In the span of less than a decade, the public went from being blissfully unaware of thimerosal, the mercury-based preservative that was used in a number of vaccines, to a place where death threats against vaccine advocates are now issued with frightening regularity. How exactly did this happen? PLoS Biology has produced an article that attempts to provide a historical perspective on these developments and fit them into the wider issue of how scientific information is communicated with the public. The story turns out to be one of historic accidents and missed opportunities, but one that could provide some valuable lessons to both public health authorities and the scientific community at large.

The article is well written, should be accessible to nonscientists, and is open access, so I’ll only recap its outlines, while focusing on aspects of the story that the author didn’t develop.

In the US, the vaccine scare can apparently be traced back to an apparently unrelated event in 1997, when a funding bill included a rider that called for the FDA to conduct an inventory of all possible sources of mercury exposure from the products it regulated. The inventory came at a time when the vaccination programs were benefitting from increased productivity—boosters were scheduled based on a better understanding of epidemiology, vaccines were becoming available for more illnesses, etc.—that had increased the number of injections children were receiving. The result was that the FDA found that children were exposed to unexpected levels of thimerosal, a preservative used in some vaccines that contains ethyl mercury.

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