The New York Times International - 27.08.2019

10 | TUESDAY, AUGUST 27, 2019 THE NEW YORK TIMES INTERNATIONAL EDITION

opinion

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Last week, just ahead of back-to-school

season, New York State health officials

issued emergency regulations limiting

medical exemptions from vaccination

requirements for kids attending schools

or day care centers.

What do celebrities think about this

development? Hopefully, the public

won’t find out — because it doesn’t

matter. But unfortunately, when it

comes to opinions about vaccination, we

in the media typically make two big

mistakes. We treat celebrities’ opposi-

tion to or fears about vaccines as news.

And in the rare cases in which their

beliefs do deserve coverage because

they could potentially affect public

health, we too often amplify unfounded

or misleading talking points without

sufficiently correcting the misinforma-

tion.

We have to do better. There’s been an

alarming resurgence of measles cases

— in 2019 this country has experienced

the highest number of measles diag-

noses in a single year since 1992, accord-

ing to the Centers for Disease Control.

Measles and other vaccine-preventable

diseases are on the rise across the

world, thanks to the growing trend of

“vaccine hesitancy,” which the World

Health Organization listed as one of the

top 10 threats to global health in 2019.

In June, Jezebel reported that the

actor Jessica Biel was lobbying Califor-

nia lawmakers alongside the vaccine

opponent Robert F. Kennedy Jr. They

were trying to persuade legislators to

vote against a bill that aims to reduce

the number of people choosing not to

vaccinate their kids for reasons that

aren’t medically necessary.

This was more than just an actor

sharing her opinion. Ms. Biel was using

her platform to try to influence vaccine-

related legislation. That made her views

— like those of the Democratic presiden-

tial candidate Marianne Williamson,

who has made numerous unfounded

claims about vaccines — a matter of

public health, and Jezebel was right to

give her effort attention.

But some of the subsequent media

coverage was more problematic. Rolling

Stone ran “A Guide to 17 Anti-Vaccina-

tion Celebs” and Yahoo went with “Jes-

sica Biel isn’t the only A-lister with

opinions on vaccinations: Celebrity

parents who don’t vaccinate their chil-

dren.”

Some similar examples from the past

few years: “Kristin Cavallari Is an

Anti-Vaxxer Because She Has ‘Read Too

Many Books,’ ” Time wrote in 2014 about

Ms. Cavallari, a reality television star (a

particularly bad framing because it

implies that she is

somehow more

educated on this

topic than most).

“Pregnant Kat von

D stirs controversy

after saying she’ll

raise a ‘vegan child,

without vaccina-

tion,’” USA Today

reported last year about Ms. von D, a

makeup artist. Much of this coverage

prominently parroted dangerous views

and did more harm than good.

It’s not newsworthy on its face when a

celebrity believes or says something

incorrect about health. Context matters.

As an editor, keeping in mind that stud-

ies have shown that celebrities can

influence peoples’ beliefs about health,

including vaccines, I encourage report-

ers and writers to avoid asking celebri-

ties their opinions about vaccines if they

are not already known. At Self, our

policy when interviewing anyone —

whether it’s a doctor with multiple

degrees, or a celebrity — is to fact-check

everything she says (about vaccines or

anything else). And if she says some-

thing factually incorrect, we often

choose not to include it, even in the

context of debunking the misinforma-

tion. If we do decide to cover misinfor-

mation, it’s after a lot of internal discus-

sion about whether it’s worth the risk.

You can argue that whenever celebri-

ties say anything about vaccines in a

public forum — especially on their social

media accounts, where they often speak

to millions of people — it becomes news

because they’re influencing public

opinion. When media organizations

reach that conclusion and feel they must

cover a celebrity comment about vac-

cines, they should work to minimize

damage through more thoughtful cover-

age.

