Fourth Estate Why Is Katie Couric Promoting Vaccine Skeptics? Why Is Katie Couric Promoting Vaccine Skeptics?

Tara Haelle is a freelance science journalist who also blogs at Red Wine & Apple Sauce. She has a forthcoming book on evidence-based parenting and can be followed at @tarahaelle.

When a former hard-hitting news anchor’s daytime talk show suffers dangerously slipping ratings, what’s the next step? If it’s Katie Couric, the answer is to trade a history of responsible reporting for irresponsible scaremongering. In her segment last week on the HPV vaccine, Couric delivered a blow to both public health and her image. The question now is what Couric – if she’s willing – can do to repair the damage.

It’s a sad turn of events for Couric, once known for drawing attention to public health issues such as colon cancer, which killed her husband. The former CBS anchor, soon headed for Yahoo! News, is now scaring the public away from a vaccine that actually prevents other kinds of cancer.


Last Wednesday’s segment focused on Gardasil, a vaccine licensed by the FDA to prevent human papillomavirus (HPV), the sexually transmitted infection responsible for 26,000 cases of cervical, oral, penile and anal cancers a year. Almost a decade of data, covering 50 million administrated doses, supports the vaccine’s safety and effectiveness. The handful of reports of serious events happening after vaccination (including death and severe disability) have been investigated and determined to be unrelated to the vaccine. But you wouldn’t think as much if you watched the show.

Couric unwittingly captured the core problem with her episode when she prefaced a question to a guest with this gem: “We’ve obviously heard two different sides about the HPV vaccine, and I think for parents watching, it’s probably still rather confusing when you hear these heartbreaking stories that these families have endured.” The irony lay in the fact that Couric herself exacerbated the confusion, abdicating her responsibility as a journalist to present the facts about the vaccine unambiguously to her audience.

On one hand, the episode may be precisely what “ Katie insiders” had in mind when they complained in the Hollywood Reporter back in October that she had “refused to shape shows with softer features to appeal to daytime’s key 25-to-54-year-old female demo, insisting instead on the kind of harder-edged interviews she enjoyed on Today and her stint as anchor of CBS Evening News.” Indeed, the show boasted Oprah-worthy heartbreaking stories of girls who were supposedly killed or seriously injured by the vaccine. And Couric certainly went softer, leaving her guests’ dubious claims unchallenged.

On the other hand, Couric may have irreparably damaged her image along with the harm she visited on public health. Time’s Alexandra Sifferlin asked if Couric would become the next Jenny McCarthy, famous for promoting pseudoscientific anti-vaccine views. Multiple Forbes columnists, Slate writers, Salon and others slammed the episode, cataloguing its inaccuracies and correcting its misinformation.

Yet the show’s response to the backlash–claiming to present “the facts supporting the potential of the vaccine” and a desire “to share multiple viewpoints”—offered no apologies. Now Couric confronts a crossroads of sorts: Does she take the path from respected journalist to sensationalistic tabloid star? Or does she step back and salvage her reputation?

It helps to understand what sins Couric committed in an episode offering an almost textbook example of false balance, the practice of presenting “both sides” of an issue as though they have equally valid evidence when, in fact, one has a clearly established evidence base that the other lacks. (Think of inviting 9/11 Truthers to join a show featuring 9/11 victims’ family members.) Media coverage of vaccines has a particularly sordid history of false balance already, but Couric tipped the scale toward the “side” without evidence, letting emotion outweigh facts.

One guest tearfully told of her daughter’s death, which the mother blamed on the vaccine. Then a mother-daughter couple (founders of an anti-vaccine website) told their harrowing journey supposedly caused by the vaccine. After assigning a “controversy” where none existed with the episode title, “The HPV Controversy,” Couric drummed up more fear with the subtitles: “Was the HPV Vaccine Responsible for One Girl’s Death?” and “Is the HPV Vaccine Safe?” As Michael Hiltzik noted at the LA Times, “Merely to ask the questions is to validate them.”

