A Journalist With A Nose For Lies: Vaccines & Random House
I first learned how dogged Mnookin could be when he wrote his Vanity Fair article about The Da Vinci Code’s plagiarism of my books. He managed to see through Random House’s high-priced flackery and hacked through all the legal chicanery to produce his piece.
And now, Mnookin has written The Panic Virus has prompted worldwide headlines by exposing the elaborate fraud of a vaccine/autism link that never existed.
The original piece of junk science — a paper partly financed by law firms seeking to sue pharmaceutical companies — has now been repudiated by the medical journal that originally published it.
Like The Da Vinci Code plagiarism issue, the vaccine story was out there for any journalist to take a close hard look at it. But both of them are complicated and require keen intelligence, determination and a damn good bullshit detector to plow through the masses of spin and plausible falsehoods churned up by those who benefit from the falsehoods.
Mnookin smelled the rat in both stories and ferreted out the truth.
The Panic Virus exposes a far, far, far more important issue than my personal battle with Random House. Vaccine fraud has deluded so many gullible people into withholding vaccines from their children that measles, whooping cough and other preventable diseases are again on the rise.
The vaccine/autism fraud can kill. At the very least, the decreased levels of vaccinated children has increased illness and suffering — and preventable medical bills.
The truth is out there. It just takes a determined master of journalism to find it.
