Seth Mnookin | |
---|---|
Born | Newton, Massachusetts, U.S. |
Education | Harvard University |
Occupations |
|
Notable work | Hard News (2004) |
Website | sethmnookin.com |
Seth Mnookin is an American non-fiction author and journalist.
As of 2017, he is a Professor of Comparative Media Studies/Writing at MIT and the Director of Institute's Graduate Program in Science Writing. [1] He is also the media reporter for Undark Magazine 's podcast and contributing editor at Vanity Fair . [2]
Mnookin grew up in a Jewish household in Newton, Massachusetts, and is a graduate of Newton North High School. He graduated from Harvard University with a degree in history and science in 1994 and was named a Joan Shorenstein Fellow at Harvard Kennedy School in 2004. [3]
Mnookin is the author of three non-fiction books.
His first book, Hard News: The Scandals at the New York Times and Their Meaning for American Media (Random House, 2004) grew out of reporting he did as a senior writer at Newsweek in 2002 and 2003. It uses the Jayson Blair plagiarism and fabrication scandal to conduct a broader examination of the troubles during the Howell Raines administration at the New York Times . It was named a Washington Post "Best Of" book for 2004 and was listed as one of the London Independent 's list of the Top 50 books ever written on the media. It received overwhelmingly positive reviews from New York magazine ("richly dramatic, hugely entertaining"), [4] Entertainment Weekly ("vigorous, purposeful prose and a killer knack for building suspense"), the Los Angeles Times ("two terrific books in one: a riveting thriller...and a Shakespearean tragedy"), and the Washington Post ("hard to put down...reads like a thriller" [5] ), among other places, and the book prompted Hunter S. Thompson to say Mnookin was "one of the best and brightest journalists of this ominous, post-American century." [6] A negative review was published by the New York Times itself, which called the book "tedious" and said it "elevates trivial details to novelistic significance." [7]
In the fall of 2004, Vanity Fair assigned Mnookin a story on the Boston Red Sox. [8] He began covering the team right before they won the 2004 World Series, and ended up spending more than a year living with the team and was given a key to Fenway Park [9] His book, "Feeding the Monster: How Money, Smarts and Nerve Took a Team to the Top" (Simon & Schuster), chronicled the history of the team from 2001 to 2006, the first half-decade of the John W. Henry-Tom Werner ownership, and includes details about Theo Epstein's abbreviated departure from the team in late 2005. It was published in the summer of 2006, and it entered the New York Times Hardcover Bestseller List for Nonfiction at number 8. [10] After Epstein left the Red Sox for the Chicago Cubs, he made an apparent reference to the book when he talked about the difficulty of dealing with "the monster" of fan and ownership expectations for a championship team every year. [11]
In 2011, Simon & Schuster published Mnookin's The Panic Virus: The True Story of the Vaccine-Autism Controversy. The book examines the history of the controversy over vaccines and autism, going back to a retracted 1998 study by Andrew Wakefield through to the current day. It is heavily critical of several public figures, including Jenny McCarthy, Oprah Winfrey, and Robert F. Kennedy, Jr.
