networks to help share deep ideas with more than 32nd soundbites. thank you very much and i hope you all have a great day out there. >> book td wants to know what you are reading, send us your summer reading list at book tv on twitter, instagram or facebook. book tv on c-span2, television for serious readers.

don't forget that most of our author events are also offered at podcasts at free library.org. i want to welcome you tonight to the free library of philadelphia. my name is doctor bao or kush and i have the wonderful honor of caring the free library's healthcare advisory council. the healthcare advisory council was started several years ago when the library did some polling of the people who use the facility and they learned that about 30% of the people who were coming to the library at the time were coming here to get answers to some kind of healthcare related question. it was an astonishing number and one that prompted the library to form the healthcare advisory council. that counsel has been meeting ever sense and we help the library broaden out the training of staff to help

people understand how to do searches to result in good outcomes to finding health information, get connected to physicians, learn about health insurance, all sorts of health related matters. it's been a real honor to do this work. as many of you know, the free library is dedicated to advancing literacy, guiding learning, and aspiring curiosity from its award winner author events earrings to its access to health information and resources. please visit free library.org/support to make a gift that would help the library continue to produce such transformative programming. while you are online don't forget to sign up for a library card. they still exist in various forms and you need one. it's now my pleasure to introduce someone who i have enormous personal respect for and someone who i did not know early in my career but has gotten to know and the last several years.

i'm a physician i practice medicine here in philadelphia for a little over 20 years and doctor paul offit was someone i and all my friends and colleagues look up to. the director of the vaccine education center of the children hospital of philadelphia and ãbat the university of pennsylvania school of medicine, doctor paul offit is the coinventor of the ãbvaccine and author is isaac ward member of the autism science foundation.his many honors include election to the institute of medicine of the national academy of sciences. he is the author of more than 140 papers and six books including the cutter incident, autism falls profits and bad faith. i admire dr. offit not only for his science but his bravery. he was always willing to speak truth to those trying to bring him down. it's a tough position to be in and he certainly deserves all of our respect.

the book he will discuss tonight is called "bad advice", or why celebrities, politicians and activists are not your best source of ãbit was really ironic when i was asked to give us introduction. i was asked to do it because i'm chair of the healthcare advisory council, however, i'm also an elected officeholder right next door in montgomery county. and i'm a doctor. so i'm looking at the title of this book and i'm thinking b is this a message? is this a subliminal message? i'm particularly interested to hear what this physician that i have respected so much in my professional life, both of them, both as a physician and elected official have to say this evening. this is a really interesting book that pushes back against the pervasiveness, the students, dangerously misinformed advocate. i'm hoping i'm not in any of

those categories. we are so pleased to have dr. offit here with us this evening. ladies and gentlemen, please welcome me in welcoming dr. offit to the free library. [applause] >> thank you. i think that science and health communications is at a crossroads, and in many roads a dangerous crossroads. i think the problem is that we have drifted through scientific letter of literacy two denies, people simply declare their own truths. for example, vaccines cause autism, or the climate change the hopes created by the chinese, or evolution is a have proxies, to believe all these you have to deny an enormous amount of data. science is losing its rightful place as a source of truth.

before i get into the details of this, i wanted to sort of take a step back and define science to say essentially what it is and what it isn't. this is from edmund wilson's constituents, science is a systematic enterprise of galleon demagoguery knowledge about the world and organizing and condensing that knowledge into testable laws and theories. the keyword is testable. you can determine whether or not mmr vaccines and measles mumps rubella causes better autism, that can be determined in a scientific venue, it's how many angels can dance on the side head of a pen. the logical question will be answered in a scientific venue. what we do as scientists, we formulate a hypothesis to establish proofs, subject the proofs to statistical analyses, science is a study of controls. to isolate the effects the single variable. what it isn't, it is a scientist, it is scientific bodies or accumulated knowledge. science is really just a way of

thinking about it, approaching a problem, as we learned, as we go, scientists are willing to take textbooks and throw them over their shoulders without a backward glance. scientists get it wrong all the time but that's okay because science is an enormously self-correcting. i'll give you examples. in 1926 johannes for better believe that the doctor of ãb a worm he had identified cause cancer for which he won a nobel prize. even though as it turned out that was dead wrong. in 1935 monads, a portuguese neurologist, created a surgical cure for a variety of psychiatric illnesses, when he crossed the atlantic ocean the name was changed to lobotomy. 20,000 lobotomies were performed between ãb7000 were performed by one man, walter jackson freeman, who lived not that farm from here. he did far more harm than good as lobotomies basically faded away, the last phlebotomies were done in the 19 70s.

keys in 1957 created what he called the heart healthy diet. he was a famous nutritionist. he headed world health organizations, as well as to the united nations, he believed that saturated fats were bad, that unsaturated fats were good and that therefore butter, which contains animal fats, therefore saturated fats, was bad. he drove us then into margarine, which was partially hydrogenated vegetable oil, which was loaded with trans fats. and it was estimated by the harvard school of public health, for about 250,000 heart related events every year, ultimately caused times magazine to change of cover. [laughter] and then this one is one you might remember, stanley on the left was ãband marty on the right were chemists on the university of utah who believe

