Blog Post #2 "Semiotic Contagion"

      I lived in Austin, Texas for 15 years. While there, I taught yoga at a studio in an affluent inner-ring neighborhood of Austin known as Westlake (for football fans, its where Drew Brees and Nick Foles went to high school). One of my favorite students was a guy named Andy. Andy was an understated British gentleman with a great sense of humor and wonderful sense of  both situational and verbal irony. We both shared a passion for English Premiere League football. He made a habit out of coming to class about 1/2 hour early so that we could spend some time talking. I thoroughly enjoyed our conversations.
     One day while we talking I asked him what he had been up to lately and he replied that he'd been working on a documentary film. "What's it about?" I asked. "Well, its about childhood vaccinations and their link to autism" he replied. Alarm bells started going off somewhere in the back of my brain. Just about then, some other students started to arrive so our conversation was cut short.
When I got home, I did a little research online and found out that "Andy" was Dr. Andrew Wakefield, a highly controversial figure at the forefront of the anti-vaccination campaign. In fact, to this day when you Google Andy's name the first thing that appears is, "Disgraced former surgeon and research falsifier."
      Andy held an exclusive premiere of his film "Vaxxed: From Cover-Up to Catastrophe" in 2016 at  a theater very close to the yoga studio. He extended me a personal invitation but by that time I was starting to feel uncomfortable and was filled with mixed emotions. On one hand, Andy was a friend that I admired and really, really liked a lot. I found him to be generous, humorous, kind and incredibly intelligent. However, journalists like Brian Deer were making him out to be both a monster and huckster and the famous skeptics organization The James Randi Educational Foundation awarded Andy the Pigasus Award for the "refusal to face reality." Furthermore, I'd read Andy's book Callous Disregard: Autism and Vaccines and found most of its claims, in my opinion to be dubious at best.
      Since our yoga studio was in an affluent part of Austin we had quite a few students that were physicians and/or worked for Seton Hospital, Dell Children's Hospital and MD Anderson. What was amazing (and quite ironic given that we are talking about a yoga studio) was the rift that formed between the established medical community and Andy's supporters; some of them yoga teachers, many of them prone to favor alternative, non-western medical beliefs and practices. The semiotic contagion spread like a particularly virulent virus. The more it spread, the more polarized people seem to become, the more set in their respective opinions and, to my eyes and ears, the further from reality both sides started to stray.