In The Panic Virus, Mnookin tells the story of several parents who, after choosing to either skip or delay their children's vaccine schedule, saw their children contract easily avoidable diseases such as Haemophilus influenzae and Pertussis. He relays the accounts of parents who objected to or delay their children's vaccine schedules for various reasons such as ambivalence, religious objections, or even misguided information from external sources. He also highlights the Cedillo v. Secretary of Health and Human Services , beginning on June 11, 2007, in which the Cedillo family's lawsuit made the claim that Thiomersal, a compound found in Hepatitis B, DPT, and Hib vaccines, weakened their daughter's immune system such that the live measles virus found within the MMR vaccine overwhelmed her system and thereby caused Autism. After a lengthy process, the courts ruled against the Cedillo family, citing questionable witnesses and a large quantity of circumstantial evidence. Mnookin additionally focuses on the now-discredited Andrew Wakefield and his work as a main player in the vaccines-cause-autism argument. Wakefield is repeatedly mentioned, as is celebrity advocate against vaccination Jenny McCarthy, often in the context of anecdotes by parents outraged by the often one-sided exposure given to these figures in the media. [12]
The Panic Virus was named one of the Wall Street Journal 's Top Five Health and Medicine books of the year. [13] The New York Times called it a "tour de force" and wrote that "[p]arents who want to play it safe, but are not altogether sure how, should turn with relief to this reasoned, logical and comprehensive analysis of the facts." [14] Writing for the Wall Street Journal, Michael Shermer said it "should be required reading at every medical school in the world. ... a lesson on how fear hijacks reason and emotion trumps logic. — A brilliant piece of reportage and science writing." [15] The Panic Virus was a finalist for the Los Angeles Times book prize in the "Current Interest" category. [16] It won the New England Chapter of the American Medical Writers Association's Will Solimene Award for Excellence and the National Association of Science Writers 2012 "Science in Society" Award [3] In 2011 Mnookin also brought out an Australian edition with a new preface which directly takes on the situation in Australia, documenting the behavior of antivaxxer Meryl Dorey and relaying the story of the McCafferys, who lost their four-week-old daughter Dana due to pertussis and low vaccination rates. [17]
Mnookin began his career in the mid '90s as a rock critic at a webzine called Addicted to Noise . His interviews with Morphine's Mark Sandman helped cement Sandman's reputation as being a contentious interview subject, [18] [19] and he was featured in the 2012 documentary "Cure for Pain: The Mark Sandman Story." [20] He later worked at the Palm Beach Post , the Forward , and Brill's Content . Mnookin has written for many other newspapers and magazines, including GQ , [21] New York magazine, [22] Wired , [23] the New Yorker , [24] the Washington Post, [25] the New York Times [26] and the Boston Globe . [27]
On October 7, 2012, Mnookin wrote an article of childhood vaccination entitled "Why So Many Parents Are Delaying or Skipping Vaccines" for the online portion of Parade magazine describing the reasoning of parents who either delay or skip their children's recommended vaccinations and the danger such logic may pose. [28]
His articles for Vanity Fair include features on Bloomberg News and the New York Times ' Iraq bureau, investigations into Judith Miller scandal at the New York Times and allegations that Dan Brown borrowed heavily from other books in The Da Vinci Code , [29] and a profile of Stephen Colbert. [30] Mnookin participated in coverage of the search for Tamerlan and Dzhokhar Tsarnaev, suspects in the Boston Marathon bombing, following the brothers from Cambridge, Massachusetts to Watertown, Massachusetts. On July 21, 2014, he published a story in the New Yorker about a family whose child was the first ever case of a rare genetic disease. [31] He also has reviewed books about science and society for the New York Times Book Review.
During the 1990s, Mnookin struggled with overcoming heroin addiction, an experience he recounted in an article at Salon.com. [32] His mother, Wendy Mnookin, has also written about his heroin addiction and subsequent recovery. [33] He currently lives outside of Boston, Massachusetts with his wife, son, daughter, and dog. [3]
Vaccination is the administration of a vaccine to help the immune system develop immunity from a disease. Vaccines contain a microorganism or virus in a weakened, live or killed state, or proteins or toxins from the organism. In stimulating the body's adaptive immunity, they help prevent sickness from an infectious disease. When a sufficiently large percentage of a population has been vaccinated, herd immunity results. Herd immunity protects those who may be immunocompromised and cannot get a vaccine because even a weakened version would harm them. The effectiveness of vaccination has been widely studied and verified. Vaccination is the most effective method of preventing infectious diseases; widespread immunity due to vaccination is largely responsible for the worldwide eradication of smallpox and the elimination of diseases such as polio and tetanus from much of the world. However, some diseases, such as measles outbreaks in America, have seen rising cases due to relatively low vaccination rates in the 2010s – attributed, in part, to vaccine hesitancy. According to the World Health Organization, vaccination prevents 3.5–5 million deaths per year.
