --. >> that that is a whole other issue. [inaudible]

>> that is true. >> we are not very good at keeping our own heart -- house in order. >> not me, i'm not a scientist. [laughter] we have no problem in journalism. [laughter] yeah, yes, i agree and again, it is one of the reasons why it is so difficult. when you find out that there are doctors who have been putting their name on journal articles that never read the article and had nothing to do with it, or yeah, it definitely -- that becomes negative for the entire field. you know, and maybe it is because i'm not a scientist, but i think that the same way that i think overall people go into

politics because they want to, they believe in public service and people go into law enforcement because they want to protect people around them. i think that the vast majority of scientists are in the field because they are interested in intellectual exploration and i think that -- i always say to myself don't make pronouncements and then i always say it. by, 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 a higher standard. 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 is not what you get a lot of times. so, you know, i think that is something that could be very beneficial and what i was talking about was journalism earlier, it very much applies to my deal. people should be embarrassed to have written the stories that they wrote about the wheat field studies in 1998, and they are not. instead now they are just writing that next story about that. and i think we should hold our colleagues to those types of standards. >> you mentioned the birther movement.

[inaudible] in a sense isn't our -- because isn't that a story in itself that people think that the president is sent? >> can everyone here that question? know, okay. the question was, the question was in relation to the birther movement, correct me if i'm phrasing this wrong but how do you draw a distinction between covering a story that is a story because there are people who believe this versus covering a story if it is a story because it is a legitimate question? and i think that is a very good good.. the coverage of the birther movement, you know i shouldn't say all but i think the reason that that took off so much was because it was not covered in a

framework of why is it that some people believe this? it was covered in why won't he show us as -- is per certificate? it was covered in can we believe that the birth announcement from the day after he was born or the conspiracy on the part of nigeria dates back to when he was born? you had lou dobbs day after day after day on cnn talking about this. again i think cnn should be embarrassed and should have been embarrassed and should have said you know, like shut up. you can't say that on our airwaves. i said that to someone and someone said you are and printing on his freedom of speech, which i love. freedom of speech doesn't mean you get a talk show on cnn.

laura schlesinger after she was was -- on racial epithets, her first amendment was violated. she can say that in her home as much as she wants but she doesn't have a right to do a talk show about it. and the other thing i would say is there are lots of crazy things that people believe that we don't cover as stories. you know, there is not going to be a story on cnn tomorrow night. there is not going to be a story about people who believe the cia is implanting radio chips in their brains. so, but yeah i think there is a way to cover some stories that does it in more that light and i think they are covered in that light you wouldn't see them, he would not have seen the birther story sort of take off the way that it did. and i think you know in the

wakefield -- i think that is what could have been done right off the bat with the wakefield study. the story could have been, why is it someone is saying this and not that there's a 50% chance that it is true. yes? >> i just bought the book this morning and haven't read it. >> you don't need to apologize. would that all of you were --. >> in the story did you really find that the story starts in 1998 or her data traced back further to other episodes around vaccines are medical science? you know including 1976? >> yeah, 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

references to 1976 effort by gerald ford to do a mass swine flu immunization campaign that was a debacle for a number of reasons. this specific fear about autism started here, but i think your point is absolutely correct, that there have been cyclical scares about vaccines as long as there have been vaccines. most of the time what has happened is when a disease is endemic in a society, everyone wants the vaccine and when a vaccine is effective, people then, people then start to become more concerned about the vaccines potential repercussions, sort of this vicious cycle or paradox of vaccines. the more effective they are the less necessary they seem. and so, and then, there have

been again throughout history incidents in which vaccine safety was poorly handled or communication about vaccine efforts was very poorly handled and because what i'm about to say is probably a situation people are more familiar with in the swine flu, situation in 1976. an example that i bring up is the current, the current situation we face with the hepatitis b vaccine, which is oftentimes given and oftentimes recommended at earth. hepatitis b is primarily, not solely, but primarily a blood-borne disease that you know, common modes of transmission would be i.v. drug use or unprotected sex, neither of which newborns are at high risk of engaging in.

