sciencemag.org SCIENCEThe result, Vaccines are not an Opinion:
Vaccinations Explained to Those Who Really
Don’t Want to Understand, was a novelty in
a country where scientists rarely communi-
cate in colloquial language. In it, Burioni ex-
plains how vaccines work, traces the history
of vaccination and of vaccine denialism,
and dismantles the denialists’ arguments.
He brings up tragic case histories of people
who died young for want of a vaccine and
skewers prominent vaccine opponents,
such as Jenny McCarthy, who declared on
Oprah that she learned her biology “from
the university of Google.” He hammers on
the theme that you can’t substitute opinion
for facts. The book’s popularity made him a
fixture on radio and TV. “The speed of light
can’t be decided by a show of hands,” he’d
say in talk show appearances.
In his later bestsellers, Burioni widened
his case against pseudoscience in Italy. “We
are a country forever wobbling between sci-
ence and superstition,” he says. He railed
against judges who ruled that unproven
treatments such as Stamina therapy had to
be given to patients who requested them,
often in publicly funded hospitals. He also
criticized the Italian public health system
for reimbursing patients for homeopathy—
pseudoscientific medical treatments that
use an extremely dilute concentration of a
substance that causes symptoms similar to
those of the disease.
Burioni says he wants to promote a respect
for expertise. “I know something about vac-
cines, viruses, and bacteria because I have
been studying them for a lifetime,” he writes
in Conspiracy of Dunces: Why Science Can’t
be Democratic, his second book. “But I have
no idea how to bake a cake or wire a lamp, so
I go to a bakery or call an electrician.”
Trouble begins, he says, when electri-
cians, bakers, and other nonscientists feel
qualified to weigh in on vaccination. The
internet abets the problem, he says: Un-
filtered by editors, it levels the playing field
between experts and “dunces.” A mass me-
dia committed to presenting both sides of
every issue makes things worse. “I can’t sup-
port a world in which lies are given the same
dignity as the truth,” he heatedly remarked
on an interview show. “Enough already!
Enough!” The audience burst into applause.
Burioni’s books, postings, and media
presence have made him a celebrity sci-
entist in Italy akin to, say, Neil deGrasse
Tyson in the United States. Hardly a week
goes by without him appearing on TV
or in a glamour shot in a newspaper or
magazine. At a recent conference in Milan
about future technologies, the audience—
including many influential business leaders—
swarmed him after his talk, asking for advice
and autographs. PHOTOS: (TOP TO BOTTOM) AUGUSTO CASASOLI/A3/CONTRASTO/REDUX; STEFANO MONTESI/CORBIS VIA GETTY IMAGESA 2017 law requiring childhood vaccinations triggered protests and threats in Italy. In the Senate, Roberto
Burioni’s allies displayed a doctored photo that circulated online, showing his face grafted onto an image of
Aldo Moro, an Italian prime minister murdered in 1978. In Rome, opponents of the law flooded the streets.
18 3 JANUARY 2020 • VOL 367 ISSUE 6473
Published by AAAS