Maggie Koerth-Baker in Aeon:
Stop me if you’ve heard this one before. On 19 December 1984, The New York Times ran a story about parents who feared the risks of routine vaccinations. The parent quoted in the article was a lawyer who blamed vaccines for the death of his daughter. The story was framed as a conflict between parents such as him and medical experts, who pointed out that serious side-effects of vaccines were extremely rare, and that the diseases vaccines prevented were far worse. We have to be careful, the scientists said, or these fears could result in fewer people getting vaccinated and more people getting sick.
On 27 April 1999, The New York Times ran a story about parents who feared the risks of routine vaccinations. The parent quoted in the article was college-educated, an author and professional activist, who blamed vaccines for her son’s brain damage. The story was framed as a conflict between parents such as her and medical experts, who worried that the internet was spreading false information and unwarranted fears. Parents today just haven’t seen the devastation vaccine-preventable diseases can cause, the scientists said.
On 21 March 2008, The New York Times ran a story about parents who feared the risks of routine vaccinations. The article noted that parents who refused vaccines for their children were often ‘well-educated and financially stable’. The story was framed as a conflict between those parents and medical experts, who worried that geographical pockets of vaccine refusal could help spread preventable diseases, such as measles. Parents today just haven’t seen the devastation vaccine-preventable diseases can cause, the scientists said.
For more than 30 years now, we journalists have been telling the same story, with the same actors, playing the same roles, and speaking the same lines. The authors change, but the news doesn’t. It barely even counts as ‘new’.
There are two groups of people you can blame for this pattern of repetitive storytelling. Maybe it’s them: maybe the problem is parents whose anti-science proclivities have carried them so far away from the facts that journalists have no choice but to repeat ourselves ad nauseum. The story doesn’t change because the story hasn’t changed.
That could be true. But there’s also another option. Maybe it’s us: maybe journalists aren’t listening. The story never changes because we stopped looking for the other stories we could tell.
If that’s true, it’s a big deal. And not just for journalists. Vaccination is a deeply important part of public health. Whether to vaccinate or not isn’t simply a decision you make for yourself or your family, independent of the choices of everyone else. Vaccines work in two ways. They decrease your personal risk of contracting a disease, and they reduce the number of potential hosts and carriers in the population. That means the more vaccinated people there are, the harder it is for a disease to spread. Vaccines can stop an outbreak before it happens. This so-called ‘herd immunity’ protects children who are too young to get a vaccine, people who are too sick to get one, and anybody whose vaccination isn’t working as well as it should.
More here.