Robert Francis Kennedy Jr., also known by his initials RFK Jr., is an American politician, environmental lawyer, anti-vaccine activist, and conspiracy theorist. He is the chairman and founder of Children's Health Defense, an anti-vaccine advocacy group that is a leading proponent of COVID-19 vaccine misinformation. He is on the ballot in some states as an independent candidate in the 2024 United States presidential election. A member of the Kennedy family, he is a son of the U.S. attorney general and senator Robert F. Kennedy, and a nephew of the U.S. president John F. Kennedy and senator Ted Kennedy.
Generation Rescue is a nonprofit organization that advocates the scientifically disproven view that autism and related disorders are primarily caused by environmental factors, particularly vaccines. The organization was established in 2005 by Lisa and J.B. Handley. Today, Generation Rescue is known as a platform for Jenny McCarthy's autism related anti-vaccine advocacy.
John Colapinto is a Canadian journalist, author and novelist and a staff writer at The New Yorker. In 2000, he wrote the New York Times bestseller As Nature Made Him: The Boy Who Was Raised as a Girl, which exposed the details of the David Reimer case, a boy who had undergone a sex change in infancy—a medical experiment long heralded as a success, but which was, in fact, a failure.
The Office of Special Masters of the U.S. Court of Federal Claims, popularly known as "vaccine court", administers a no-fault system for litigating vaccine injury claims. These claims against vaccine manufacturers cannot normally be filed in state or federal civil courts, but instead must be heard in the U.S. Court of Federal Claims, sitting without a jury.
Michael Specter is an American journalist who has been a staff writer, focusing on science, technology, and global public health at The New Yorker since September 1998. He has also written for The Washington Post and The New York Times. Since 2021 he has also taught writing and, along with a colleague, a course called “Safeguarding the Future” at MIT. He has previously served as an Adjunct Professor of Bioengineering at Stanford University, and a Visiting Professor of Environmental and Urban Studies at Bard College.
Jennifer Ann McCarthy-Wahlberg is an American actress, model, and television personality. She began her career in 1993 as a nude model for Playboy magazine and was later named their Playmate of the Year. McCarthy then had a television and film acting career, beginning as a co-host on the MTV game show Singled Out (1995–1997) and afterwards starring in the eponymous sitcom Jenny (1997–1998), as well as films including BASEketball (1998), Scream 3 (2000), Dirty Love (2005), John Tucker Must Die (2006), and Santa Baby (2006). In 2013, she hosted her own television talk show The Jenny McCarthy Show, and became a co-host of the ABC talk show The View, appearing on the program until 2014. Since 2019, McCarthy has been a judge on the Fox musical competition show The Masked Singer.
Alexander Shoumatoff is a journalist and author who was Vanity Fair Magazine's senior-most contributing editor from 1986 to 2015, and a staff writer at The New Yorker from 1978 to 1987. He authored 11 books and was a founding contributing editor of Outside Magazine and Condé Nast Traveler. Most of his books are extensions of long-form journalism that has appeared in dozens of American and international magazines and other literary sources and collections.
Claims of a link between the MMR vaccine and autism have been extensively investigated and found to be false. The link was first suggested in the early 1990s and came to public notice largely as a result of the 1998 Lancet MMR autism fraud, characterised as "perhaps the most damaging medical hoax of the last 100 years". The fraudulent research paper, authored by Andrew Wakefield and published in The Lancet, falsely claimed the vaccine was linked to colitis and autism spectrum disorders. The paper was retracted in 2010 but is still cited by anti-vaccine activists.
Jennifer Gilmore is a Swiss-born American novelist.
Marie Harriet Brenner is an American author, investigative journalist and writer-at-large for Vanity Fair. She has also written for New York, The New Yorker and the Boston Herald and has taught at Columbia University's Graduate School of Journalism. Her 1996 Vanity Fair article on tobacco insider Jeffrey Wigand, "The Man Who Knew Too Much", inspired the 1999 movie The Insider, starring Russell Crowe and Al Pacino. Her February 1997 Vanity Fair article "American Tragedy: The Ballad of Richard Jewell" partially inspired the 2019 film Richard Jewell directed by Clint Eastwood.
