I didn’t think that Amanda Peet could get any sexier for standing up for science and the safety of vaccines, but her appearance on Good Morning American yesterday was outstanding. Here is the money quote:

“It seems that the media is often giving celebrities and actors more authority on this issue than they are giving the experts. I know it’s a paradox, but that’s part of why I wanted to become a spokesperson, to say to people, ‘Please don’t listen to me. Don’t listen to actors. Go to the experts.'”

Is it crazy of me to think that maybe Ms. Peet read my blog entry where I made the exact same point? I applauded her efforts while simultaneously pointing out that the media gives far too much attention to celebrities on this issue. Even still, GMA is playing the debate over vaccines as a battle between Amanda Peet and Jenny McCarthy – Um…maybe the scientific medical community might have an opinion as well.

Peet gets it exactly right – she is just being a spokesperson for expert consensus opinion – not substituting her own scientific opinion.

Meanwhile, the new pinup girl for the anti-vaccination movement, Jenny McCarthy, has been trying to get the troops out to counter the new American Academy of Pediatrics effort to promote vaccinations. Orac has the scoop – and he correctly points out such efforts to thwart the AAP’s initiative shows that McCarthy is full-blown anti-vaccine, not “pro-safe vaccine” as she unconvincingly claims.

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Reminder – my main blog entry on Wednesdays is over at Science-Based Medicine.

I have bemoaned in the past the celebrity culture in which we grant more weight to the opinions of celebrities than they deserve. It seems to be part of human nature to idolize and hero-worship. It can be benign, even healthy. Young athletes idolizing the talent and hard work of sports stars may be spurred on to greater achievement themselves. I also think that intellectual heroes, like Carl Sagan and Stephen J. Gould, can have an enormously positive influence on culture and society.

TV and movie stars, however, are famous because their profession involves public performance in a medium that potentially reaches millions. This is fine as far as it goes – I have no problem admiring stars for their entertainment value, their charisma, and their artistic talent and skills. It is reasonable to admire artists for their art.

The problem comes, in my opinion, when actors and actresses feel that their political opinions or ideology are somehow more valuable than anyone else’s because of their fame. I don’t necessarily blame them – they have a right to express their opinions and their fame gives them an outlet. I do think that if they are going to trade on their fame then they have a responsibility for what they promote, but I am not questioning their right to promote whatever they choose. Rather I maintain that the public should largely not care what celebrities think about issues that have nothing to do with their art and profession.

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A recent BBC article discusses the emergence of products designed for neurofeedback to aid in stress reduction. The headline asks, “Smart headbands claim to make people calmer. Do they work?” However, the article does not really answer the question, or even get to the heart of the issue. It mostly provide anecdotes and opinions without putting the technology into a clear context. The article focuses mainly on the use of such devices to allegedly improve sports performance.

There are a few premises on which the claims made for such devices are based, varying from well established to questionable. One premise is that we can measure “stress” in the brain using an electroencephalograph (EEG) to measure the electrical activity in the brain. This claim is mostly true, but there is some important background necessary to understand what this means. First, we need to define “stress”. Functionally when researchers are talking about mental stress they mean one of two things, either the stress that results from an immediate physical threat, or the mental stress that results from engaging in a challenging mental task (like doing math in your head while being distracted). For practical purposes the research on EEGs and mental stress use the challenging mental task model.

It his, however, a good representation of stress generally? It is a convenient research paradigm, but how generalizable it is to mental stress is questionable. It can result in objective measures of physiological stress, such as secretion of stress hormones, which is partly why it’s convenient for research and not unreasonable, but it is only a representation of mental stress and might not translate to all “stressful” situations (like sports).

Can EEGs measure this type of mental stress? Yes – a relaxed mind with eyes closed produces a lot of regular alpha waves. A more active mind (and one with eyes open) produces more theta waves and chaotic brainwave activity. EEGs can therefore tell the difference between relaxed and active. How about not just active but stressed? That is trickier, but there are studies which appear to show some statistical differences in the wave patterns regionally with mental stress. So the premise that EEGs can measure certain kinds of mental stress is reasonable, but not as simple as often implied. This also does not necessarily mean that commercial devices claiming to measure EEG markers of stress work.

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From time to time celebrities publicly discuss their opinions on scientific topics, and the results are usually not pretty. I have discussed previously the folly of Jenny McCarthy, for example, in using her dubious celebrity to promote anti-vaccine nonsense. Now The Donald has joined the ranks of people who are mostly famous for being famous who feel their celebrity gives them license to pontificate publicly about complex scientific issues. Trump told a Fox News audience that he strongly believes vaccines are causing the increase in autism diagnosis. He based this upon his scientific training, thorough reading of the relevant scientific literature, and consultation with experts – no, I mean based upon his casual observation and naive assumptions. Hey, he has an anecdote.

Here is the core of his rant:

“I’ve gotten to be pretty familiar with the subject. You know, I have a theory — and it’s a theory that some people believe in — and that’s the vaccinations. We never had anything like this. This is now an epidemic. It’s way, way up over the past 10 years. It’s way up over the past two years. And, you know, when you take a little baby that weighs like 12 pounds into a doctor’s office and they pump them with many, many simultaneous vaccinations — I’m all for vaccinations, but I think when you add all of these vaccinations together and then two months later the baby is so different then lots of different things have happened. I really — I’ve known cases.”