This is tricky because of the evidence

that even myth-busting vaccine misin-

formation runs the risk of making read-

ers more likely to believe the misinfor-

mation and also less inclined to vacci-

nate. That may be because people are

more likely to believe statements that

they’ve heard repeatedly — so the more

exposure they have to misinformation,

the more likely they are to believe it to

be true, even if they have been explicitly

told that it’s false.

One place to start: Treat the topic

with the seriousness it deserves. Media

organizations should devote seasoned

health reporters to the case, rather than

covering it as celebrity gossip. And then

from there, instead of focusing entirely

on the news of a celebrity saying some-

thing unfounded (and repeating that

unfounded claim in the headline or news

crawl), a more informative, less harmful

approach would be to cover that celebri-

ty’s perspective as one data point in a

broader article, perhaps about the trend

of vaccine hesitancy or what’s behind

the law that this celebrity is opposing.

Think of it as misinformation harm

reduction.

Even the views of people who are

“vaccine hesitant” — not completely

anti-vaccine but skeptical about

whether vaccines are safe enough or

worth it — are frequently rooted in

unsupported anti-vaccine talking

points. The media, in misunderstanding

this dynamic, often gives an uncritical

platform to those ideas, potentially

fueling greater vaccine hesitancy

among the public in the process.

For example, after she received

criticism for her lobbying efforts, Ms.

Biel clarified her stance on Instagram,

writing, “I am not against vaccinations.”

Her reason for opposing the bill: “My

dearest friends have a child with a

medical condition that warrants an

exemption from vaccinations, and

should this bill pass, it would greatly

affect their family’s ability to care for

their child in this state.”

“Entertainment Tonight” ran a seg-

ment covering Ms. Biel’s response to the

backlash. And why not? Her argument

sounds reasonable enough: In a limited

set of cases, there are legitimate medi-

cal reasons not to vaccinate.

But the problem here is that the bill is

significantly more complicated than Ms.

Biel’s framing of it, and deserved a

deeper dive than “Entertainment To-

night” gave it. The back story is that

public health experts and lawmakers

are worried that doctors are giving kids

medical exemptions when they aren’t

warranted, which threatens (and even

eliminates) herd immunity in some

communities.

The goal of the California bill is to cut

back on these unnecessary medical

exemptions by standardizing the ex-

emption request process rather than

leaving the call up to individual doctors.

People with legitimate medical reasons

to avoid vaccinating would still be al-

lowed to opt out.

See? Complicated. Probably far too

complicated to cover all that ground in a

minute-long entertainment news seg-

ment. The media has a duty to get this

right, and not cause further confusion or

skepticism. It is a matter of public

health.

Carolyn Kylstra

CAROLYN KYLSTRAis editor in chief of Self

Magazine.

Celebrities and ‘vaccine hesitancy’

Administering a measles vaccination at Miami Children’s Hospital. There have been more measles cases this year than in any single year since 1992.

JOE RAEDLE/GETTY IMAGES

Very rarely do

the misguided

beliefs of

famous people

deserve

headlines.

SEDONA, ARIZ. As a government official

in World War II, Hamilton Warren was

outraged to learn that a black colleague

made half as much as his white peers.

So, after the war, the wealthy Harvard

graduate and his wife Barbara pitched

up a tent in a remote corner of northern

Arizona. Working together with the

Hopi people, they built a school open to

every race, creed, orientation, and

nationality, and dedicated to values of

environmental stewardship, physical

labor and cultural understanding.

Verde Valley School was and remains

among the most progressive boarding

schools anywhere. It is surely the most

American. Instead of aping the Etonian

traditions of the Old World, it created

something different for the New. It

believed in an identity that was forged,

not just inherited; in the possibility of

transcending differences, not re-

inforcing them; in making a break from

the past, not remaining fixated by it.

So it is with so much in the United

States, which makes it so different from

nearly everywhere else. When Hernán

Cortés and his men landed on the coast

of Mexico, in 1519, they encountered a

world of utter barbarity: incessant

warfare, endemic slavery, and human

sacrifice on an immense scale. They, in

turn, inflicted their own barbarities:

massacres, epidemics, forced labor and

religious intolerance. Whether one

barbarity was better than the other is

not a particularly interesting debate.

