Alternative Facts from Court, the Anti-Vaccine Edition

In a very real sense, the anti-vaccine movement lives in an alternative reality. It’s a dark, frightening realitywhere there is a global conspiracy run by pharmaceutical companies that, apparently, controls most of the doctors, scientists, and health officials in the world, and every government. Where vaccines are poison and diseases are benign, and all that is bad in the world – or most of it – can be blamed on vaccines.

 

I want to use a recent FOIA stipulation to demonstrate how this is formed, how anti-vaccine  groups interpret reality to make it more sinister. This might also give some insight into the phenomenon of alternative facts more generally.

 

On July 9, 2018 a stipulation resolving a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) case between an anti-vaccine group, Informed Consent Action Network (ICAN), and the Department of Health and Human Services (DHHS), was filed. ICAN requested from HHS “reports transmitted to the Committee on Energy and Commerce of the House of Representatives and the Committee on Labor and Human Resources of the Senate by the Secretary of HHS Pursuant to 42 U.S.C.  §300aa-27.” That section requires DHHS to work to improve vaccine safety and report on its efforts to the two congressional committees every two years.

 

The stipulation included DHHS’ statement that it conducted thorough searches and did not find any such documents. The natural implication is that such reports were never filed. Why they were never filed, I don’t know. It certainly may be a failure on the part of the DHHS – and on the part of the Congressional Committees that did not follow up – and the natural result would be for DHHS to start filing such reports. There may be more to it.

 

The interesting story is how the stipulation was described on anti-vaccine pages. To protect individual privacy and not shame private people, I will refer only to public pages and leading figures.

 

In a discussion of the case on an anti-vaccine web broadcast, anti-vaccine activist Robert F. Kennedy Jr. – who was the lawyer signing the stipulation for ICAN - said: “what HHS has admitted here is that there is no scrutiny; there is no vigilance.And of course, the gravamen of their strategy has been to make sure that vaccines are never safety tested.” Kennedy did not quite say there are no studies, but he suggested there is no monitoring of safety.

 

The show includes a caption that says: Government concedes: There are no safety studies on vaccines...”

 

 

 

In a discussion on a popular anti-vaccine page, the same heading was used: “HHS concedes no afety studies on vaccines.”

 

Many other anti-vaccine pages followed through. To give one example, the page Oregonians for Vaccine Choice said:

“[DHHS] DID NOT DO ONE SINGLE SAFETY STUDY IN THE LAST 30 YEARS OR AT LEAST THEY STATE THEY HAVE NO RECORD OF ANYTHING!!”

 

To be fair, a few sites have tried to pull back and be more accurate – The World Mercury Project, an anti-vaccine outfit created by, among others, Robert F. Kennedy – explained that this is about not filing reports. Though it did it in a post connecting to the inaccurate statements by Mr. Kennedy and the inaccurate caption I described above, so the nuance may be lost. Similarly, Oklahomans for Vaccine Choice, after initially saying HHS did not do one safety study, corrected it to saying they did not file reports. But the general message was “no safety studies!”

 

That is, of course, not what the FOIA request was about at all. It is also incorrect.

 

The CDC provides a useful central page with links to various collections of vaccines safety studies by itself and other parts of HHS. While not part of HHS, at HHS’s request the National Academy of Medicine – formerly the Institute of Medicine – created several reports on vaccines safety, reviewing abundant literature and synthesizing it. In 2014, the HHS commissioned another large report on vaccines safety by another group. There are several federal committees overseeing vaccines safety, and four monitoring systems looking at vaccines safety, all connected to HHS.

 

Saying HHS did not do safety studies or did not work on vaccines safety for 30 years is simply untrue, or, in today’s parlance, alternative facts. But this is how this simple, straightforward court decision has been read on anti-vaccine sites, and that is the message being distributed. Again, I do not want to shame or target individuals, including leaders of the anti-vaccine movement, so have limited this to public pages.

 

This is how fake news are born, even in the face of a simple three-page court document. It is likely, at least, to widen the gap between firm believers in the anti-vaccine reality and the rest of society that realizes this is untrue, creating even more mistrust. Whether it will go beyond that is unclear. It is relatively easily disproven, so it might actually help demonstrate how unreliable anti-vaccine claims generally are. We will have to see.