Hot on the heels of yesterday's paper in Pediatrics showing that vaccine refusal elevates the risk of pertussis in a child by nearly 23-fold, a commentary in PLoS Biology asks what can be done to combat anti-vaccine misinformation. Entitled A Broken Trust: Lessons from the Vaccine-Autism Wars, it's an interview with a professor of medical anthropology at UCSF named Sharon Kaufman, who took a 26 month hiatus from her usual work on aging and longevity to study the anti-vaccine movement from an anthropological perspective. Her observations in some way echo observations I've been making as a commentator and blogger, but she also makes at least one suggestion that strikes me as rather implausible, if not wildly so.

The article treads on ground that I've covered many times on this blog before in that it gives a good, concise history of the latest incarnation of the anti-vaccine movement since the late 1990s, when a confluence of two events, one in the U.K. and one in the U.S., worked to plant the seeds of antivaccine lunacy that continue to germinate now, over a decade later. The U.K. incident was, of course, the publication of the infamous Lancet paper by scientific fraudster Andrew Wakefield, who was also in the pocket of trial lawyers who were suing vaccine manufacturers. That was 1998. The second, which occurred in the U.S. in 1999, was the sudden decision, bulldozed through merican Academy of Pediatrics' vaccine advisory committee and the CDC mostly due to Dr. Neal Halsey, to recommend the removal of mercury from all childhood vaccines by the end of 2001. As described in the PLoS Biology article:

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