>> i tried to stay out of politics. i'm not going to get into that. >> the belief systems of the people that raised rock obama? >> well, first of all, and this is where i get into a part of the book. here is where i take great issue. traces it to his father. he never lived with his father. that is the secret they are hiding. his family never lived together. barack obama's mother was in seattle 15 days after obama's birth. a little barrier. this is beyond dispute. barack obama senior is back in hawaii. they never live together. no one went to the wedding. barack obama sr. had nothing to do with the formation of a yawn. obama. it did have a lot to do with the

mother. he had to stay in indonesia. his stepfather was ago as you please muslim. his mother was a hard core secular humanists. she drove, drove, turned this into his head. at one occasion, he talks about this, her husband works in an american auto company. those are not my people. this is barack obama's mother. not a little girl from kansas. she was known as an artist annie in her high school years in seattle where she left and went back to seattle immediately. so that was the primary formation. that was reinforced by frank marshall davis, reinforced by bill errors. deep seated secretary 65 secular humanism. it is at jeremiah rights church,

which is a pure calculation. christianity, but it is calculated. he is not unique. bill clinton always walked with his bible to be the camera side of his body. obama isn't that dance. there is some speculation there. >> i am an engineer. quite frankly the principal, i have no idea what you were talking about most of the time. >> that is why you have to buy it and read the book, you see. i did catch your interview. i was wanting your opinion of your whole experience with that. >> the whole experience. well, i ran it to them at cpc. it was fine. you are doing some. -- truly weird radio things. they seemed fine and obliging

and appropriate. i get that feeling. the zero to 60. they don't know anything about this at all. i get in else from our own people. this sounds improbable. well, yak, it sounds improbable. let's face it. if he was a neighborhood electrician and barack obama needed his house rewired he would have called his neighborhood editor. obama beat his book rewired. >> in my burrow an electrical engineer. now i understand.@ >> i thought i would bring it home to you. i spent five years at perdue. yes, sir. >> promised or say anything. did you ask him? >> yes, i nl him a couple of times without response. here is what he did. when christopher andersen's book came out in september 2009 on 2

occasions unprompted he told people that he did write friends of my father. however, he did it with a wink and design. at the mainstream media took that to mean he was treaties in the riders. i think he was, yes, a double tease. he was telling the truth and subverting it by making you believe he's not telling the truth. the ultimate message went to the white house saying the dead, i get in number. he didn't go on. thanks a lot. good question. thank you all for coming. appreciated. we will be signing more books outside. thank you. >> the executive editor of the business magazine ingram's. to find out more this is his website. you are watching 48 hours of

nonfiction authors and books on book tv. >> the fraudulent 1998 study by a british researcher andrew wakefield winking childhood vaccinations to autism. the wakefield report has led to a movement in the u.s. fueled by celebrities like oprah winfrey and jenny mccarthy to stop vaccinating children which is a troubling development. his focus on vaccinations has diverted money away from important autism research. he spoke at the university of wisconsin in madison for a little over an hour. >> i'm going to talk briefly about how the book came about and some themes that i try and deal with in the book. then i will leave as much time as i can for questions. i have spoken with a number of

different types of groups, and it has been hard for me to anticipate what the questions are going to be outside of them always being provocative and interesting. 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 the center for inquiry or different places. so excuse me. i will also be sipping a lot. replenishing my liquids. so, this book, this project started for me about three years ago a little more than three years ago. and at the time i was newly married.

we move into an area where the 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 vaccinated children, 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 get instinct. they would say things like, well, it feels like a lot. feels like a lot to give a kid. it does not feel safe.

it seems like there are 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 as someone who has spent most of his career as a reporter and investigative reporter, i was very willing to believe that drug companies and the government or engaged in a massive cover-up and, you know, there were motives and incompetence and it combined to create a public health problem which may seem like a potentially great story. but i was surprised that so many people i knew were not making these decisions based on an analysis of the evidence. it especially struck me because it was the same group of people, my peers essentially that were

very very dismissive and disdaining of the controversies about other issues like climate change or evolution where they felt like people who they disagreed with or ignoring the scientific evidence. so, their seemed to be this great disconnect to me. and one of the reasons, i should say, at the time that it was probably started to come up a lot is because jenny mccarthy suggested the second of for four books, focusing on her belief that the vaccine had either cost or triggered her son's autism and she said -- i always try to be very careful, but her story has not remained completely consistent over the years. so, i started looking into it.

