In The Arena How Congress Brought the Measles Back

Few legislators were prepared to stand up for science. Rep. Henry Waxman (D-Calif.), then ranking member on the Government Oversight and Reform Committee and a longtime advocate for children’s health and safe and effective immunizations, was one of a handful of members prepared to state that the evidence did not support a link between the MMR vaccine and autism. As for the others, the antivaccine evidence presented might have been shaky, but the science is complicated. And most members of Congress — on the committee and off — did not feel comfortable opposing the advocates and parents armed with heartbreaking stories of children whose autism seemed to come on just after they received their routine immunizations. A number of members made supportive comments about the committee’s work, and the hearings continued for a number of years.

We can see from the numbers the CDC reported this month that those hearings 14 years ago made a difference. They gave an unscientific theory the veneer of government-sanctioned legitimacy — enough for the Internet and a handful of celebrities to cherry-pick evidence presented to Congress and spread it. A study published in the journal Pediatrics in 2008 found that there were spikes in media coverage of the theory linking vaccines to autism after the two most high-profile hearings in 2000 and 2002. The same study also showed that parents were increasingly getting their information about vaccines from the Internet, where the work of the committee was widely covered.

My message to Congress is simple: What you say matters. Members routinely give impassioned speeches from the dais in hearing rooms that have very few people in the audience. Inflammatory rhetoric and disregard of the facts can seem harmless enough. But they are not. People are watching, they are listening and the outcomes of “oversight” that some legislators took part in years ago can today be seen in the resurgence of a disease that was eliminated in the United States around the time these hearings took place.

Congress has an opportunity now to remedy its previous mistakes. It should use the return of measles to demonstrate its commitment to protect the public from vaccine-preventable diseases and give the CDC adequate resources to fund immunization programs. But Congress also has the bully pulpit. Committees can hold hearings to correct the record. Members should record public-service announcements, reminding parents to get their children and other family members vaccinated. And members should participate in immunization clinics in their districts as a show of support for the local public-health departments who are on the front lines preventing outbreaks.

People are getting sick from a disease that we eliminated from this country 14 years ago. Congress has a moral responsibility to fix a problem it helped create.