Sharyl Attkisson is an American journalist and television correspondent. She hosts the Sinclair Broadcast Group TV show Full Measure with Sharyl Attkisson.
Andrew Jeremy Wakefield is a British fraudster, discredited academic, anti-vaccine activist, and former physician.
Alex Norman Berenson is an American writer who was a reporter for The New York Times, and has authored several thriller novels as well a book on corporate financial filings. His 2019 book Tell Your Children: The Truth About Marijuana, Mental Illness and Violence sparked controversy, earning denunciations from many in the scientific and medical communities.
Barry Blitt is a Canadian-born American cartoonist and illustrator, best known for his New Yorker covers and as a regular contributor to the op-ed page of The New York Times. Blitt creates his works in traditional pen and ink, as well as watercolors.
Michelle Cedillo v. Secretary of Health and Human Services, also known as Cedillo, was a court case involving the family of Michelle Cedillo, an autistic girl whose parents sued the United States government because they believed that her autism was caused by her receipt of both the measles-mumps-and-rubella vaccine and thimerosal-containing vaccines. The case was a part of the Omnibus Autism Proceeding, where petitioners were required to present three test cases for each proposed mechanism by which vaccines had, according to them, caused their children's autism; Cedillo was the first such case for the MMR-and-thimerosal hypothesis.
Hurair Vasken Aposhian was a Ph.D. toxicologist and an emeritus professor of molecular and cell biology at the University of Arizona, a post he held beginning in 1975. He is also a former professor of pharmacology at the medical school at said university. He received his bachelor's degree in chemistry, at Brown University, 1948. He received a master's degree and a PhD in physiological chemistry at the University of Rochester, where he published some scientific studies about the synthesis of isoalloxazine ring-containing compounds. He did a postdoctoral with Nobel Laureate Arthur Kornberg in the department of biochemistry at Stanford University School of Medicine. He has done sabbatical scholar-in-residence at MIT and at the University of California at San Diego. He is best known for his pioneering work on Succimer and Unithiol in the treatment of arsenic, mercury, lead and other heavy metals leading to FDA approval of succimer in childhood lead poisoning at levels over 40 ug/dl. Previous posts he had held include at Vanderbilt, Tufts University, and the University of Maryland. His views about mercury in vaccines and in dental amalgams go against the consensus of the medical community and are controversial.
Big Pharma conspiracy theories are conspiracy theories that claim that pharmaceutical companies as a whole, especially big corporations, act in dangerously secretive and sinister ways that harm patients. This includes concealing effective treatments, perhaps even to the point of intentionally causing and/or worsening a wide range of diseases, in the pursuit of higher profits and/or other nefarious goals. The general public supposedly lives in a state of ignorance, according to such claims.
"Deadly Immunity" is an article written by Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. that appeared in the July 14, 2005 issue of Rolling Stone and, simultaneously, on the website Salon. The article is focused on the 2000 Simpsonwood CDC conference and claims that thimerosal-containing vaccines caused autism, as well as the theory that government health agencies have "colluded with Big Pharma to hide the risks of thimerosal from the public." The article had originally been fact-checked and published in print by Rolling Stone, but posted online by Salon. The article was retracted by Salon on January 16, 2011, in response to criticisms of the article as inaccurate.
Extensive investigation into vaccines and autism spectrum disorder has shown that there is no relationship between the two, causal or otherwise, and that vaccine ingredients do not cause autism. The American scientist Peter Hotez researched the growth of the false claim and concluded that its spread originated with Andrew Wakefield's fraudulent 1998 paper, and that no prior paper supports a link.
In this exclusive excerpt from his new book, Feeding the Monster, Seth Mnookin explores the fascinating, curious, and combative relationship between Red Sox CEO Larry Lucchino and the young man he hired to build a championship team, general manager Theo Epstein.