i spent most of the last three years reading scientific studies , interviewing people coming interviewing parents, parents whose children had died of faxing 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 of court transcripts for on going issues. at the end it seemed really very clear to me that this was not 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 a relief felt like, there were two things i had to address. one of them is why there is this sense in our society and culture that this is such a debate and there continues to be. a harris poll was taken two weeks ago in which only 52 percent of people said that they believed that vaccines did not cut off autism. that did not mean the other 48 percent dead. there were thirtysomething percent that said they were unsure. more than a decade after this whole specific vaccine started there is still an enormous bummer of the population that thinks there is some legitimacy to that.

so the things i wanted to explore or why is that both from the media angle and an information consumer angle. and also from a personal -- from an individual angle, why is it that we as individuals create narratives that we use to convince ourselves of things that appear not to be true actually are. little did i know at the time exactly how much that was this as a project that initially started as a hopeful magazine story. i could not interest any magazine editor in writing it. it's actually less rare than you think. you can't sell a magazine article, but you can read a

book. we don't want to read 5,000 words, but 130,000 words, great. so 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 bike it was, but i'm just saying that as an illustration of the way in which i felt like this one issue permeated through of the things that we are dealing with as a society and culture. it's also the reason why neither the word autism or vaccine appears in the title, which i had some spirited debates with my publisher. get scene, i believe that you should see what they are about. i kept saying, well, it is not just about that. we don't want to give people the impression that it is about this one specific topic.

so, what i am going to do is use some of bands that have occurred recently in the past months that some people might be familiar with the show some of what i am talking about before i opened it up. now 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 positing a link between vaccines at autism. the first time that there had been a connection, a potential connection. before that for decades and centuries there have been different concerns and fears about vaccines and links to other physical or developmental disorders, but this was the first time that there was a specific link toronto autism.

that paper involved the measles, once, rubella vaccine. the lead author was a british gastroenterologist and andrew wakefield. he was one of 13 authors on the study. and what the british medical journal report or three part series the started coming out about one month ago said was that wakefield had committed outright fraud when he submitted his report. the stories that then resulted on tv and the newspaper, newspapers was report that -- initial report that linked autism and vaccines. that is both complete and

accurate and i think completely irresponsible. this was a study that had been debunked years earlier. andrew wakefield lost his medical license as a result of the tests that he performed on children in this study that did not hold up. we have known for years that he had taken out a patent for an alternate measles vaccine just before he published this initial study. we also know that 12 children who appeared in that study had not been consecutive the referred as was initially planned. 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. there is not a connection between the vaccine and autism. so when the media went forward

and framed this as studies to bought and then as we want to have segments where you would have andrew on the one hand and, you know, someone from the ctc or the ap on the ama on the other hand. that gave and gives the impression that this is on the one hand the debate. which it is not. i think it is -- that is a fundamental problem with the way the press acts specifically around medicine and health. it also often times is an issue of politics.

and to present that ben as on the one hand on the other hand is incredibly irresponsible on the part of the media and 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 they have been for instance a year

earlier when the "lancet" officially retracted its story and he lost his medical license. i think as, as all of the revelations about him and his initial work have come out the media has consistently done less of the on one hand, on the other hand. however, similar to the coverage of the birther movement, i still don't think that is responsible way to cover a story like that. there have been many studies. there was one of the university of michigan in 2008 that gave subjects 20 statements 10 of which they said were true intent of which they said were false. 10 minutes later there was a very high degree of, a very high degree of accuracy i guess. that is not the word i'm looking for, but in the test objective

the ability to correctly remember what had been presented as true and what had 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 now the suspended bond, i also think is not really legitimate. it is a little bit like the political tactic of saying well, i have no reason to suspect that my candidate eats his wife or that my client eats his wife. you introduce that concept into a population and then, when you see that candidate you start to think well, yeah i have no reason either but i wonder if that is true. it is very very hard to unscare

people. i think we can look at any number of things for any parent out there. have 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] but there is no document it case of a case getting a razor blade in an apple. you know, if we all gave out apples and all that our children need apples i know public health would probably incredibly positive as opposed to having them all eat candy and it is highly unlikely that anyone actually would have gotten a razor blade. it is an urban myth that has 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 is it that a

