The Times Square Jumbotron ad keeps trucking, and with it frustration from the medical and public health community. The American Academy of Pediatrics sent a letter to CBS Outdoors, asking them to pull the ad, to no avail. Rahul Parikh thinks it's time to do more:
We in medicine need more than letters and passive education for parents on a website. What we really need are some Mad Men of our own. If you want guidance, look at what the folks at the the American Legacy Foundation have done with their anti-smoking campaign, The Truth. Who can forget the TV commercial where a truck pulls up to the headquarters of a tobacco company and teenagers jump out, carrying body bags? We need powerful and unforgettable messages that remind us what's at stake here.
Have you heard the horrifying whoop of pertussis? Seen how meningitis kills and maims kids, or the painful, paralyzing rigor of every muscle in the body of a child with tetanus? Dear AAP, collect those sights, sounds and the true stories of kids injured by vaccine-preventable diseases and the parents who cried for them when they got sick. Then have the audacity to buy space on a jumbotron, right next to NVIC's, or in a newspaper the day after Generation Rescue takes out another of its bogus ads. Tell the stories of those parents and children -- if they're still alive today -- and make it clear that choosing vaccines means choosing health for kids, families and communities.
I agree with what Parikh is saying, but it's still sometimes tough to get over my gut reaction to that kind of emotional advertising. He's right that it can be effective where the simple scientific facts don't work, but like Chris Mooney notes, it also has to be "presented in a context that doesn't trigger a defensive, emotional reaction." For those currently eschewing vaccines for their children, that could be tricky to do, but I wonder how many are true "fence-sitters" and not emotionally committed to an anti-vaccine stance? Those are the ones we really need to work with.
[Edited to add: Steven Novella has a great post up today that reminds us why this is such an important fight: Consequences].
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I think more than you'd think sre "fence-sitters". Yes, of course there are the die-hard altie-medicine zealots that are not going to trust anything a scientist or physician says, but there are a lot of people out there who really think there is a serious scientific debate on the vaccine issue and they need to be informed that there isn't, and that misleadingly-named organizations like the "National Vaccine Information Center" are not actual scientific centers like the CDC.