In the segment, Couric did not demand evidence to show the vaccine actually caused the problems (and no evidence to date substantiates the possibility), and the mothers offered only vague assertions. Not that Couric seemed to mind: It’s been long established that emotional anecdotes trump facts and figures in the human mind—a trick of our amygdalae that can skew the risk-benefit calculus we make about issues such as vaccines.

Yet therein also lies Couric’s opportunity to correct her wrongs: She could schedule a new show featuring the heartbreaking stories of women whose multiple cone biopsies to remove HPV lesions have robbed them of the ability to have children. She could invite some of the 12,000 women who suffer cervical cancer each year, or relatives of the 4,000 women who die each year, to share their pain. Couric could even invite Michael Douglas to discuss his oral cancer, a disease that’s increasing due to HPV. Fewer than 1 percent of HPV-vaccinated individuals have reported serious events—the same percentage reported in placebo groups—so Couric could have invited several of the millions who received the vaccine and experienced no adverse effects, rather than having one mother and daughter in the audience briefly say as much.

The show’s producers, evidently realizing they have a problem on their hands, noted in an unsigned blog post, “We do not want to leave our viewers with an irrational fear of the vaccine.” But the plan for addressing the controversy so far is “to continue the conversation and invite a number of medical experts, journalists and scientists to weigh in here, on our site.” Offering a webpage for comments on the show does little to set the record straight. It only compounds the sense of false equivalence Couric created with the two experts she hosted on the show.

One was Dr. Mallika Marshall, pediatrician who had a few minutes to defend the vaccine after the audience heard from the mothers. The other was Dr. Diane Harper, a problematic source whose appearance calls into question Couric’s motives for the show. Harper is a researcher who worked on HPV vaccine trials both at Merck, which manufactures Gardasil, and at GlaxoSmithKline, which manufactures another HPV vaccine called Cervarix. It was Harper who implied that HPV vaccination might be unnecessary in the United States, arguing that women should get regular check-ups with Pap screenings for precancerous lesions.

Yet even a cursory Google search reveals that Harper is a controversial outlier among the medical community when it comes to her opinions on the vaccine, and her past speaking engagements at anti-vaccine organizations cast doubt on her reliability. She does not represent the scientific community on the vaccine, yet she was given substantial speaking time and presented as Marshall’s foil, despite the fact that Marshall actually represents the consensus of the medical community.

Harper’s comments left viewers with inaccurate impressions about the vaccine, such as the misconception that it lasts only five years despite being recommended for prepubescent girls and boys. Harper cannot be unaware of data showing that Gardasil lasts at least 8 years, with evidence that it likely lasts much longer, especially when she has published data on both vaccines, including Cervarix’s effectiveness beyond five years. Her claim that Pap smear screenings are “100 percent accurate” at catching precancerous lesions early enough to prevent cervical cancer is inaccurate, and she didn’t mention that reliable screenings don’t exist for other cancers caused by HPV. Harper’s contributions were disingenuous at best, lies by omission at worst.

Yet Couric’s job as a journalist is to challenge experts too. Why didn’t Couric dig up this easily accessible evidence to challenge Harper’s comments instead of relying on her to confirm the scaremongering on stage? And why did an experienced, intelligent journalist such as Couric invite onto the show a fringe medical expert in the first place if she wasn’t after creating controversy where there ought not be any?

Couric needs to review her priorities—a journalist’s responsibilities don’t change when her medium does—and plan future shows accordingly. If her goal is truly to explore an important public health issue, her next step should be to schedule an episode with credible experts who accurately inform the public about HPV, and with men and women whose lives have been tragically and irrevocably altered by the virus and its related cancers. HPV is indeed an important public health issue, as are barriers to vaccine uptake such as the misconceptions that Couric propagated. Such a move would be one step toward repairing her image—and might even garner some decent ratings.

Tara Haelle is a freelance science journalist who also blogs at Red Wine & Apple Sauce. She has a forthcoming book on evidence-based parenting and can be followed at @tarahaelle.