14-month-old is out trick-or-treating on his own? [laughter] but i'm sure i wouldn't let him -- i wouldn't let him eat it because in the back of my mind there with the this gnawing 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 way in which i think the situation in which we have got ourselves now could have been avoided and it gets to what i think it's 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 that 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% 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 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 act like superman. but for some reason, there is this sense around that and other scientific context that it is something that is impossible to convey to the public. another problem in the communication effort is that journalists, as a group, leave for some reason 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 in the newspapers, no one would come to me and say oh, here is this performance of the ballet tonight. will you go and write about it? i know nothing about ballet. 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 also had no knowledge or experience with and would be told okay we you go right this? i wouldn't be given an assignment to go cover a hockey game or a football game, because i don't know enough about it too speaks 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 we are dealing with science and they think this is a 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 made 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. i would say 25 and one, two, three, four, five, six, seven, eight of you are men. there is a case study of the percentage of the population that is male and female. that is the equivalent. they are randomly -- i even picked out special groups. if i then went and said okay well 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 well that is interesting. there is this very isolated situation that i'm dealing with, and because the results seem to be statistically significant that is something that maybe we should look at more and try and look at over a population or with a wider subset of people. also, if you have a case series or case study that is based on after-the-fact recollections, that is another reason -- that is another reason why he would say okay well this again might be an interesting starting point, but we know so much now about the unreliability of memory of eyewitness testimony, a huge issue in courts and the 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 irresponsible of me to take peoples recollections of a very emotional event and use that as a basis for a conclusion. so neither of those concepts require an incredible amount of expertise or advanced scientific training or advanced scientific knowledge. so what i think would have been a responsible way to cover the initial study and even more than that in more detail than you wanted at this point that 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 is this guy doing this based on absolutely nothing, based on the

12 person case study. what is the hospital doing holding this press conference? if you want a controversial story that is 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 fear into a population. the measles vaccine fell from 90% to -- and 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 really, doesn't have mandatory school-age vaccination law so it is much easier for something like this to see an immediate drop. what you have seen here is 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 law relating to vaccination which means, in order to have your child go to a public school and not be vaccinated used to need a religious exemption. so you know a christian scientist could easily get a religious exemption. i could not go when as a reformed and say it is against my religion to get vaccinated. but now, with the philosophical it -- exemption all you need 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. 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 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 is 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. well yes, that is true, but that is a 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 agencies to get a toehold and we have seen that. there was a measles epidemic in california that happened recently 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 and lived in an area with a lot of other intentionally unvaccinated children. that ended up causing $10 million to contain. and infant 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, measles is the most infectious microbe, one of the most infectious microbes known to man. this kid was in a trader joe's and they had to quarantine everyone who have potentially come into contact with that trader joe's. which gets to another -- i asked the california public health official how do you know if you are trying to find what communities are at risk party figure this out? he said take a map and put a pin wherever there is a whole foods and draw a circle around it. i'm waiting for the day when i get, i am delivered a lawsuit from whole foods. [laughter] i also throw in prius owners in there. and we shop at whole foods and my mom has a prius so i'm not knocking it. so those are the communities where it came -- it tends to be in communities where there is more of an emphasis on natural or urbanek 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 vaccine, to get someone to send in 20 or 40 cents to get vaccines to areas where is the leading cause of childhood death and here bob sears is telling people to 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 want to address before i open it up and began this is a little bit circuitous and i will partially blame that on the infectious microbe living in my stomach at the time.

but, relating back, i've 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 feel -- i am just not going to vaccinate my kid. and i'm willing and do have conversations 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 an fence and with 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 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. in this country, it tends kids 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 i have no -- i don't make suggestions about, about legal remedies or whether it should or shouldn't be something, that

there is a law against it. i don't feel 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 ripples down and affects everyone else. and it may seem all the more crazy now that i have a son. there was someone at our pediatrician's office who again, i feel like they too were a sport is going to file a lawsuit against me. someone had measles and just came into our pediatrician's office, walked into our pediatrician's office and said i'm worried my son has been measles. can you check them out? which meant the entire office had to be shut down and every kid who was there that had to be either, had to be either quarantined or tested.