if you took a palladium wire and attached to a battery, put it into heavy water, so-called deuterium, you could cause two small nuclei diffused to form larger nucleus which release energy. this is exactly what happens when the sun, except the difference is they did this at room temperature. the name for this, the hyphenated name for this was coldfusion. this too died the death it deserved. it should have bothered people that it violated the first law of thermodynamics, you can't get more energy out of something you put into it. which is why you'll never see a perpetual notion machine. but in any case, it didn't. we wanted to believe this. this is right around the time of the exxon valdez disaster and we wanted to believe there was a possibility of clean limited source of energy even though it did make await a

physiological sense. i think people are upset by this. i think the fluidity of science, the fact that it's always self-correcting, is disconcerting. for example, what i would call the balance mccoy ãbfor those of you who remember the chief medical officer on the uss enterprise. when he knew a particular set of signs and symptoms he did this. if you look in his hand he has something called a try quarter scan you up and down and look at the readout and that's what you had. there was no doubt about it. i think if you ask people today whether or not we are going to know more about science and health than we do now, 100 years from now, will we know more? i think most people would say yes we will know more but when it comes to your illness you would like to believe we know everything we know now, even though that's not true. i think what ends up happening is that we are seduced by the guru. ours is a guru, he doesn't express that, he says things in absolute certain terms. he's launched here by oprah winfrey. ãbalso functions in many ways is a guru and even something

like andrew wakefield who was of the belief that the combination of me both, mumps, rubella vaccines created autism. 17 studies that have shown your know it no greater risk, still he has his followers. if you watch him go from venue to venue and there was a movie called the pathological optimist that actually launched last year briefly. it didn't get much of a run but if you watch that movie you will see that people treat him as a god in many ways. they sort of gather around him and just want to touch the hem of his coat. stick to the new testament analogies. so now given that, who should really be the persons or person who communicates science to the public? i think the answer to that question is, the people who know the most about it. which are the scientists who work in the field. unfortunately i think there are many things that work against them. for example, the scientific

method, something that's all scientists are trained in. i will give you an example of how this works. if you are trying to determine whether or not the measles mumps rubella vaccine causes autism you form something called the no hypothesis. which is to say that mmr vaccine does not cause autism. you can do two things with that null hypothesis, you can reject it, which is to say when autism follows receipt of mmr vaccine error occurs at a level greater by then by chance law. or you cannot reject it is that when autism follows the vaccine it occurs at a level expected by chance law but you can never accept the null hypothesis which is to say you can never prove never. i think that's difficult. when i was a little boy i used to watch the television show "adventures and superman" starring george reed. george reeves flew, he put his arms out in front of him with his interlocking thumb grip which i thought it was key to

the whole navigational experience and he would go to the left, he would go to the right and his cape would fly behind him and he would look at the city's passing and below. when you're five years old, television does not lie. i went to the backyard and i put a towel around myself, this was ãbi don't know if any of you saw the mr. rogers movie but they talk about this in the movie. kids actually did, what i did, although from a much smaller height and hurt themselves, but i went and tried from a very small height to fly and spoiler alert, i was unsuccessful. that didn't prove i couldn't fly. i could have done it a million times, that would only have made it all the more statistically unlikely. you can't prove that there were weapons of mass discretion in iraq, he could only say there were nowhere that you look. you can't prove that there weren't ãbi've never been to juneau alaska, even though i've never been there, you can only show a series of buildings in juneau alaska with me not standing next to them. [laughter] i think the way this plays out in the real world was evidenced

by burton who was a republican of indiana who headed the ãb government reform he had a grandchild who was had autism and he believed vaccines caused it so he brought in a number of panelists in, including andrew wakefield. i was actually pretty spayed on the other side, i did an epidemiologist from the centers of disease control and name-calling boil. she was great. i think she did as good as one could do to try to explain the science and that she basically said, all the evidence to date doesn't support the hypothesis that mmr vaccines or other vaccines, autism but she didn't say what she needed to say which is mmr doesn't cause autism because to him he heard lawfully and he got really angry and said, so, you can't tell me that mmr doesn't cause autism because you just don't know.

ultimately like she was covering something up, you could see his anger while she was dedicated to the scientific method knowing you can never say never, i think that ultimately hurt her when she was trying to communicate science and that venue to the subcommittee. the other thing that we are up against is how the scientists is perceived. in 1982 david chambers asked 4800 elementary school students to draw a picture of the scientists. in each case the scientists wore white lab coat, on tousled hair, through thick dark rimmed glasses and was male. this is more than 30 years ago i'd like to think that they didn't draw only males before but that was true then.if you google the term scientist this is often the image that you see. where does this come from? there's an author named christopher framing ãbhe argues that it comes from the world's most famous scientist, albert einstein, a symbol of

genius. although they were many other famous scientist he's universal popular. he argues that the white lab coat is a symbol of neutrality, cleanliness and separation from the rest of the world. and standards usually mail a professionalism. that the coke bottle glasses were often an outward and visible signs that scientists were saved, a shortsightedness that cut him or her off from the mainstream. i think most of all this in the worst case the scientist is seen as someone who creates monsters, either literally like frankenstein are figurative like genetically modified organisms.these images ãb stripped-down, depersonalized perception of knowledge, the child of power without spiritual intelligence. interesting on eckert when he played a geophysicist in the movie the core, spent a couple months with actual geophysicist and was amazed they were pretty

much just like everybody else. he actually wrote about it but they had the same concerns as everybody else, that they procreated and had families. this was like surprising him. when you think about it, only about 0.3 percent of the american population are basic scientists, ãbmany people don't know scientists so they have these thick images of them. good news is that this was a gallup poll trying to answer the question or asked be people the question, do you think this particular group contributes to society? 84 percent of respondents believe the military did contribute. 77 percent that teachers contribute. 70% that scientists contribute. ãb40% that clergy contributed. 38 percent that journalists contributed, 31 percent that artists contributed, 23 percent remarkably high percentage believe that lawyers contributed. sorry dad.

