Tgk1946's Blog

From Bad Advice (Paul Offitt, 2018) pp107-9

Bee confronted science denialism head on, starting her segment showing a series of interviews from Fox News during which several conservative pundits offered their views.
Addressing the audience, Bee says, “This right-wing science denial has tragic, real-world consequences.”

“When you cross the line into being a scientific denialist,” I say, “then you have the potential to do a lot of harm.”

“Is it really fair to blame the other side, though?” asks Bee. “I mean, every scientific fact has a counter-fact that is true for other people.”

“The good news about vaccines,” I say, “[is that] they’re not a belief system. They’re an evidence-based system.”

Bee then shows a graph of the incidence of various diseases before and after the introduction of vaccines. “He’s right,” she says. “Because of these right-wing nut jobs, outbreaks of vaccine-preventable diseases are occurring in the red states of California, New York, and Oregon. Wait, what the fuck is going on here?”

I’m asked to explain why vaccine denialism appears to be a blue-state problem, given that the conservative science denialists on Fox News presumably represent red states. “There are communities that have large populations of Caucasian, upper-middle-class residents who are college educated, often graduate-school educated, who believe that by simply Googling the word vaccines on the internet, they can know just as much [as], if not more than, anyone who’s giving them advice.” “It’s happening in my community?” says Bee. “People who juice?”

Bee then sets out to stop the spread of bad information about vaccines. “I had to find the source. How about this lifestyle blogger, Sarah Pope?”

“These vaccines are loaded with toxins,” says Pope. “And I’m not going to inject them into my kids. Period.”

Bee next takes on the issue of shared responsibility, letting Pope hang herself with her own logic. “There is no herd immunity from vaccination,” says Pope. “Thats a myth … I believe that the decline in epidemics is due to other reasons besides vaccination. Getting the filthiness of the horses out of the streets.”

“You know that you don’t get measles from horseshit, right?” asks Bee, worried about how many people are actually listening to Pope.

Pope then says that her blog currently has about forty-six thousand subscribers.

The producers of The Daily Show bring two cameras to these interviews. The next scene explains why.

After Pope states her blog’s number of subscribers, Bee literally foams at the mouth. Copious amounts of thick, white foam pour out. Pope is disgusted.

“I’m so sorry,” says Bee, holding up a large white tablet. “I thought this Alka-Seltzer was just a giant breath mint.”

(One purpose of the second camera is to catch guests’ expressions when Samantha Bee does something unexpected. During my interview, without warning, Bee threw her hands to her head, jumped up, screamed “What the fuck?” and ran out of the room. I suspect that my face registered something between shock and horror.)

Bee then sets out to prevent the misinformation spread by Sarah Pope from going viral — treating Pope as if she herself is a virus. “I had to trace the spread of this left-leaning idiocy,” says Bee. “It starts on blogs like Pope’s, goes viral on Twitter, and then replicates wherever progressives congregate.” (Bee shows a picture of a Whole Foods store.) “And then, when it jumps hosts into a celebrity, it goes airborne. You can catch it from an iPhone.” (Bee shows a photo of herself putting an iPhone into a hazmat bag.) “Or over soy lattes. I had to stop it.”

“Do you remember where you last had tea?” Bee asks Pope, apparently panicked that it might be too late to stop the viral spread.

“It was Starbucks,” says Pope.

“Which Starbucks?” screams Bee.

Back to me in my office: “I think, sadly, that the only way this gets better is when we see more and more outbreaks,” I say.

“So the cure for the anti-vaccination epidemic,” says Bee, “is observing the very real negative effects of the anti-vaccination movement?”

The segment ends with pictures of ice caps melting and children in iron lungs. “So there is a cure for science denial,” says Bee. “Once Florida is underwater and we all have polio, it’ll be better.”

At one point during the filming of my interview for The Daily Show, Samantha Bee asked if she could lie down on top of a workbench in my laboratory. She wanted me to read to her from the textbook Vaccines, which is about sixteen hundred pages long, as if I were telling her a bedtime story. At the same time, she wanted me to gently pat her head. So I did it. It was another Iowa-cow-pasture moment, but it was worth it. Nothing dismisses ill-founded beliefs better than humor. And. although some of this interview had been uncomfortable for me, I knew that I had to be willing to set aside the small amount of residual pride that might have been left after surviving twenty-five years of the NIH granting process and just do it.

I wondered how Sarah Pope would handle being publicly ridiculed on national television. She loved it. On her blog the next day, Pope wrote about how she had made her points and how anti-vaccine activists had praised her for her bravery. She later called Samantha Bee to thank her. To Sarah Pope, there was no losing.