it is not like all code you know, i think that maybe my kid has strep throat or something. i will go when 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 convocations. if i had known who that person is, i would have said very mean things to them. [laughter] so yeah, they are are about more topics that i wanted to hit on, but again because the areas in which people are interested in oftentimes don't coincide with what i feel like people might be interested in i'm going to open it up. one last thing that i didn't touch on it all is, as little

sympathy as i have for parents who just decide this is something i can do, i feel almost the opposite about parents who are dealing with, who have children who have very serious developmental disorders and believe that it is the result of a vaccine. as much as i feel like it is a tragedy that children are dying, i think that the safeguards and supports for families dealing with serious developmental disorders is also really disgraceful. i spend a lot of time at conferences, a lot and 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 that is -- it is a community that gives them all support. it is where people can understand what they are going through and say oh yes 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 what is happened to me and here is what you might want to try. this is thankfully changing, but i talked to a lot of parents and i know people even before this that basically you know they got the diagnosis and it was like okay, you know, here's your pamphlet so you have a child with autism. and you know, all right, good luck. why don't you with developmental disorder so it is not something that i can deal with and that is it.

so, you know i feel like it is unfortunate that because of the way the it 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 and i think that is another -- something that is really awful about this and that you have groups of parents who all want the same thing which is to protect children that are absolutely at each other's proverbial throats. i will open it up for as long as you guys want to ask questions, and then hopefully you will all buy 10 books. yes? have at it.

alright, well. >> one of my jobs is -- and in public health is to promote prevention activities like vaccinations. and i was very intrigued by your early mention of conspiracies among pharmaceutical companies. one of the challenges in communicating about science is that science is deliciously gray and the narrative around great is a very hard narrative to sell to people, and it particularly 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 and there were people who get the flu vaccine to get the flu. so, one of the problems to me was particularly thrown into light this week in "newsweek". sharon wrigley had a two-page article about the quality of medical research and it was quite critical and a 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, and i just wonder how to fold what may in fact be a conspiracy theory with. >> with reality. it is certainly, i think fortunately this is not a

scenario in which we need to take the drug companies word 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 is problematic. the ways in which drug companies have relationships with review articles that are disclosed -- there are a number of things that are problematic and there has been case after case after case over the last decade where something has been brought to market and we have asked -- later found that it was either brought to market before it could be fully researched or in fact when there was indications that there were some serious side effects. in this situation, i think 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 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, one of the fx of now 13 years old this current sort of cycle of affairs is that vaccines in the vaccines that are currently on the schedule are probably the most single studied health initiativh initiative that has been used today. so i think you know, i think from my perspective when people say to me well, you know, a bad bad -- ab and c are things drug companies did, i don't argue that it 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, you know, getting to your point about how do you deal with gray, i think that is also a problem not just around medicine but in science generally and an example that really helps clarify my thinking around this with climate change. this number is one i am pulling not out of thin air but not exactly with the number is. so there is like 89 or 93 or whatever percent research that has strong indication that human beings have a very large role in climate change that is going on and then there is 11 or seven or whatever percentage that say either have results that contraindicated that or are much more vigorous. so there has been in the climate

community for a long time this incredible anxiety bed if there was a knowledge meant that it was 93% evidence as opposed to 100%, the global warming denied, there would never be any way to move forward with initiatives, environmental initiatives so instead we had discussions that this was 100% and then when we all found out and in fact it wasn't, the rebound was much much greater than i think the initial -- sort of like the cover-up is greater than the crime. if as a scientific community there was more honesty from the outset, i think more people would feel comfortable saying okay 93%, that is a figure that i can feel pretty confident with, then oh wait why were they lying to me about this and is it going to go from 93% to 84% to

72%? why should i now start to believe them when they tell me that this is true? and that is also something that has happened with vaccines. there is any fear about accurately communicating the risks to the public, and people have nick at every actions 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 crashed because of a seatbelt. i will always wear a seat l. because however many times out of 199 or whatever, seatbelt is going to protect me, but you know nothing works 100% of the time. yes?