21 percent that business executive turned to read it. they didn't ask about politicians because what would be the point? [laughter] i think the other challenge is the scientists personality. this is an old joke but still plays, how can you tell the difference between introverted scientists and extroverted scientists. when introverted scientists talk to you they stare at their shoes when extroverted scientists talk to you they stare at your service. often shy, quiet, much more comfortable working in isolation than carousing in public. you don't typically find scientists doing standup comedy, appearing on reality television shows or screaming shirtless and sub freezing weather and football games with the exception of eagles games. this is actually being carried on c-span, i just want to make that point. and also the point that the new england patriots are evil and

deserved to lose. [laughter] [applause] so take a look at this picture. this is larry king live.to the left is jenny mccarthy, to the right is a man named david halo, who at the time was the president of the american academy of pediatrics. david taylor, he is an excellent pediatrician, he went on the show to try to calm the waters about whether or not vaccines cause autism but this is not his venue. jenny mccarthy is an actress, she was imaginative, she is dramatic, she's not a level actress but an actress nonetheless, you can look at the body language to stop she dominated this conversation. she's leaning forward and making her point while david is literally back on his heels uncomfortable in this kind of venue. he is used to being in scientific or medical venues where people share ideas, discuss facts, come to reasonable conclusions. this was drama. this was a passion play and it wasn't one wasn't really ready

for. i think the other challenge is that there are shrinking opportunities, by 2008 the number of science articles in american you newspapers had shrunk by two thirds was the same year cnn dismissed an entire science and technology unit. the boston global eliminated a science section, less than two percent of nightly newscasts include any mention of science. the other issue i think is the soundbite problem, it's very hard to take a complex subject and reduce it to a soundbite. for example, in the late 1990s, early 2000, was born the notion that a mercury -containing preservative in vaccines could cause mercury toxicity or development of the laser autism. you have to really understand a fair amount of data to calm the waters on that. you know most if you live on the planet earth that you are going to be exposed to levels of mercury in anything that is

made from water. including breastmilk and formula than you'll ever get from vaccines. they said in studies that looked at children's who got vaccines contain mercury compared to the children who got same vaccines that didn't contain mercury to find the instance of mercury ãbwas the same and both. it's a complicated subject. you find yourself saying things like babies are exposed to far more mercury just by drinking breastmilk or infant formulas than they will ever get from vaccines. that's not exactly reassuring. all you're doing is confirming notions that people are caught in this environmental health. or you can say that the studies have shown that the ãbmercury never sounds good. it's truly at high levels and toxic to the nervous system and the minute you say that word really you have lost.

i've heard congressman say, when it comes to mercury, i have zero tolerance. if you have zero tolerance for mercury you need to move to another planet. as much as you are exposed to other heavy metals. we all have those heavy metals circulating in our bloodstream because we live on the earth's crust. but the good news is that scientists i think are good stories, they certainly have a story to tell. there are many examples of this. galileo who lived between 1564 and 1642 and by 1610 he published observations about the faints of venus, moons around jupiter and stars in the milky way, when he published his monograph he called it the starry messenger, what a great title. he didn't call in planetary observations, the notion is that not only was he observing

the stars but at some level they were observing him. it was an interesting and dramatic title. mary shelley in 1818 was fascinated in the early 1800s by the fact that electricity was popularized in county fairs and acquisitions. people were amazed when they saw their hair stand on end or saw a dead frog leg twitch. she was especially amazed when she saw that dead frog leg twitch and so has an 18-year-old she was so impressed that she wrote the book "frankenstein". it's alive. ãbpastor was a showman, much more than he was getting credit for.in 1881 he separated sheep, goats, and cows at the county fair into two groups. one group he gave a ãb vaccine, the other he gave nothing. 30 days later he infected both groups with anthrax bacteria, all ã there's many scientists who i think have been excellent ambassadors to the field. cousteau oceanographers, ãb

albert einstein, stephen hawking are theoretical physicist and have all been excellent storytellers. my favorite line actually from jacques cousteau as he says that whether we believe all of us believe in lock because how else can we explain good things that happen to people we don't like. [laughter] so now to sort of guess at the meat here is in terms of communicating science in public i'm going to go through a number of stories that to some extent i experienced, i don't know if you remember the dancing bear's book. remember the bernstein bears, the answer from more fines group. the father would always do something wrong that would basically that would be the way he would educate his family, this is in fact. in september 2007 jenny mccarthy appeared on oprah.

