Anti-vaxxers need to be less selfish

Long Beach is experiencing a trip back in time - an outbreak of the mumps, which many considered a childhood rite of passage until an effective vaccine was developed in 1967.

Health officials have confirmed at least 36 cases of the highly contagious virus, contained in a small geographic area. Officials are urging everyone in the area to wash their hands more often, and - in a very 21st-century twist - to get the measles, mumps and rubella (MMR) vaccine if they haven't already.

"We're trying to prevent this from getting larger," Lawrence Eisenstein, Nassau County's health commissioner, told ABC News.

In the past, health officials could be relatively certain that Americans had received the MMR vaccine between 12 and 15 months old, and then been given a booster between ages 4 and 6.

It's true that the vaccine is not 100 percent effective against the mumps - there are four or five breakouts in New York every year, according to Dr. Bruce Farber at North Shore University Hospital in Manhasset. And health officials speculate there may be a new strain of mumps going around.

But the call for immunization wasn't something we would have witnessed 15 or 20 years ago. The MMR vaccine has acquired a bad reputation, and more parents are refusing or delaying shots on behalf of their infants. Arkansas health officials have asked students without the vaccine to stay home in response to a school outbreak. And five dozen cases threatened Harvard's graduation ceremony in May.

In a survey published Monday, the American Academy of Pediatrics said that 87 percent of its members in 2013 had encountered parents who refused vaccines, up from 75 percent of pediatricians in 2006.

I used to support opting out of vaccinations. The refuseniks raised some valid questions about how many and which immunizations were necessary.

For example, if a person contracts chickenpox without having been vaccinated, he or she might be sick for a week. With the vaccine, a child might be ill for five or six days. Is it worth a shot to be well two days earlier? Hard to say for sure - but it does seem to benefit vaccine manufacturers in the wallet.

For a long while, people suspected that the MMR vaccine caused autism - a connection that has now been debunked by many studies but is still supported by celebrities like Jim Carrey and Jenny McCarthy.

It's reasonable to respect people who are willing to do the research, to listen to the other side of a story - people who don't necessarily take someone else's word for what's true, even if it's the word of a physician or the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

But anti-vaxxers have taken skepticism too far. Confronted with the science, they choose to believe the less supportable theories. Science isn't a certain discipline; it's the best hypothesis we have at any given time, and it can change. But that doesn't make it evil or corrupt.

Somehow, we've arrived at a point where questioning institutions, without any benefit of evidence, is admired. The suspicious person, the contrarian, takes on a veneer of knowing more. You see glimmers of this in Long Island's constant NIMBY operations and in the Common Core opt-out movement.

When you can find support for just about any wacko theory on the internet, the stance of the contrarian can be dangerous.

What made me drop my support for parents' choice over vaccinations was learning about herd immunity. The refusal doesn't just affect the individual but puts others in harm's way. In 2014, a single unvaccinated child with measles at Disneyland led to 146 people sick. People who refuse vaccination are free-riding on the large majority of people who do vaccinate.

Sometimes, it's simply not adequate to decide what's best for oneself. Sometimes, we have to think of our neighbors.

First published in Newsday. Anne Michaud is the Interactive Opinion Editor for Newsday.

Huma had a Sophie's Choice

In the end, it probably wasn’t Huma Abedin’s injured wifely feelings that ended her marriage so much as her professional pride.

This is the third time that Anthony’s Weiner’s sexting has landed him on the front pages of New York tabloids. Again, he was embarrassingly shorn of his shirt, wearing just his skivvies and apparently happy below the waist.

The first time Anthony went public with a photo like this, it was intended for a 21-year-old admirer, but he accidentally tweeted it to his roughly 45,000 Twitter followers. It was May 2011, and he was congressman, a loner and a whip-smart combative son of middle-class Brooklyn with the ambition to run New York City as its mayor. Huma, his pregnant wife of one year, apparently hadn’t known about his obsession for e-sex with strangers.

But she knew when she propped him up for his mayoral run in 2013 – helping solicit funds from her friends among the Bill and Hillary Clinton campaign donors. And so it mustn’t be the infidelity – if you can call it that – of phone sex that finally caused Huma to walk. It must be the public embarrassment. A scandal isn’t a scandal if it’s private between two people. It’s a scandal when it appears on the cover of the New York Post.

For Huma, the Aug. 29 NY Post cover was a potentially career-ending juncture. It called into question her judgment at a time when her long-time mentor Hillary Clinton is a breath away from becoming the nation’s first female president. Why would a woman as talented and striking as Abedin stay with a guy who regularly humiliated her? Love is one reason, but it doesn’t overcome every odd. Not odds this repeated and this public.

Heartbreakingly, the photo also compromised Huma as a mother. The couple’s son Jordan, now 4, appears as a baby next to his dad in the offending pic. His face was blurred out in the published photo – but, my God. One of the reasons the couple stayed together all these years – five years since his first fateful tweet in May 2011 – was an aspiration to give Jordan a good family life.