>> i think the book is really well done. have you considered a career as an epidemiologist? because what i am impressed by is how you blended the science, your understanding of scientific process but also journalism. one question -- somewhere in the book, can't remember where, you brought up the issue of having science processed in the public so that his people are debating whether trans fats are good or bad, the study comes out this way or that way and eventually we settled the issue but we do that in the public and i think someone in the book are you commented that why don't scientists just do this behind closed doors and then when they come up with the answer, tell us? >> i mean, right. i mean you know, one easy answer to that is because you never come up with the answer.

you know, newton was right until he was sent. until einstein showed that he wasn't right. 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 dean wrong, about you come up with a theory and then he sort of say alright, everyone have at it, and all you can do, because of the inability to prove a universal negative proposition, all you can do is show that there have been x number of 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, 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. i was watching cnn before i came over here, 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 is scientific understanding supporting them. like flying. like chemotherapy. there are all sorts of things that we accept as part of our everyday life, because on some level we officially have faith in science. and i think that -- so i think that actually there is more respect and understanding for science in the scientific process albert, but it is very

easy to harm back, to her dad and when there is a sense of there being a cover-up or 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 science is not really -- a lot of it claims to be evidence. >> right, that is true. speedway are not very good at keeping our own house in order as science is. >> not me. i'm not a scientist. i have no problem in journalism. [laughter]

but yeah, yes. i agree. and again, i mean it is one of the reasons why it is so difficult to -- i mean when you find out that there are doctors who have been putting their name on journal articles that never read the article has nothing to do with it, yeah, it definitely definitely -- that becomes negative for the entire field. you know and maybe it is because i am not a scientist, but i think that the same way that i think overall people go into politics because they want to, they believed in 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 are interested in intellectual exploration. and i think that -- i always say

to myself don't make pronouncements and then i always fail. so 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 or, and that is not what you get a lot of times. so, you know, and i think that is something that could be there there -- very beneficial and what i've talked about with

journalism earlier it very much applies to my deal. people should be embarrassed to have written the stories that they wrote about the studies in 1998 and they are not. instead they are just writing the next story about that. and i think we should hold our colleagues to those types of standards. yeah. >> you mentioned the birther movement and an example of how journalism -- [inaudible] aren't journalists just trying to tell their story? >> yes, yes. could everyone here that question? no. 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 trust distinction between covering a story that is a story because there are people who believed us versus covering a story as if it is a story because it is a legitimate question? and i think that is a very good point. the coverage of the birther movement, i mean i shouldn't say all, but i think the reason that took off so much was because it was not covered in a framework of why is it that just some people believe this? it was covered in why won't you show us his birth certificate? it was covered and can we believe the honolulu star advertiser birth announcement from the day after he was born or the conspiracy on the part of nigeria and dates back to when

he was born. you know 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 were an binging on his freedom of speech. freedom of speech doesn't mean you get a talk show on cnn. it is like laura schlesinger after she was throwing around racial epithets and our first amendment rights were violated. she can say that in her own home if 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, the flat earth society there's not going to be a story on cnn tomorrow night. there's not going to be a story about people who believe the cia is implanting radio chips in our brains. but yeah, think there is a way to cover some stories that does it in more that light and i think if they are covered in that light, you wouldn't see them -- you wouldn't have seen the birther story sort of take off the way that it did. and i think in the wakefield, i think that is what could have been done with the wakefield study. the study could have been, why is it that someone is saying this and not that there is a 50% chance that it is true? yes? >> i apologize because i bought your book and i haven't read it

yet. >> what do you mean apologize? >> as a story did you really find that the story starts in 1998 or did it traced back further to other episodes around medical science, you know including 1976? >> yeah, yeah, right. so the question was, did i feel like this debate started in 1998 with the wakefield paper, all or did it go back further and the reference was to the 1976 effort by gerald ford to do a 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 encyclical