i was actually asked to be on the show, here's how it played out. the oprah winfrey, ãbyou think i probably know more about vaccines than jenny mccarthy and oprah winfrey that's not what the show is about was how oprah is there to tell a story and her story has three roles, the hero, the victim, and the villain. jenny is the hero, her son who has autism or she believed has autism, was the victim. this leaves only one role for you. the villain. basically you are going on to a show to basically tell to women that they are wrong, that jenny mccarthy is wrong, vaccines don't cause autism. that oprah was wrong to have her on a studio audience of all

women. it's not exactly an home-field advantage. jenny is dramatic, she said my child was five and the doctor pulled out that shot and he says that the autism shot isn't it? and doctors she said screamed at her, pediatricians do not scream at people, they get screamed at, we are wimps, we don't scream. and then my child got the shot and within seconds the soul left his eyes. she's fighting back tears telling the story. you don't go on that show, i did go on the show because it's a mistake. i think that's the lesson, don't go on a show when the host is on your side. i think of all the things actually that i've done with media, this is the one thing that i would like to take back. it's the thing i still think about, it still haunts me and i will tell you this story . it's actually the first time i was ever on television. the issue on good day philadelphia was bruce williams and his 11-year-old daughter whitney williams, she had ãb the father believed she acquired a human ãbat the

time the child had no other recognizable risk factors. she never had a tattoo, never had a blood transfusion, as far as anybody knew she never had sex, both of her parents were hiv negative, how did she get hiv? the father didn't make this up. there was an article in the rolling stones by tom curtis titled "the origin of aids was an act of god or act a man" there was a book by edward hooper called the river, a journey to the source of hiv and aids, both of the article in the books basically made the same claims. which is centered on hillary cup roski and the oral polio campaign. doctor perkowski was the head of the ãtrash institute, also the first person to give the vaccine oral polio vaccine by mouth. he gave it in the belgian congo in the 1950s.the article in the book basically made these claims, the chain sells used to make the polio vaccine contained simian ml different should seed virus.

after people work ãb containing polio vaccine, that then mutated in their bodies to human immunodeficiency virus is. and consistent with the theory, hiv first appeared in the belgian congo in the 1950s. in truth, hiv did it mutate from hiv but that didn't occur in the belgian congo in 1950s, it occurred in cameron in the 19 thursday. it was made for monkey cells. and chimps aren't monkeys, they are apes. neither f iv or hiv, ãball of this adds up to the fact that this is why rolling stone is not considered to be one of the great scientific or medical journals. i didn't know the source of whitney's hiv, i only knew what was in the source. when the father got angry with me and the host got angry with

me, i became more insistent. i was upset that they actually use this child, who clearly was suffering, to put forward this hell sounded belief. ...

>> so she had four models who were standing next to me each with progressively shorter skirts. that was the set up. the question was could it be

anymore distracting really? and then sort of my ear piece fell out and as i put it back in again, i was asked this question, could you tell us what vaccines children get? how many they get? and when they get them? now the actual answer to that question in 97 is this, children received a vaccine to prevent hepatitis b vaccine, six months of age. at four years of age a vaccine to prevent hib. at 2, 4, 6 months of age a pole -- polio vaccine. there was no way i could do this without a vaccine schedule in front of me. the better answer would have been children receive several vaccines for the first years of their life to prevent pneumonia among others. parents need to make sure their children are up to date on their

vaccines so they don't suffer diseases. the answer i gave was pathetic. it was so pathetic that the model stopped talking and stared at me sadly. i think the lesson here is you don't have to answer the question exactly as asked. this was another time i was on television. this was june 2013 with nora on the left, charlie rose in the center, you remember charlie rose and gayle king on the right. it had to be with a book i had written called do you believe in m magic? gayle king did the interview. when you are on television, less likely with newspapers or radio where they are more likely to have read your book. you're happy if they have read the flap of your book, you are pretty happy if they had read the title of your book. gayle king had read the whole

book. she had tabs throughout the book. she asked a series of great questions and we had good questions about how dietary supplements are unregulated by the industry and how mega vitamins can do harm. it was great until it wasn't. in the book i talked about how steve jobs had pancreatic cancer, he died from that cancer. he didn't have a typical pancreatic cancer. he didn't have the one that is almost uniformly fatal cancer. he had a tumor that happened to be in his pancreas. with early surgery he had a 95% chance of survival. he didn't choose early surgery. rather he chose a variety of alternative treatments like mega vitamins, fruit juices until it was too late to do the surgery. charlie rose was a good friend of steve jobs. he really was angry that i had

chosen to bring up steve jobs and his care. so we had this interaction. with respect to you sir isn't it dangerous to say if you have never treated a person what might have or might not have been the consequence? sir by the way is always bad. i'm sorry, sort of mild panic sets in. in other words did you treat jobs? i didn't. you sort of get pulled into these rabbit holes you know where it doesn't really matter whether i treated steve jobs. the question is, were those facts i stated correct? certain ll ll ll lly others hadi had said. that's basically what i said. you know he significantly delayed the surgery. you know that. i think up to the fact he put himself at unnecessary risk by choosing an alternative course.

the lesson is you don't go down the rabbit hole. who funded that study? what is your association with that funding? it is about the data, the quality of the data, the internal consistency of the data, that's what at issue. you always get pulled into the other things which you have to try and avoid. this was another one. it was 60 minutes in december of 2002. at issue was the george w. bush administration wanted all front line medical personnel to receive the smallpox vaccine. this request occurred months after the tragic events of september 11th, 2001 and one year before the united states invaded iraq. the administration was worried that smallpox would be used by rogue nations or rogue groups as a weapon of bioterror and they knew that we basically had stopped giving the smallpox vaccine routinely to children in this country by 1972. we had generations of people in this country who hadn't been

vaccinated and they were worried that we were at risk. i was actually on the advisory committee for the immunization practices at the time that made that recommendation. i voted against it. i voted against it because for these reasons, the smallpox vaccine can be given post exposure, even after you have been exposed to somebody, you have at least two days before you have to make sure that you've gotten that vaccine. the smallpox is spread by large droplets that are generated from blisters in the mouth so you really need face-to-face contact. you need to be within 5 feet of somebody face-to-face with smallpox to get it. it is not like measles. measles is spread by small droplets. if i have measles and stand here and then walk away, if anybody comes into my airspace within two hours, they could catch measles. that's not true of smallpox. you have to have face-to-face contact. it is never an asymptomatic infection. if you have smallpox, you have visible blisters on your face and your body. also the smallpox vaccine has a difficult safety profile which

