In the midst of a discussion about woo, medical science and the (misplaced?) priorities of people like Ben Goldacre at Daniel’s site, he asks an interesting question:
What interests me is that the strategy of marginalising the “anti-vaxers” and treating them as fringe loonies who didn’t have to be listened to worked so much worse in the medical sphere than similar strategies worked against “conspiracy loons” in the political sphere.
While I’m not sure his characterisation of the MMR “controversy” is accurate, it is interesting to see how quickly these fears about the MMR jab causes autism were taken up by the media and respectable, mainstream politicians and media commentators. This in contrast to e.g. the runup to the War on Iraq, where the quite obvious guff about Saddam’s WMD was barely questioned until years after the fact, with those skeptical of the evidence being given little hearing. Why is it that one type of skepticism, no matter how ill-founded, found an eager audience in the British media, while another type of skepticism, with much more evidence for it was dismissed as conspiracy theory?
Because one story slotted right into existing rightwing media narratives while the other doesn’t. The tabloids, especially the Daily Mail have always been suspicious about government propaganda about health care, mistrustful of the NHS and medical science and friendly towards alternative treatments. Having real true “scientific” evidence that the NHS and Labour were poisoning our children with autism was too good to pass up. Meanwhile, why would these same tabloids be skeptical about a war they supported anyway?