OK, it’s easy for a lay person to get caught up in a complex scientific question and get overwhelmed by information from one side. If you naively watch Loose Change, for example, without being familiar with the whole 911 conspiracy thing you might be led to believe there is something sinister going on. That’s how propaganda of that sort often works – overwhelm your audience with factoids, distorted and cherry-picked information, and apparent correlations and weave them into an emotionally compelling story. If you listen to just one side of any scientific debate you will probably be convinced that that side has a strong and perhaps even iron-clad case. Only when the other side has an opportunity to make their case do you see how the information you were given was systematically biased in one direction.

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I applaud the recent attempts by the American Academy of Pediatrics to fight back against the anti-vaccine misinformation scare-mongering machine. As part of that goal August is Vaccine Awareness Month. However, this just brought home for me how much better the PR machine is on the anti-vax side than on the side of science. Here we are half way through August and I am just learning it is Vaccine Awareness Month. This is a topic I track quite closely, and blog about frequently. Where was the media blitz? Where was the rallying of troops?

The Good

OK – it’s not all bad. They did put out an open letter with a fair number of authoritative signature. Here is a brief excerpt:

We, the undersigned, support immunizations as the safest, most effective way to control and eradicate infectious diseases. This August, as another National Immunization Awareness Month comes to a close, we are reminded that diseases such as smallpox and polio were once commonplace in the United States. Thanks to vaccinations, we have not seen or experienced many of the infectious diseases that gripped past generations, but other countries have not been so fortunate and outbreaks continue in the United States.

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There is a dedicated fringe anti-vaccine movement. They are dedicated to some permutation of the collection of beliefs that vaccines are: 1) not effective; 2) have not reduced or eliminated any infectious disease; 3) are not safe; and 4) are a conspiracy of Big Pharma, the government, and paid-off doctors. Specific claims have wandered over the years, but they have as a central theme that vaccines are bad. When one specific claim collapses, they will move on to the next anti-vaccine claim.

While anti-vaccine cranks have been around as long as vaccines, it is only recently that they have captured the attention of the mainstream media and the skeptical movement and the battle has really been engaged.

Anti-vaccinationists have focused much of their recent efforts on the claim that vaccines cause autism. At first the MMR vaccine was blamed, sparked by a now-discredited study performed by Andrew Wakefield. This led to declining vaccination rates in the UK and a resurgence of measles.

As the MMR claim was in decline (although by no means abandoned), attention shifted to thimerosal – a mercury-based preservative in some vaccines. There are many flaws with the thimerosal hypothesis, and numerous studies have shown no link between thimerosal and autism or any neurological disorder. But the fatal blow to the thimerosal hypothesis was struck when thimerosal was removed from the routine childhood vaccine schedule (thimerosal, incidentally, was never in the MMR vaccine) in the US by 2002. In the subsequent 6 years the rate of autism diagnoses kept increasing at their previous rate, without even a blip. Only the most rabid (or scientifically illiterate)  anti-vaccine fanatics still cling to the thimerosal claim.

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In response to my blog post on Monday, David Kirby wrote a response in the Huffington Post and Dr. Jon Poling (father of Hannah Poling) wrote an open letter to me, placed in the comment section and posted at Age of Autism. It seems only polite that I respond to their kind attention.

The primary focus of my original post (which I further developed yesterday) was that the media is focusing too much attention on what celebrities and politicians are saying about the controversy surrounding the discredited notion that vaccines are a significant cause of autism. Over the past year Jenny McCarthy (now joined by her boyfriend Jim Carrey) has become the major spokesperson for a movement that, at its core, is anti-vaccine and is dedicated to the scientific opinion that vaccines are toxic and cause autism. Recently actress Amanda Peet joined the fray, professing her belief that vaccines are safe, are not associated with autism, and that parents who do not vaccinate their children are “parasites” for depending on other parents who do. (She later apologized for that remark, calling it “divisive”.)

While I appreciate Amanda Peet’s support, I feel strongly that scientific questions should be handled by the scientific community. Celebrities are great when they support causes – but when they second guess the scientific community and decide to advocate for their own scientific conclusions, they are more likely to cause harm than good. Continue Reading »

Yesterday I wrote about the fact that Amanda Peet had come out in support of vaccine safety, adding her voice to those who wish to counter the now discredited notion that vaccines are linked to autism. While I admire her for essentially reading the situation correctly, I lamented the fact that celebrities (like Jenny McCarthy) are getting too much attention for their opinions on scientific questions. Today, while bouncing around the blogosphere, I see that McCarthy and Peet were only the tip of the iceberg.

Britney Spears

Orac reported yesterday that Jenny McCarthy held a fundraiser for her antivaccination group (mischaracterized as an autism charity) Generation Rescue. Her boyfriend, Jim Carrey, was there, of course. But also making an appearance was Britney Spears. Orac nailed it when he wrote: “Because no one knows parenting and science like Britney Spears, I guess.”

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