is a nice way to say it can cause encephalitis which is inflammation of the brain, and also inflammation around the sack that surrounds the heart, multisystem organ failure. so my feeling at the time let's just wait. let's instruct personnel on the vaccine. let's instruct people how to give it. let's make sure it is distributed but let's make until there's at least one case of smallpox somewhere on the face of the earth before we launch the program because smallpox was eliminated by the late 70s. i was the only one that voted against the program. my lesson is i was writing something when i voted and when i looked up, i was the only one who voted against it. the lesson is look up when you vote. dan rather interviewed me. i will remember that moment when he was interviewing richard nixon and was in a large venn knew and, you know, at one point nixon said this was about a

month before nixon actually left office but nixon said, you know, are you running for something, dan? and rather said this was a time when you didn't routinely said that, dan rather looked back and said no, mr. president are you? this was an imposing figure, dan rather. he came to my laboratory and to interview me about this issue. the thing that was worrisome here was that the childrens hospital in philadelphia receives federal funds. the hospital administrators were worried i was about to appear on national television show decrying a program that was supported by the president of the united states and cdc. they were comfortable with the interview as long as i didn't criticize the federal government directly but stuck to the scientific argument. it was nerve-wracking. the person who was the head of the public relations at the time was great. she was a veteran. she knew what she was doing. but she didn't want me to say

george w. bush's name. every time that dan rather said well if you were in the oval office and you were advising george w. bush, what would you say? she was just over his right shoulder so i could see her doing this. [laughter] >> so it was -- but we got through the interview. dan rather was great actually. it was a winter day in january. i remember, i brought the kids with me because i wanted them to meet with this iconic journalist. he spent time with them, explaining to them how journalism worked. they were about 8 and 10 at the time. he was really wonderful. so in any case, the lesson here is make sure you have the backing of your institution. so i think there are fortunately a number of courses that really work on behalf of science. clearly the best without question are the comedians. they are universally great on science. i think it is because generally they are skeptics. they know nonsense when they see it so they are very quick to point it out. i will give you some examples. this is a quote from george bernard shaw, if you are going to tell people the truth, make

them laugh otherwise they will kill you. [laughter] >> but they have all sort of had their different ways of doing it. in 2010, this was done, a screen was set up on one side that's protecting these bowling pins that represent children and then the other side is -- then he takes the sort of plastic ball and keeps throwing it at both sides where he correctly actually states, you know, this many children died of measles, this many children were paralyzed by polio, this many people -- mothers developed an infection which caused birth defects. getting the epidemiology exactly right, screaming at the top of his lungs, so i mean, where scientists would sort of in a drier way kind of go through those numbers he did it in a way where you were riveted. it was great, this show. i was actually on the colbert report a couple times. this was nerve-wracking. i can tell you it sort --

inoculating mice in a windowless room for 20 years was not training for this in any way. [laughter] >> but the way that colbert works is he sort of comes to you before the show, and he says, look, i play a character. i'm going to stay in character the entire interview. don't let my character get away with anything. if you do let my character get away with something, then it will be a boring interview. they don't give you the questions beforehand, but they sort of -- they have the dos and don'ts of the colbert report, and so one of the don'ts interesting was a brilliant wonderful surgeon and writer, he's written a number of books, one of which was the checklist manifesto, and he was about sort of hospital -- how hospitals can be more efficient. and he was on the colbert report. he was a don't. the reason he was a don't is he kept coming back to his talking points. people don't watch the colbert report to learn about how hospitals can be more efficient.

they go there to laugh at colbert. similarly they don't want to learn about vaccines from you, they want to laugh at colbert largely at your expense. get used to it. you are on a comedy show. if anybody happens to learn anything about vaccines, consider it a wib win. -- consider it a win. at the end, though, what happened was he asked me so it's out there, you are in the industry, how do you respond to it? i said, you know, i'm not in the pocket of industry, i'm in the pocket of children because we do this at childrens in philadelphia and 300 people in the studio audience booed loudly. so i didn't understand this. i will tell you why in a second. he was great. he could have left it at that. he could have just had me embarrassed publicly on national television. he said that's not the answer you want. i will ask you the same question again, and then we will go out with this answer. he asked it again. i said you can on the one hand praise vaccines for making them

safe and effective and praise those who give them. i asked the studio audience was that better? and they cheered. i asked the associate producer why had people booed when i was leaving. she said people like you forget that you are on a comedy show. when you said that you were in the pocket of children, it made you sound like a pedophile. so when we were going back to the -- this was in new york. so we were going back to the train station to come back to philly that night, i asked my wife and daughter, you know, would you ever have imagined that? and my daughter said yeah, i imagined that. that's why i booed. [laughter] >> samantha bee took on in this case the health and nutrition --

again, it was her strategy where sort of stephen colbert kind of played the anti-vaccine activist. samantha bee took one on directly and challenged her for a number of her assumptions and clearly just recoiled at some of the things she said. this was pretty brave, i think. i was also on this show. when she came to my laboratory, i actually hadn't seen -- i'm embarrassed, i had never seen her. i didn't know who she was. when i asked my children whether or not i should be on the show, definitely, everybody watches the daily show, she's great. go on the show definitely. when she was there, she was there with a couple camera people and producers and stuff, and i thought she was the producer when i first met her. she just struck me as very quiet and shy and introverted. you know, i can read women. i don't know what it is. it is like a special gift or something. [laughter] >> they brought two cameras to the interview, one to sort of

