Defiance is not enough
It’s good to question conventional wisdom, except when it isn’t. Conventional wisdom holds that a bridge designed by engineers and built by reputable builders is safer to drive across than one designed by shamans and built by hairdressers. Questioning that conventional wisdom is not really all that productive, and if anyone listens to the questioning, it’s downright lethal.
So with Christine Maggiore.
Until the end, Christine Maggiore remained defiant.On national television and in a blistering book, she denounced research showing that HIV causes AIDS. She refused to take medications to treat her own virus. She gave birth to two children and breast fed them, denying any risk to their health. And when her 3-year-old child, Eliza Jane, died of what the coroner determined to be AIDS-related pneumonia, she protested the findings and sued the county.
That’s the risky kind of questioning conventional wisdom – and it risks other people as well as oneself. That’s why Prince Charles makes me angry when he indulges his passion for denouncing non-alternative medicine, and it’s why Juliet Stevenson made me angry when she used her celebrity to denounce the conventional wisdom about the MMR vaccine and autism, and it’s why Christine Maggiore makes me angry even though she’s now dead. It makes me angry that she breast-fed her children and it makes me angry that she went on television to denounce research showing that HIV causes AIDS. People shouldn’t do that. People shouldn’t take on life and death medical issues when they have no training or expertise in the subject. People shouldn’t trust their own judgment that completely.
For years, the South African government joined with Maggiore in denying that HIV is responsible for AIDS and resisting antiretroviral treatment. According to a new analysis by a group of Harvard public health researchers, 330,000 people died as a consequence of the government’s denial and 35,000 babies were born with the disease.
It’s not a subject for hobbyists or cranks or princes or actors. Children must never play with matches.
Can somebody please explain to me how a woman who clearly loses a child she on some level knowingly infected/killed with the AIDS virus not have experienced at least a moment’s pause regarding her take on the transmission of the disease? What did she consider the death – an ironic coincidence?
Can somebody please explain to me how a woman who clearly loses a child she on some level knowingly infected/killed with the AIDS virus not have experienced at least a moment’s pause regarding her take on the transmission of the disease? What did she consider the death – an ironic coincidence?
All these are terrible, but cut them some slack – even highly-educated western gays caused many deaths of haemophiliacs when they regarded giving blood as a civil right and refused to stop donating voluntarily, before HIV was diagnosed but after AIDS was recognised.
It isn’t just incompetence that drives many awful consequences of mistaken thinking. It can be political investment, or negtive self-image, or any combination of cognitive traps. If it isn’t a deliberate attempt to kill, there are varying degrees of culpability.
ChrisPer, are you so devoted to naysaying that you cannot even see the differences between situations when you write those differences down yourself?
In the early days of the AIDS epidemic before the viral cause of AIDS was even recognized…
Anything at all that you write after such a clause has NOTHING AT ALL to do with the self-indulgent, self-important, evidence-rejecting posturing of a Christine Maggiore or Peter Duesberg or Thabo Mbeki, which followed and persisted after years of overwhelming and utterly convincing evidence of the nature and cause of AIDS, HIV. Willful ignorance doesn’t have to be deliberate to be morally blameworthy, and neither OB nor anyone she linked to (nor anyone I’ve ever read) has said anything about a deliberate attempt to kill in this context. Likewise, no one has claimed that there are no degrees whatsoever in culpability. So your objection amounts to what, exactly?
No, Christine Maggiore did not deliberately kill her own child. Nevertheless, she did kill her own child through her own massively unjustified epistemological irresponsibility. And most of the people who are leaping to her defense are people who don’t want to admit that truth. I don’t think you are trying to deny that she had any responsibility, so what the fuck is your point? What slack, exactly, should we cut people who choose their own willful ignorance over the health and welfare of their own children?
I’ll cut Maggiore exactly this much slack: When she chose to ignore empirically irrefutable medical advice and breast-feed her children, she was only putting her own children at risk. In that, she is better than the anti-vaccination loonies, who risk the health of their own and everyone else’s children based on their own self-important ignorance.
I particularly like the bridge example – I don’t think I’ve seen a more succinct explanation of the utter folly of these people. I’m sure if one googled for long enough one could probably find a badly-written website urging us to reject “allopathic bridge-building” in favour of “alternative perspectives” drawing on the natural, organic build-building methods of the ancients – and lambasting anyone who drives over “mainstream” bridges for submitting to the “dominant paradigm”…
Why isn’t there a massive international outcry over this, yet anytime some crank denounces mobile phone radiation or the MMR vaccine there are screaming headlines and televised debates? I’m angry too. Angry and frustrated at the lethal, and all too commonplace, combination of arrogance and stupidity that seems to characterise so much of human affairs.
Btw, what’s South Africa’s policy now? Did Mbeki andmit his mistake?
“she was only putting her own children at risk. In that, she is better than the anti-vaccination loonies, who risk the health of their own and everyone else’s children based on their own self-important ignorance.”
Ah but G she was also an active campaigner, so in fact she was no better than the anti-vac loonies.
Did you see that picture of her on the cover of (choke) ‘Mothering’ magazine? Pregnant, with a ‘No AZT’ sign on her bump? What a horrible sight.
Indeed – there are many kinds of denialism. Seth Kalichman, the guy who wrote the post I linked to, is going to write an article about that for B&W. Something to look forward to!
I think this illustrates the importance of not falling in love with your self-dramatized role in a story, to the point where you neglect the facts.
Maggiore, it seems, was in love with the role of Rebel Against Conventional Oppressive Establishment. She let her love of that role get in the way of perceiving facts.
That certainly seems to have been a huge part of it. She was apparently genuinely convinced by whatever Peter Duesberg told her…but the Rebel Role may well have shored up her commitment in some terrible way.
Frankly I always kind of cringe at people who are too obviously in love with some self-dramatized role in a story…Get me I’m so hip, or tragic, or nonconformist, or wild and crazy. Bleah. Get over yourself.
OB: You are right, of course. As a campaigner, Maggiore was just as culpable as any anti-vaccine nutter. I was focusing solely on her culpability just as a mother: An HIV positive mother who nurses her children without taking any antiretroviral medication harms her own children – and so the tragic death of Maggiore’s daughter is on her head. But parents who choose not to vaccinate their children don’t risk the just the health of their own children, but the health of other children as well – q.v. the rising measles numbers in the UK after Andrew Wakefield’s egregious acts of proven scientific fraud. But everyone around here knows that, methinks.
And yes, I think the “rebel without a clue” factor Jenavir cites must play a very large role in the psychology of denialism in all its many ugly forms. It seems very closely allied with – indeed, overlaps with – the self-congratulatory “I’m so smart I can see truths other people are too foolish to see/too cowardly to face” exhibited by conspiracy theorists. I hate to use any terminology tainted by psychoanalysis, but there is clearly a powerful narcissistic element to the crank/denialist personality.
I suspect OB knows about them, but for the rest of y’all: The brothers Hoofnagle (and their semi-recently added co-blogger PalMD, formerly of White Coat Underground) do a great job analyzing and explaining the common psychology, sociology, and politics of denialism at http://scienceblogs.com/denialism. Their “About Denialism” page (see their top navigation banner) is terrific primer.
G, oh right, now I get it.
There are new stats just out on measles in the UK – lots more new cases. Take a bow, Juliet Stevenson.