The New McCarthyism

by Kristina Chew, PhD on October 28th, 2007

If you hear about Arthur Miller—a witch hunt—McCarthyism—-the first thing that might come to mind is Miller’s 1952 play The Crucible, which is often interpreted as an allegory for the McCarthy Hearings. In 1952, Joe McCarthy, the junior senator from Wisconsin, proclaimed that 205 Communists had infiltrated the State department. Actors, screenwriters, directors and others associated with Hollywood had been investigated by the House Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC) since 1947; many who refused to cooperate with the HUAC lost their jobs in the film industry and were blacklisted. Said Miller in a Paris Review interview, as noted in an essay by Tom Shafer:

In this general atmosphere of fear and suspicion, Arthur Miller was reminded of a topic he had researched for a play while a student at the University of Michigan. When “the McCarthy era came along,” he told The Paris Review, “I remembered these stories and I used to tell them to people when it [the Red Scare] started. I had no idea that it was going to go as far as it went. I used to say, you know, McCarthy is actually saying certain lines that I recall the witch-hunters saying in Salem. So I started to go back, not with the idea of writing a play, but to refresh my own mind because it was getting eerie.

McCarthy was on his own witch hunt to rout out any Communists and the atmosphere of “guilt, accusation, suspicion, and dread” generated is precisely conveyed by the witchcraft-fearing Puritans of Miller’s play.

But The Crucible is not exactly the subject here.

When I have mentioned Miller here, it is to refer to his son, Daniel Miller, who has Down Syndrome and who Miller did not acknowledge for most of his life. I have referred to witch hunts in reference to vaccines, which some believe is the cause of their child having autism. And McCarthy—-well, let’s say that is a surname mentioned often here as of the past month, thoughin regard to Jenny not Joe.

And, it could be said, we (”we” being the “autism community”) are living in the era of the New McCarthyism. An era in which the hunt is on for the terrible scourge that is damaging an epidemic number of America’s children, that is infiltrating the current generation with mercury or some autism-causing thing, that is perhaps even invading the very air we breeze (did someone mention pollution wafting across the Pacific Ocean from Chinese factories?) and poisoning the youth of tomorrow with some foul contagion. The source of this evil has a name, some say—vaccines—and it is on the list of many to be questioned and even brought to trial (the third trial of the Autism Omnibus Proceedsings is scheduled for November in Orlando; the second was in Charlotte, North Carolina; the first was held in June).

In commentary in the October 27th Wall Street Journal, Ari Brown, a pediatrician in Austin, Texas and a fellow of the American Academy of Pediatrics, writes about the demonization of the vaccine program in the wake of the publication and publicizing of Jenny McCarthy’s book Louder Than Words: A Mother’s Journey in Healing Autism. She notes two “medical misaccuracies”:

Parents go through stages of grief when their child is diagnosed with a disorder like autism. We all want to blame someone for our suffering. That’s understandable. Was there something we could have done as parents to prevent this? But why hasn’t the media called out Ms. McCarthy on all the medical inaccuracies in her book? Has anyone actually read it? I have — cover to cover. Here are two revealing points:

Ms. McCarthy told Oprah that her son was a normal toddler until he received his Measles, Mumps and Rubella vaccine (at 15 months of age). Soon after — boom — the soul is gone from his eyes. Yet she contradicts herself in her book: “My friends’ babies all cracked a smile way before Evan did . . . he was almost five months old.” Which is it? Was he normal until his MMR vaccine or were some of the signs missed before he got that shot?

Ms. McCarthy also contends that mercury in vaccines caused damage to her son’s gut and immune system, leading to autism. Yet the mercury preservative Ms. McCarthy assails was removed from the childhood vaccination series in 2001. Her son, Evan, was born in 2002. It’s hard to trust Ms. McCarthy’s medical degree from the University of Google — she comments about the Hepatitis C vaccine that wreaked havoc on a friend’s child. An inconvenient truth: There is no Hepatitis C vaccine.