see your reaction. at one point she threw her hands to her head, jumped up and screamed and then ran out of the room so they can get your expression. this is how it works. so you have to sort of -- if you're willing to do this, if you want to get out there and try and communicate science, you have to be willing to put aside any residual pride that you have after 25 years of the nih granting process and do it. [laughter] >> and jimmy kimmel, i don't know if you have seen this one, this is one of the best ten minutes i think has ever been on television. it was great. he had a series of pediatricians in southern california basically just screaming at the top of their lungs at their frustration of having people reject an arguably life-saving measure vaccines. they weren't kidding. i mean if you watched this show, you would be really impressed by how truly angry they were and given their level of frustration, i don't think they were kidding. so i'm coming to the end here. i think there are some also very

hopeful signs. i think if you can say nothing about the trump administration, you can really say nothing about the trump administration, i think one thing you can say is he's gotten us of our butts. more people have marched since he's been in office than ever before in american history. so on april 22nd, 2017, in 400 cities in the u.s., and 600 in the world from the washington monument, millions people marched for science carrying signs and banners. it was a staggering compelling moment. these are some pictures from that event. i don't know if you remember this march for science, but here in philly, it was raining. there were like 20,000 people that eventually marched down to penn landing. there was some great signs. this is one, so bad even the introverts are here. [laughter] >> and then for those of who you remember the vietnam war protests, what do we want?

peace. when do we want it? now. what do we want? evidence based science. when do we want it? after peer review. [laughter] >> this is my last slide, i think that, you know, i think as scientists or clinicians we need to stand up now more than ever. i think there's no venue that's too small. all of us at some level are scientists. i mean are logical ordered thinkers who can tell good information from bad information. i think we all need to stand up. i think now more than ever. i think we shouldn't assume other people are doing it. me personally i was funded by the national institutes of health for 25 years to work on as the doctor said to work on a vaccine. who paid me? it was the taxpayer that paid me. they can just as easily decide not to pay people like us to do that kind of work. i just close with one story in terms of no venue is too small.

when my daughter was in the 8th grade, she went to a school in philadelphia, the teacher asked me to come out and to talk about vaccines. i thought this was going to be really fun. my daughter didn't. she was mortified. i mean, the entire drive to school that morning, she said don't make jokes, dad. people my age don't get old people's jokes. they are not going to think you are funny. don't do it. [laughter] >> and so it was the most harrowing talk i have ever given, including the colbert report. this was worse. [laughter] >> so, you know, i gave this -- 19 girls seemed to be enjoying it. one didn't. she was staring grimly forward with a look on her face that said don't embarrass me in front of my friends. you know, i think this -- it's -- if you embarrass your daughter in front of your 8th grade friends, this is why i think it was more challenging than anything i have done, you are a dead man, you are a walking dead man. clearly the hardest thing i have ever done. thanks for your attention.

i will stop there. [applause] >> there's a bunch of questions here. i will start with this. the gentleman right here. yeah? they are going to give you a microphone. >> thank you. i don't want to personalize this, but the person's name has to be used, but i would like you to try to unwind what's come up about this, robert kennedy. and so i mean, he's held up by the anti-vaxer as an anti-vaxer although he has said he has vaccinated all his children. i think all of us were horrified when he went to trump tower to talk to trump. can you sort of unwind this nexus of how he's become immeshed in this and how people

like him are used by one side or the other? >> right, so robert kennedy jr., the son of robert kennedy is an antivaccine -- he's head of something called the world mercury project. he's believed the mercury -- that was in a number of vaccines is largely out of vaccines. he believes this was causing harm. he's made this his crusade. i don't know why he continues to ignore the science that's exonerated this. i think the data has clearly -- a truth has clearly emerged from study after study, there have been seven studies that have shown that you are in no greater risk of even subtle mercury

toxation. he doesn't believe that. he was of counsel of law firms that are involved in class-action lawsuits. maybe that's part of this. i don't know. i don't know. i mean, it's frustrating. he actually called me once to talk about this issue in an article that he eventually wrote for the rolling stone magazine. and he -- it was just full of inaccuracies. i thought it was great. i thought i had a great long phone conversation with robert kennedy jr. and i remember -- >> he's a smart guy. i mean, it really has to be frustrating. he's done so much good work with -- [inaudible] -- it doesn't make any sense to me. >> i don't know. but when we had that conversation -- just sort of a light on a window to this, when we had that conversation, i thought he had said to me i have mothers who have come to me who are worried about this, i'm trying to understand the science of this. could you explain this to me? i probably talked to him for an hour on the phone.

i thought great i will be having touch football games -- this is all going to work out. [laughter] >> he sandbagged me. he published an article in rolling stone magazine, again not one of the great medical or scientific journals claiming -- it was called deadly immunity and it had a series of misstatements. not the least of which the vaccine contains primerisos -- primerisol which it doesn't. so i called the editor of rolling stone or the person who was involved in this piece and said there are a number of misstatements in this article. he just kept saying you know we stand by our story. sort of channelling ben bradley we stand by our story. bradley was right to stand by his story. they stood by their story.

