Study: You Can't Change an Anti-Vaxxer's Mind

[proverbialwisdom]

98. Chris Mooney is a 37 yo Yalie; here's an older Yalie, Dan Olmsted. Each earned BA degree in English.

CHECK IT OUT:

http://www.msnbc.com/ronan-farrow-daily/watch/the-truth-about-vaccines---autism-339650627865
http://www.msnbc.com/ronan-farrow/watch/debunking-the-anti-vaccine-movement-340243523842
http://www.ageofautism.com/2014/10/age-of-autism-weekly-wrap-.html (appropriate snark considering sobbing as the alternative)


FYI: (Mooney pitches the official CDC and Rand Corp views; Olmsted is an independent investigative journalist (maybe there'll be a movie in 30 years vindicating his reporting).

http://us.macmillan.com/author/danolmsted

Dan Olmsted is Editor of the blog Age of Autism (ageofautism.com). He has been a journalist for 35 years and was an original staff member of USA Today and Senior Editor of USA WEEKEND and United Press International. He lives in Falls Church City, Virginia and is a member of the National Press Club.

http://autism.lovetoknow.com/Age_of_Autism

AOA Editors: Yale College graduate Dan Olmsted is an investigative reporter who focuses his research on autism and related pervasive developmental disorders. His research includes investigations of the Amish community in Lancaster, Pennsylvania, a community that has very few cases of autism. Dan is the coauthor of the book Age of Autism: Mercury, Medicine and a Man-made Epidemic. Age of Autism is a collaborative effort between Olmsted and Mark Blaxill, the Editor-at-Large for the Age of Autism. Blaxill is a graduate of Princeton University and Harvard Business School. He is the parent of a child with autism.

Other work by Olmsted, below. GOOGLE - lariam site:ageofautism.com (145 results). Related: http://www.democraticunderground.com/1014598418

http://www.ageofautism.com/2009/04/drugs-death-and-the-manufacture-of-doubt.html

Posted by Age of Autism at April 26, 2009
Drugs, Death and the Manufacture of Doubt
By Dan Olmsted

I hope regular readers of this site will indulge a fairly extended incursion into a topic that, on the surface, is unrelated to autism but that connects at a deep level with our point and purpose. It concerns what I would call an analogous situation, and analogies sometimes have just as much power as direct argument and evidence.

This piece is triggered by two articles written last week on The Huffington Post by Greg Mitchell, editor of Editor & Publisher magazine and nine books including “Wrong for So Long: How the Press, the Pundits -- and the President -- Failed on Iraq.” Greg is one of the really smart guys orbiting the media universe, and was among the first to raise questions about the weak and wobbly performance of the press in covering the so-called “war on terror.”

My own experience with Greg comes from something he wrote in March 2004: “My vote for Iraq reporter of the year goes to a low-profile journalist who did not cover the war itself and has never even been to Baghdad. His name is Mark Benjamin, 33, and he serves as investigations editor for United Press International out of Washington, D.C. E&P has documented his work since last autumn, and now the heavy hitters - The New York Times and The Washington Post - are following his lead, taking a long look at the forgotten American victims of the war: the injured, the traumatized, and the suicides.”

At that point, Mark and I were colleagues at UPI -- I was his editor on those stories, although we were first and foremost co-conspirators in trying to bring attention to the woeful way the military was treating its soldiers and veterans. We had already been working together a couple of years at that point, starting in early 2002 with an investigative series on an anti-malaria drug called Lariam. The Army invented it as older malaria pills were losing effectiveness during the Vietnam era, and rushed it onto the market with inadequate testing under a licensing deal with Roche. It didn’t take long for the pharmaceutical version of “sin in haste, repent at leisure” effect to appear -- by the late 1980s, severe mental problems that included suicide and aggressive behavior were showing up in the military and also in the general traveling population, which was being prescribed Lariam as the new wonder drug.

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