Brown notes that McCarthy is “in the trenches, fighting for her son” but she, too, is fighting, to “keep our kids healthy and protected.” Those who critique McCarthy are often themselves critiqued, and harshly, for not simply applauding her efforts for increasing autism awareness. Mention her interesting past exploits (1994 Playmate of the Year, among other endeavors) and one gets soundly drubbed (look at some of the comments on an earlier post; I am curious what this post might generate).

Vaccines as “a” or “the” cause of autism, the gluten-free casein-free diet, yeast—all theories and potential remedies that have been the talk of autism parents for at least the past decade—-have been given a new life in the media, due to McCarthy’s claims about what may have caused her son to become autistic, and what may have helped him. Due to her celebrity, it is no surprise that what McCarthy says and does in regard to autism gets much more attention than anything here ever might, but misinformation can be misleading, can even be dangerous. Biomedical treatments for autism are unproven; Dr. Roy Kerry has been charged with involuntary manslaughter in the August 2005 death of 5-year-old Abubakar Tariq Nadama while the boy was undergoing chelation therapy in the doctor’s office. Brown opens her Wall Street Journal commentary with an account of a 7-year-old girl who was brought to the emergency room of Children’s Hospital Boston.

The girl had come down with chickenpox a few days earlier — she had a fever and hundreds of itchy skin lesions. That night, she had taken a turn for the worse. Her fever shot up to 106 and she became confused and lethargic. She was unresponsive and limp in her mother’s arms.

The ER doctors suspected that her open sores allowed Strep bacteria to get under her skin and rage through her bloodstream. Now she was in “multiple system organ failure” — every square inch of her body was shutting down all at once. IVs were placed into her veins to start fluids, antibiotics and medications to stabilize her heart and blood pressure. She was placed on a ventilator machine to breathe. Then she was brought to the Intensive Care Unit.

By the time I met my patient, she had tubes coming out of every opening and weeping skin lesions all over her body. I was used to blood and gore, but it was hard to look at her and not cry. Imagine how her parents felt when they saw their once-beautiful little girl in this grotesque state, struggling to survive.

My attending physician told me to grab dinner. This child would need me for the rest of the night. I returned to the ICU to find that my patient had gone into cardiac arrest and died. I watched, helplessly, as the nurses placed the little girl into a body bag.

Fast forward five months: The first chickenpox vaccine was approved. That day, I vowed never to let a child on my watch suffer from a disease that was preventable by vaccination.

Brown coins the phrase the “New McCarthyism”; now it is the vaccine program that is being demonized as fear of vaccines leads parents to act in contradiction to their own beliefs.

Call it the New McCarthyism: Who cares about 100 years of scientific research? Vaccines are evil, because the Internet says they are. When a well-meaning parent like Ms. McCarthy blames vaccines for her child’s autism, it’s dangerous. Celebrity books come and go, but the anxiety they create lives on in pediatricians’ offices across the country. A small but growing number of parents are even lying about their religious beliefs to avoid having their children vaccinated, thanks in part to the media hysteria created by this book.

Joe McCarthy’s support and popularity began to fade in the 1954 Army-McCarthy hearings; he was censured by the United States Senate, which voted to “condemn” Senator Joseph McCarthy by a vote of 67 to 22 on December 2, 1954. “McCarthyism” has come to mean “the use of methods of investigation and accusation regarded as unfair, in order to suppress opposition” and to be associated more generally with the making of “demagogic, reckless, and unsubstantiated accusations.” In the New McCarthysim, those who prefer not to talk about curing autism, or suggest that there is no epidemic of autism, or that a link between vaccines and autism is a myth, or that our better understanding of autism and better diagnosis are important reasons for the rising prevalence of autism, or that sometimes growing up and getting older are the reasons that a child does better,: Those who make such claims and arguments are roundly decried, criticized, and castigated, and I would not be surprised if Ari Brown receives such treatment for writing her article and for stating her beliefs about vaccines.

In the New McCarthyism, who is John Proctor? And who is Abigail?

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