and the reason, or one of the reasons, and one of the strongest reasons for giving the hepatitis e. vaccine at birth is that the populations that are most at -- most at risk of giving their children and hepatitis b either through breast milk or because they are already carriers is also the population least likely to come in for follow-up pediatric care so they want to give the vaccine there they are in the hospital. but it is not -- you can't say in a public-health setting, we recommend this if you are poor or disadvantaged or live in an area where there is high drug abuse or you know -- that doesn't fly, and so i think people are therefore skeptical of the have the key to --

vaccine and when people ask their doctors why their child needs a hepatitis b vaccine at earth, there is 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 earth. okay well then why do i need to do this? so why not bad and why this? and that i think it's been a consistent problem, that type of communication has been a consistent problem. with the hepatitis b situation i have no idea how one might handle that. you know, i mean i see why it is hard to make an answer on that

but i do think that is a situation in which there is less than total transparency and honesty with the patient population and population and when you are dealing with the kid and especially a newborn that sets off an alarm bell. >> i am curious what was the reaction in the anti-vaccine circle? >> the question was what type of direction has this generated in the anti-vaccine circuit? the type of reaction that has led me to take pictures of my family off-line and i don't have a listed phone number. you know, i get a lot of and the lord sayeth vengeance will be mine e-mails or you know

accusations of having a child in order to sell a book and poison my child so i can sell it look. you know, very angry e-mails. and again, you know, it can be very difficult when you feel like your family is, 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 are coming from a place of fully and honestly believing that the vaccines are essentially poison, that is

being injected into infants and it is harming them, and you now, so i try not to, try to either not respond or respond in a way that it will start a dialogue and usually when i do that i just don't hear back. ..

>> when you have children dying of whooping cough, when you have measles outbreaks, there is a potential for a backlash against, you know, against autism and autism research, so yeah, it, you know, the reaction from anti-vaccine advocates has been about what i expected, but, i mean, you know, there's people who have written about this who need fbi protection, and i'm clearly not in that situation. >> 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. >> here's are ten books in the care goir of military history in order to release date. unfloor fishes released march 22. march 29, the good book, a humanist bible, and great soul by joseph on lelyveld. on april 26, the floor of heaven, the last trail of the frontier and the gold rush. moral combat, good and evil in world war ii will be released sometime in april. on may 3, to end all wars, a story to end all rebellion by adam hochschild.

mightier than the sword, battle for america, a book by david rentals is available. the struggle to set america free will be a leased. to find other books released this spring, visit booktv.org and visit the news about books section. we're talking about the lathest book by ralph reed. tell us what this is about? >> it's a knock down drag out mother of all supreme court con confirmation battles. it involves the nomination of really the 5th conservative on the court, kind of ultimately moving the court in a irretrievably conservative direction, and that nomination goes to a democratic senate, so you can imagine it's a one pitch battle. when i wrote it in late 2008 and

early 2009, it was the first hispanic supreme court justice ever name nateed, and then barak obama kind of stole my thunder with sotomayor, and so i changed it to the second his panic. >> how were you up spired to write this? >> well, i've been involved in not every, but just about every supreme court confirmation battle since buork in 87, and i was at the christian coalition in the 90 for the thomas nomination. a lot of what happened there is in the dialogue, the meetings, the notes happened in the roberts or alito nominations, and i just decided to fictionalize it because i think the nomination process has become broken. i think what used to be con vise

and concept is now search and destroy. there's a litmus test and that tends to be one-sided frankly, and that's unfortunate. i wanted to it to be accessible to the average reader, and that's why i chose fiction. >> why do you see the court going? >> well, it depends in what happens in 2012 and who else retires. i mean, i think the general conventional wisdom that i subscribe to is that you have a court that's evenly divided, four, four, with justice kennedy as the swing vote. sandra day o'connor used to be the swing vote, and now is replaced by alito. kennedy is the swing vote. unless and until kennedy retired and is replaced either by barak obama or by a republican, it's kind of likely to stay that way. >> you haven't had any recent