The conquest of Mexico was another

chapter of history as it usually is, a

contest for power with little hope for

progress.

The Conquistadors and their succes-

sors also imported millions of African

slaves. Seen in the overall context of the

Western Hemisphere — or, for that

matter, most of the pre-modern world —

the arrival of more than 20 slaves in

Virginia a century later was abomina-

ble, but not unique.

Yet something else came to America:

the idea of liberty. Unlike the taste for

plunder, which is nearly universal, the

idea of liberty isn’t. It emerges from a

distinctive intellectual tradition that,

within a limited sphere, emphasized the

claims of individual conscience, a disin-

termediated relationship with God, and

a skeptical view of state power.

It also emerged from a unique histori-

cal circumstance. Cortés was a soldier

acting in the name of the Spanish crown

and the Catholic Church. Among those

who came to North America, many were

religious dissenters and political refu-

gees, starting with the Huguenots in

Canada and the Mayflower Pilgrims.

They could be tyrants and bigots, vio-

lent and superstitious. But they also saw

themselves, if sometimes self-servingly,

as nonconformists and victims of politi-

cal persecution.

It was this self-conception that en-

couraged successive generations of

religious dissenters, movement start-

ers, and freethinkers to go their own

way. As importantly, it also made it

untenable, over the long haul, for those

in positions of authority to oppose them.

This is the thought that I’d like to con-

tribute to The Times’s

1619 Project.

Elsewhere in the

world — Spain in the

17th century; China

today — the argu-

ment against liberty

has mainly been an

argument for tradi-

tion, hierarchy and order. In America,

the argument against liberty has been

the argument of hypocrites. To deny

freedom to others inevitably means

subverting the principle through which

one can claim freedom for oneself.

That’s why every significant libera-

tion movement in the U.S., from aboli-

tion to suffrage to civil rights to mar-

riage equality, has made its case by

appealing to foundational principles,

not rejecting them.

“The existence of slavery in this

country brands your republicanism as a

sham,” Frederick Douglass reproached

a Rochester audience on July 5, 1852.

But he also said that “interpreted as it

ought to be interpreted, the Constitution

is a glorious liberty document.” Martin

Luther King Jr., made essentially the

same case 111 years later from the steps

of the Lincoln Memorial.

This has always been one of the aston-

ishments of America: The origin story

of the ruling class does more to under-

mine than bolster its claims to power.

Take that origin story away — the one

that traces a line from Mayflower Com-

pact to the Declaration of Independence

to the Battle of Gettysburg to the Free-

dom Riders — and you lose this.

Past generations of oppressed Ameri-

cans have bested their oppressors by

appealing to their conscience. But if a

new origin story were to tell us that our

ideals have always been a sham (as

opposed to being honored too much in

the breach), and that the whole story of

America is one of unremitting oppres-

sion (as opposed to the far-too-gradual

relief of oppression), then we would lose

the mechanism of self-reproach by

which past progress was made.

At that point, the only thing for people

with power to do would be to hold on to

it. Why should anyone bother to meas-

ure his behavior according to standards

nobody expects him to hold?

This is a beautiful country, especially

amid red rocks under vast skies. But as

people like Hamilton Warren knew, the

real beauty of America has less to do

with the outer vistas than the inner ones

— the ever-renewing possibility of being

“more perfect” according to ideals that

remain a starting point and destination.

America the beautiful

The country’s

progress

springs from

a process of

self-reproach.

Bret Stephens

Jay Inslee’s single-issue campaign for the Democratic

presidential nomination was a quixotic effort from the

get-go, noble but doomed, one of the longest shots in

this electoral season. And on Wednesday, with his

hopes of appearing in the next round of debates fast

disappearing because of his poor standing in the polls,

he accepted reality and graciously dropped out of the

race.