ultimately it was retracted. it was -- i don't know, i don't understand it. he's a powerful position because of his name. he could do a lot of good and he's choosing to do harm. i don't know why. this one right here. >> as a pediatrician for 40 years, i can certainly identify with the pediatricians who were screaming about how vaccines are denied by parents. my own feeling after all these years is that a lot of it comes down to science education. science education in the elementary school, the high school, i would like your thoughts on that, that this is how we teach people what scientific method is and how to evaluate facts because just as this gentleman said about robert kennedy, the facts don't seem to matter to people. >> yeah, i wish i had an easy answer to that. i certainly agree that we probably could be better at trying to educate and about the scientific method, about what the method allows us to say and

what it doesn't allow us to say. but i think we're in a different time. this notion of simply proudly declaring your own truth even though they are directly contradictory to everything we know. the thing that's -- i mean, evolution, you have to deny 250,000 years of fossil records to believe that man and the apes didn't involve from a common ancestor, yet the head of secretary o t education does do this. that's the secretary of department of education head. it's painful. i think all we can do is to try and get the facts out there in the most compelling passionate and compassionate way that we do, to make it a story, to make it fun, to make it clear, to make it also clear that there are things at stake. i mean, obviously denying climate change puts us at great risk. and we just have to make that clear. we have to tell a powerful story because i think we're humans.

we're compelled by story. we have to be able to tell a more powerful story. we can do that. i think we can do that. you look at like the american association for the advancement of science in d.c., 120,000 scientists belong to that organization. that's a great business. that's the organization that publishes the science magazine. i think we don't feel that we're compelled to get out there and do it. we think other people are doing it. and they are not. we're not very good at it. it is certainly out of our comfort zone. believe me, this has been way out of my comfort zone. but, you know, i think you have no choice but to do it because if you don't do it, then, you know, we have much to lose. right here. >> this is personal. my first granddaughter is 8 1/2, and for 8 1/2 years, i've been carrying this burden because my daughter has not vaccinated my

8 1/2-year-old and the 6-year-old. and i would ask her why, and it seems that her husband's family also feel this way because when he was a baby, and he had one of his shots, his temperature shot up to 105 and they had to take him out in the snow to get the temperature down. and i said to her, well, same thing happened to my son, and i put him in some ice water, and he recovered. but it wasn't because of the vaccinations. it was because of a virus. i walk around with this, and she says, we're in discussions now with the doctor -- with her pediatrician, and i'm just -- i'm so scared that they are putting their children in harm's way, and i love these kids. and my whole family walk around like shaking when we're around her. she took them to disney world. i asked her to please get them

vaccinated before they went to disney world because the world comes to disney world. well, they were lucky because nothing happened. what do i do? how do i get this person -- how do i get my daughter, who i love very much, adore my grandchildren, how do i get her to see the light? >> yeah, it's a great question. i think -- and arguably an unanswerable one. i think you just do the best you can. i would say that i get calls every day from parents who have questions about vaccines. i would say 85% of the time they smell the smoke. they want to know whether there's any fire. they are reassureable. you find out what they are worried about. you show them how their concern could be alleviated by data. some people have this fear, irrational fear, but it was one they hold on to very tightly, it doesn't matter what you say to them. they are not going to be convinced. you live in a country where you can choose not to vaccinate your

children. 47 states have religious exemptions to vaccines. 17 states have philosophical exemptions to vaccines. you can put that child at risk. it puts other children at risk that have had the vaccine because not all vaccines are 100% effective. a choice not to get a vaccine is not a risk free choice. it is a choice to take a different and more serious risk. you shouldn't play that game. you shouldn't play the game of russian roulette. i will give you a perfect example at our hospital. we saw a child at 2, 4, 6 months of age. the parents had recently converted to muslim, they vax natded their older children but -- they vaccinated their older children but chose not to vaccinate this child. not there's anything in the muslim religion that says you don't get vaccinations but this family decided not to do it. at 11 months of age, the child

got a bacterial meningitis caused by a bacteria where there was a vaccine for it. the particular type of bacteria he had would have been prevented by the vaccine. he had a bad case of meningitis. we intubated him and saved his life, but he will never see, walk speak or hear again. this was a normal child whose life was snuffed out by a terrible decision, a decision based on bad information. at the very least, especially young pediatricians who also don't see these diseases today and so are less compelled by them, i think they have to be willing to be much more strident about what's at stake here. i think vaccines are largely a victim of their own success. i mean, you didn't have to convince my parents to vaccinate us. they were the children of the 20s and 30s. they saw diphtherias as a common killer of teenager, they saw polio as a crippler of children and young adults.

i had measles, mumps, rubella, i had all those diseases, i know what they felt like, my children, who are 25 and 23, they didn't grow up with these diseases, they don't see these diseases today. they are far less compelled by them. i would like to believe they will vaccinate their children. that would be my guess on that. you know, it's also true of young clinicians who also aren't as compelled by these diseases because they didn't see them. something with a fever and a rash comes into our hospital, i'm often asked to come down and take a look because i had seen so much measles whereas many young physicians haven't seen measles, which is remarkable when you consider that every year we have had 3 1/2 to 4 million cases of measles, 48,000 children would be hospitalized, 500 to a thousand would die from a disease that's now preventable because of a man and we are fortunate to have his wife here in the audience. she's sitting right here. i think there's time for one