decisions coming as a surprise, or you think that the court pretty much stayed along its ideological lines and there's no surprises in recent years? >> i think there's always surprises because eng there's people like scalia and thomas who well conservative tend to be free speech and first amendment oriented, so sometimes on privacy issues and things like that, they may go at a more, for lack of a better term, libertarian, opposed to a traditional conservative direction, but i tend to think, as i said, it's a 4-4 court with a swing vote, and we've got some very big issues pending before the court. i mean, we're going to have, whether or not obamacare is constitutional is going to be decided by this court. it looks like we have a california marriage decision that is on its way to this court, and i'll tell you what's funny is in the con fir police station, there's a marriage case

in california pending before the supreme court, so i guess life is imitating art or a little bit of both. >> thank you very much for your time. >> thank you. >> >> we're talking about her new book. can you tell us what it's about? >> it's about the rise of radical islam throughout the world. we are witnessing an islamic movement driven by the radical

minority in the islamic religion trying to cause problems around the world through terrorism and bringing back their islamist with it. the book talks about the history about radical islam, what it's doing in europe right now, what's happening in the united states as well, and why we need to be mobilized to understand where the threat of radical islam is camming and who ce with do to protect our society. >> what are your findings? >> we are finding the organizations are well organized whether in europe, united states, or australia. they are working together, linked together through the internet. we are finding out that al-qaeda that is just an umbrella organization with many other organizations underneath it that share a similar goal. lately, we've heard about the muslim brotherhood and considering what's happening in egypt, the muslim brotherhood is the mothership basically that

launched these terrorists. it was funded in 1928 and has 70 organizations including al-qaeda. the chapter in the book is dedicated to the muslim brotherhood project and the project for north america. >> tell us about your background, how did you become an expert? >> i was born and raised in lebanon, and my 9/11 happened to me personally in 1975 when the radical islamists blew up my home, bringing it down, burning me under the rebel. i ended up in a hospital for two and a half months and later lived in a bomb shelter underground for seven years of my life hiding to survive. i became very concerned about national security, even as a child. i grew up and i went to israel, become news anchor as a journalist to understand what was happening around the world, and what contributes to certain things around the world.

it's a movement. i worked as news anchor for world news in the middle east from 1984-89. as i reported world events in the 80s, i connected the dots and realized the name of the perpetrators were always the same. akmhad, hussein, and they targeted jews, finance life, and i can go on and on, and i connected the dots and realized what i used to think was a regional problem between a majority of muslim middle east trying to kill or expel the minority christians and jews had become a worldwide problem, but the world was not connecting the dots. when i came to the united states, i thought i left everything behind me. i'm an american now, and all the radicalization is left behind. the 9/11 changed everything for everybody in the united states

and around the world, the way we travel, live, you can't turn on tv without hearting about some terrorist act occurring. >> tell me what your next project is? >> i'm working on another book discussing the grass roots movements around the world, not only in the united states, but how the internet gives power to the people to rise up, mobilize, and get involved in their government. we are witnessing a revolution around the world, and the internet is empowering that. my organization started out of my bedroom on the internet through nothing but a website. today, we're the largest national security grass roots movement in the united states. 160,000 members, 510 chapters nationwide with full time lobbyists on capitol hill all starting from the internet, to the next book is about power to the people. >> booktv is on twitter.

follow us for regular updates on our programs and news on nonfiction books and authors. twitter.com/booktv. >> according to a list from publisher's weekly, here's ten business books due to release this spring. march 22, thomas sowell is releasing economic facts and fallacies. the thank you economy by gary vaynercheck and cure ration nation also comes out in march. financial origami, how wall street bock. april 26, the next american economy, blueprint for real recovery will be available. douglas looks at how to benefit business in pulse to track threats and opportunities and

that's released mai 3. may 31, age of greed, the triumph of finance. available june 13, douglas edwards gives an insider view in i'm feeling lucky. michael louis, the author of money ball and the blind side has a new book called boomerang, travels in the third world. the deal from hell, how wall street plundered great american newspapers will be in stores june 28. for more spring 2011 nonfiction books, visit booktv.org and check out the news about books section. >> from new york city, leo recounts the vote of 120 asian boys to