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 then when a vaccine is effective, people then start to, people then start to become more concerned about the vaccines potential repercussions. sort of this vicious cycle and paradox of vaccines. the more effective they are the less necessary they seem. and so, and then there had been again throughout history incidents in which vaccine safety was poorly handled or communication about vaccine efforts was very poorly handled, and because this is what -- what i'm about to say is probably a situation people are more

familiar with than with a swine flu in 1976. the example i bring up is the current, the current situation we face with the hepatitis b vaccine which is oftentimes given and recommended at birth. hepatitis b is primarily, not solely but i merrily at blood-borne disease that 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 for one of -- or one of the reasons and one of the strongest reasons for giving the hepatitis b vaccine at birth is that the populations that are most at risk of giving their children hepatitis b either through breast milk or already

carriers is also the population least likely to come in for follow-up pediatric care so they want to give the vaccine as there they are in the hospital, but you can't, 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. that doesn't fly, and so, i think people are therefore skeptical of the hepatitis b vaccine, and when people ask -- you know, when people ask their doctor why their child has to get the 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 birth. but the net effect of that is then, why not bad and why this? and i think that has 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 lab. you know, i see why it is hard to make a pronouncement about that, but i do think that is a situation in which there is less than total transparency and honesty with a patient population and when you are dealing with the a kid and especially with the newborn that sets off alarm bells. >> i am curious what type of reaction in the anti-vaccine

circles. >> the question was what type of question has this generated in the anti-vaccine circle? >> 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, you know, and the lord sayeth the engines will be mine e-mails or accusations of having a child in order to sell a book and poison my child to sell my book. you know, very angry e-mails. and again, you know, it can be very difficult when you feel like your family is being, not

threatened but when people are talking about your family like that. but i have spent time with a lot of people who fear -- feel very passionately 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 vaccines are essentially poisons that are being injected into infants and it is 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'd just don't hear back. also i have to say i have gotten

more reaction than i would have expected from families dealing with autism who have been appreciative that there is a discussion and an awareness about, that not everyone in the autism community feels this way. i think one thing that has been very difficult for autism advocates is the ways in which that has become associated with anti-vaccine sentiment, and there are people who are very very concerned that i think probably it is a somewhat legitimate concern that you know, when you have children dying of whooping cough, when you have measles outbreaks, there is is the potential for backlash against autism and autism research. so, yeah.

you know, the reaction from anti-vaccine advocates i guess has been about what i have explained. but i mean you know, there were people are people that have written about this. you need fbi protection and i'm clearly not in that situation. she is an fbi agent. [laughter] >> to see other programs related to this topic visit booktv.org and search vaccine or autism and the upper left-hand corner of the page. >> 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 review space and sort of the standard media. a lot of book review sections have been folded. they have shrunk and it is harder to find information about what is going on in the world looks these days. coverage of the publish industry has shrunk. so we have 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 we would create her own book review and it is about 70 of us that have been engaged in it and we have just launched and had a great response. it has been a lot of fun and very gratifying. >> now what kind of books will you be reviewing on this 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 they won't 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 views 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 looks 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 and you can get a lot of books that way. that are hard to deal with. so we certainly invite people to e-mail us, bring their books to our 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 he said that a lot of your reviewers and people involved in the washington independent review of books have

backgrounds 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 am now an author, have done a couple of looks on american history, one on the writing of the constitution constitution in the summer of 1787 and one 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 and for creating reviewers. we have a book on the eichmann trial in israel. we were able to get judge patricia walz who was on the war crimes tribunal for yugoslavia. we have been able to get the leading constitutional scholar, erlang -- 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 meir at mrt who has a wonderful book out about the ratification of the constitution is going on review. a new book by gordon wood so we have really been able to get top-notch reviewers and it is an exciting thing, and everybody in this operation works for the same amount of money. nobody is paid and that includes a review or so it is wonderful to see people willing to pitch in to create this conversation about the world of books which is really what we are all about. >> 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 that up than 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 interview partners who will be putting up podcasts, 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 is that there are a lot of voices so you are not just stuck with one or two reactions to a new book. which may be idiosyncratic in their reactions. >> will you be looking at politically slanted looks as well and will you be looking out oath 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. in the early days, we are trying not to set the bar too high for ourselves but as time goes on we expect the content to become richer and richer and i'm really looking forward to that. >> mr. stewart e. sanger web site that you got your seed money through the aiw freedom to write fund. what is that? >> it is associated 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) that is affiliated with aiw, and we have done very modest fund-raising. we need to do more, but enough to get us up and running and it has been a great sponsorship. >> david stewart is a president

of the washington independent review of books. washington independent review of books.com is the web site. >> you are watching booktv on c-span2. here is our primetime lineup for tonight. ..