Jay Gordon excoriates Frontline

Dr. Jay Gordon has posted a...something...of sorts over at HuffPo in which he gives the text of a letter of righteousness he sent to Frontline after they failed to run a single second of their interview with him. I read his piece, and I read the letter. And I can't find a single thing in either that offers up a fact to counter anything that Frontline aired. Nothing. It's primarily a litany of complaints that Frontline would have the temerity to exclude him, HIM!, from their show, especially after he, HE!, took the trouble to give a two-hour interview. Most of the letter is about how great he is, how a True Eminence like himself should never be excised from something like a Frontline report. I mean, how dare they?

There's something that throws me off about his letter. I think it's the emotion, the italics, the personal attacks, the unsupported accusations of lying...these things simply do not seem to behoove a practitioner of medicine or someone who lays claim to a backdrop of support from science. Curious about the presence of this cardinal sign of a pseudoscience (look for emotion! exclamation points! a total lack of factual information!), I looked into Dr. Gordon a bit more. Pardon me for my ignorance, but I hadn't ever really heard of this guy because, well, he's just a pediatrician. There are thousands and thousands of pediatricians in this country, and I've already got one of my own.

The first thing I wondered was, I wonder if he makes any money off of his target audience? And, he does. Pseudoscience sign #2. Not surprisingly, his tomes are listed under "recommended reading" on...his Website. There are three books listed there. They're all his. Further reading leads to information about how he's parlayed his "expertise" into all kinds of consultant roles across various sorts of entertainment media. OK. But where is the information about him that explains his role as a vaccine expert? Where is the information about his training in toxicology and/or infectious diseases? Or his published studies on vaccine-related studies or preventable illness? I can't find it anywhere.

And is it any surprise that in the pantheon of experts that Frontline rounded up for this story, there are none on the anti-vaccine side who are, in fact, infectious disease specialists, toxicologists, published investigators in the field, or public health experts? Instead, we have Jenny McCarthy, PhD, Google U, Robert W. Sears, M.D., Pediatrician, no specialty, and J.B. Handley, a businessman who started an autism organization.

Perhaps that's why Frontline ultimately elected to not use his interview. Credentials for speaking to the effects of vaccine would seem to include having some training in infectious disease or toxicology. They'd seem to require some background and training at least in public health or epidemiology. Otherwise, you're just talking to another general pediatrician with opinions, in both cases pediatricians who've managed to parlay those opinions into a self-promoting cottage industry involving peddling their books. Frontline already had one of these in Dr. Sears. Perhaps they felt that Dr. Gordon would simply be redundant.

I wouldn't feel quite so snarky about Dr. Gordon had he managed to omit the following from his empty letter to Frontline:

Did you happen to notice that Vanessa, the child critically ill with pertussis, was not intubated nor on a respirator in the ER? She had nasal "prongs" delivering oxygen. I'm sorry for her parents anxiety and very happy that she was cured of pertussis. But to use anecdotal reports like this as science is irresponsible and merely served the needs of the doctor you wanted to feature.

Really? A pediatrician who has practiced as long he avers to have practiced ought to know--surely has seen--the terrible effects of whooping cough in the very young. He dismissed this visual as not convincing of the child's critical condition. In the same letter in which he himself wrote only of his anecdotal experience, without producing an iota of data, he then asserts that using "anecdotal reports like this as science is irresponsible..." Irony meters nationwide surely exploded as those words were typed. But I simply do not understand, cannot fathom, how he, as a doctor, found it in him to grasp that desperately at pediatric nasal prongs in a feeble and cowardly attempt to dismiss the deadly dangers of whooping cough, especially to the very young? How can a doctor licensed to care for children use a child's suffering as a false front for an assertion he must know is indefensible?