Yet Mr. Inslee has much to be proud of. In retrospect,

his efforts were less about actually winning than they

were about pounding home the importance of one is-

sue, global warming. The changing climate consumes

him but has had little staying power with the public

and the politicians in Washington, and Mr. Inslee dedi-

cated his campaign to moving it closer to the center of

the political conversation, at least among Democrats.

In this he has succeeded. One by one, the other can-

didates, most recently Bernie Sanders, have unveiled

climate plans large and small, while the issue of cli-

mate change itself has steadily risen in prominence

among Democratic voters. A survey from Yale and

George Mason University in April found that while

climate change ranked 17th on a list of 29 important

issues among all registered voters, it ranked third

among the liberal Democrats to whom many of the

candidates have aimed their appeals and eighth among

moderate and conservative Democrats.

The affable Mr. Inslee brought more than passion to

the table. He also brought a wealth of experience in

dealing with the issue on the state level as the gover-

nor of Washington, as well as a staggering appetite for

detail. In the course of his campaign, he released six

formidably researched position papers, more than 220

pages altogether, amounting to a blueprint for decar-

bonizing the American economy by midcentury, a goal

that the United Nation’s Intergovernmental Panel on

Climate Change has urged on the world as a whole to

avert the worst consequences of climate change.

The first paper addressed the three sectors of the

economy — power generation, transportation and

buildings — that together are responsible for nearly 70

percent of carbon emissions in the United States, and

what must be done to clean them up. In the case of

transportation, for instance, Mr. Inslee would mandate

all-electric cars by the 2030 model year. The last paper,

released only hours before his withdrawal from the

race, dealt with agriculture and how farmers can im-

prove land-use practices to reduce emissions from the

soil. In between were detailed disquisitions on where

he would invest $9 trillion over 10 years to retrofit older

buildings, modernize the grid and build green infra-

structure; how and when he would phase out fossil fuel

production in America (beginning with a swift karate

chop to hydraulic fracturing and all fossil fuel subsi-

dies); how he would protect poorer communities and

workers who lose their jobs in the decarbonizing

process; how he would engage with the rest of the

world to bring down global emissions.

If this sounds a bit like last winter’s Green New Deal,

it is, but with two very big differences: The Green New

Deal was a 14-page congressional resolution full of lofty

goals. Mr. Inslee puts substantial policy meat on an

aspirational bare-bones outline. Second, unlike the

Green New Deal, Mr. Inslee offers a compelling inter-

national component that basically reimagines Ameri-

can foreign policy by putting climate change at its very

center, and by using all the tools of foreign policy —

trade, aid, robust diplomacy — to reward countries that

adopt ambitious climate strategies and punish those

that don’t.

As an exercise, try to imagine a President Inslee

dealing with Brazil’s leadership, which is letting the

Amazon burn out of control, or the Australians, who

plan to enrich themselves by selling vast quantities of

dirty coal to India. Of course, he would quickly reaffirm

America’s commitment to the Paris agreement on cli-

mate change, which President Trump rejects, so that

America could recapture the leadership role it had

under President Barack Obama. But he would also

demand much of others.

What’s Mr. Inslee to do now? Well, he plans to com-

pete for the office he already holds and will run for a

third term as governor of Washington in 2020. Should

he win, he will remain, along with New York’s Andrew

Cuomo and California’s Gavin Newsom, as one of the

three most important leaders of the effort by America’s

states and cities to reduce their emissions and compen-

sate for Mr. Trump’s failure at the federal level. But for

the moment, he can take satisfaction in what he has left

behind: an actual Green New Deal, a guide that’s just

waiting for whoever wins the White House (assuming

it is not Mr. Trump) to read, to digest and to steal from.

Democrats

in the U.S.

say they care

about global

warming.

Why couldn’t

the former

presidential

candidate get

more traction

on it?

JAY INSLEE’S LONELY CLIMATE CAMPAIGN