more question. let's go with this gentleman here on the end. >> first, i already read "bad advice" and i really enjoyed it. >> thank you for saying that. >> would you be in favor of hospitals or pediatricians refusing to treat children whose parents don't vaccinate them? >> that's the $64,000 question. i mean, what to do. what do you do if you're a pediatrician? on the one hand, you want to do the best you can to try and -- you are the child's advocate. you want to do the best you can to get that child a vaccine. if you choose not to see them, what happens to them? where do they go? do they go to a chiropractor who is perfectly willing not to vaccinate? do they go to another pediatrician? i don't know the answer. i watch my wife who is a general pediatrician goes through this. she felt that once they drew the kind of line you are talking about, where you say look, this

is how important this is to me, if you can't vaccinate your child according to the schedule so i know they are in the safest position possible, i can't have them walk out of this room knowing they are at risk. let me love your child. don't put me in a position where i'm asked to practice substandard care where this child could get measles or whooping could have, there were 6,000 cases of mumps last year. i can't do that. what she found and this was with sort of upper middle class suburban practice is that was much more convincing. they saw how important it was to her. if you want to draw a line, you have to realize somebody may say no and walk away. then you have no chance. i don't know the answer to that question. i think certainly there are increasing numbers of pediatricians who are making that choice, in part because they have responsibility to the waiting room. you know, the waiting -- if you have more and more children in the waiting room who are unvaccinated knowing there will be children in that waiting room who are on steroids for their rheumatology diseases or on chemotherapy for their cancers,

those people can't get. when california eliminated -- thus becoming the third state in the union to have only medical exemption, no philosophical or religious, what turned the tide was a 5-year-old boy who had chemotherapy, he would go to the meetings, he would get on a stool and then he would say what about me? don't i count? i depend on you to protect me. and that made a difference. i mean, it's a societal argument. i think it is hard to make a societal argument these days. people are more selfish. thank you. [applause] [inaudible conversation]

>> book tv recently visited capitol hill to ask members of congress what they are reading this summer. >> right now i'm reading "courage and consequence" written by karl rove. and i'm only about halfway through it right now. but its focus is on sort of the political strategies of how -- that were used to sort of propel george bush in a position where he could run for governor and win in a race that was determined to be not winnable. but of course they proved that wrong, and then after that, the political strategy moving him

from the governor's office in texas to a candidate for and eventually of course becoming president of the united states. it starts out with a description of karl rove's personal life and how he became involved in politics and some of his ups and downs, the beginning of his career. so i find that very fascinating. i like to read books that are factual. so i'm not a fiction reader. i like to read about history and i like to read about real people and real events. >> you have a read couple books on some of your favorite presidents. do you care to talk a little bit about those? >> yes, i'm an abe lincoln fan. i really like the idea of bringing those, you know, that are maybe not the most friendly to your cause around you and, you know, mr. lincoln is famous for bringing some of his enemies into his cabinet. it is a fascinating story on how

he was able to run the country and the courage it took to move through the civil war. and then also another favorite of mine is teddy roosevelt, and so this is just one example of one of the teddy roosevelt books that i've read. there's been many. and this one is special because i happen to visit with teddy roosevelt iv. he was in my office and he autographed this book of his ancestor for me. so he like his ancestor, president roosevelt, is very interested and involved in the environment. so it's also as you meet -- as i met him and knew about teddy roosevelt and the passion he had for the environment, it is really interesting to see how that's passed down from generation to generation. it was a pleasure to meet with

teddy roosevelt iv. >> now you've authored a book, and the proceeds go to charity. >> yeah, so i -- i think this book came out in 2004. i was a homicide detective in the early 80s and became the lead detective in a case called the green river serial murder case. and over a 19-year span, this -- i'm going to call him the devil of a human being, a monster of a human being, took the lives of somewhere between 60 and 70 people. he pled guilty when we finally caught him through dna and microscopic paint evidence. he pled guilty to 49 murders. we closed 51 cases. so there were a couple of cases that we didn't have all the evidence we needed to charge him with it. but we knew he had committed

those too. so we closed 51 murder cases. this book describes in the beginning a little bit of my childhood, a little bit of my early life and the struggles i had growing up. a run away. and so some of those struggles are described in the book. but mostly focused on the investigation of the murders and the day-to-day activity of the task force, the team that was involved in this over the years, tremendous, tremendously talented, committed people from detectives to volunteers, scientists, civilian employees who entered data. this is before the era of computers. so i'm very proud to say too that this book, all the proceeds go to the pediatric interim care

center in kent, and they are known for their ability to take in drug addicted babies and put them through treatment withdrawal from those drugs and get them into foster homes or adopted homes or back with their biological parents. two of my grandchildren are from the pediatric intern care center and they were adopted by my daughter tabitha and her husband ken. they were adopted, a year apart, at 3 months old each and they are now 16 and 15, and they are just doing awesome. so they do an awesome job. all the proceeds from the book go there. special acknowledgment to the families of victims who lost

their daughters and also special thanks and recognition to all those detectives and the entire team that stayed with this case for so long to catch the monster that did this. >> book tv wants to know what you are reading. send us your summer reading list at book tv on twitter, instagram or on facebook. book tv on c-span 2, television for serious readers. >> so larry elder, how is president trump doing? >> so far so good. still too early to tell. it is the bottom of the 2nd inning if this were a baseball game. i think he's done a lot better than i thought he was going to do. i think he surprised a lot of republicans who held their nose and voted for him. over 90% of republicans support him. republicans haven't been that supportive of a president since george herbert walker bush after the persian gulf war. as far as republicans are concerned, he is hitting a home run. >> okay, let'sti