A Pox on Fools
The True Believers, Grifters, and Cynics Who Convinced Us to Reject Vaccines
by Thomas Levenson (Random House
Transistor radio jokes aside, what would help vaccine acceptance in the United States is if the government gave out escalatingly larger caliber small arms with each.
This is a book about the contemporary anti-vaccine movement. It is a quick, emotional polemic and does not pretend to be anything else. It derives three strands of vaccine hate – immoral, unsafe, and anti-free – and puts them in historical context. None of these are new, so the book can present some of their history. The author argues why it was wrong then and why it is wrong now, and he also notes some of the fuzzy bits (eg. pre-germ theory, there is at least some reason to approach vaccines with caution, in that the causality was unclear). If you are a sensible, it will make you mad. Okay, it will make you mad if you are insensible, but it should not. And in either case, it is well-sourced and full of recent events with which to contend.
The strongest part is unsafe. These are all the most mendacious claims but also the most difficult to pull out by the roots, since they run on vibes-based skepticism. While this book is too short for detailed coverage, the Wakefield disgrace is covered well. I also like this section because it gives the lie to the argument in a previous book that I did not like: the call is coming from inside the house. Publishers cannot successfully gatekeep if the actual scientists are doing an end run.
The weakest part is anti-free. This is the usual knife-to-a-gunfight problem of a scientist trying to do politics, which goes as well as when politicians try and do science. At best it is an appeal to pathos and at worse it serves the opposition (I can twist the logic here in a lot of malign ways). And it is interesting to read in the context of our tech overlords and the overlap of different forms of altruism. Mind you, I am not offering a better argument. If I knew that, I would write something other than non-fiction book reviews. Maybe the right way to put it is that there is not a better argument, there are only arguments that operate from different sets of values. The book treats it as if there was a conclusive argument and it amounts to something social-contract-y, which is insufficient.
The only real flaw here is the mis-blurbing, to the extent that there is much less history or sociology around the movement. But it is fine for what it is.
My thanks to the author, Thomas Levenson, for writing the book, and to the publisher, Random House, for making the ARC available to me.
CITATION HEEDED 
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