Huma said, at a July 2013 press conference, “I made the decision that it was worth staying in this marriage and that was a decision I made for me, for our son and for our family. I didn’t know how it would work out, but I did know that I wanted to give it a try.”

Anthony’s view in October 2014, as told to Politico, may have been the more pessimistic if realistic outlook for young Jordan: “I am quite confident that my son will have the ability to look at the totality of the experiences he has with his father and the record that I've got and judge me appropriately. Maybe, you know, it teaches him a little something about adversity and everything doesn't go great all the time.”

Especially not if you keep working at making it un-great, no.

Anthony could not keep his fetishes inside the walls of his home. Perhaps if he could have, his and Huma’s personal bargains could have had a chance. All relationships make accommodations – maybe those of political spouses more than the rest. But because of who Huma is – given her near-familial relationship with Hillary Clinton – the interpersonal is always going to be front-page, tabloid fodder.

Huma had to choose: Hillary or Anthony. Anthony’s behavior tilted the scale. As a mother and a political force, Huma knew the stakes on both sides were rising. I think she chose well.

If you liked this blog post, please sign up for updates on the book launch of "Why They Stay: Sex Scandals, Deals, and Hidden Agendas of Nine Political Wives" at whytheystaybook.com, publishing in March 2017. Anne Michaud is a veteran political journalist and columnist for Newsday in New York.

That ringing endorsement

This is an early sketch for the cover of Why They Stay. Photographer C.J. Burton sketched out nine or 10 potential scenarios, and our team chose this as the one that most closely conveys the idea that politically married women are tied to their husbands -- even as the husbands continue to thrive in politics.

When I showed the early sketch to friends, I explained, "That's a wedding ring around the couples' waists." Fortunately, when C.J. sent through the actual cover design, the circle was so obviously a gold wedding ring that I no longer had any fear people wouldn't get the idea and impact.

Janet Michaud was the art director for the cover design. Yes, in fact, we did grow up together. She's my sister and the talented head of Politico's magazine and website design. Janet, C.J. and I brainstormed the art on conference calls. The three of us live in far corners of the country. It was wonderful being able to use technology to collaborate at a distance.

I've always been on the word side of publishing, and this collaboration has taught me a ton about what my sister does for a living. Bonus!

‘Wife’ imitates life

The Good Wife debuted in 2009, shortly after the real-life resignation of New York Governor Eliot Spitzer. Like Spitzer, the CBS series' errant politician Peter Florrick is discovered hiring hookers. District Attorney Florrick goes to jail, not for the sex but on corruption charges, and the show – as its name implies – revolves around how wife Alicia and their two children cope with the crisis. Creators Michelle and Robert King, husband and wife, say they drew inspiration from imagining the life of Silda Wall Spitzer after her husband's downfall. Like Alicia, Silda had given up work as an Ivy League-educated lawyer earlier in the marriage to raise her two children.

As Alicia sells their beautiful suburban home, downsizes to an urban apartment and begins work at a law firm, her reasons for staying married to Peter unfold. First, there's his assumption that once he beats the corruption charges, their life will go "back to normal." His mother, who's now helping the family care for their young teens, tells Alicia, "he's hurting, and he needs you to forgive him." And, naturally, the children want their father to return and their family to be reunited. When Peter finally leaves jail and decides to run again for office, his sharp political adviser tells Alicia he has no chance of winning without her Good Housekeeping stamp of approval. In other words, she can choose to stand by him or deny him his redemption.

As the writers of this show would have it, Alicia/Silda acts out of concern for everyone around her. The insights about her feelings for her husband are rare – at one point, she suggests separate bedrooms, telling Peter she still loves him but that she's been deeply hurt.

The political limelight bends couples

Our public conversation about politically married women who remain in the marriage after infidelity has remained frozen in place. When the Monica Lewinsky scandal broke, we asked, "Why does Hillary stay with Bill?" And we are still asking essentially the same question. When Anthony Weiner's sexting came to light, we wanted to know what kept Huma in the marriage.

It would take a lot for me to leave my marriage, which I love, but the repeated public humiliations these wives have suffered would have been enough to break me.

So, I wrote a 260-something-page book called "Why They Stay: The Sex Scandals, the Deals and the Hidden Agendas of Nine Political Wives." I concluded that the spotlight changes how these couples react to infidelity. I'm sure you've heard references to politicians living in a bubble or an echo chamber. I feel that applies to their marriages. We can't judge them by normal standards.

For one, they've often lost touch with normal. These couples have learned to perform for the media and, at the same time, to distrust media reports, so that they turn inward toward each other and a few close advisers for counsel. Also, couples in public life fend off repeated political attacks, and the furor over an infidelity can elicit the same defensive crouch. The women who stay in these marriages are often described in the media as loyal, selfless, "a rock" -- which again distorts what's going on. The temptation to buy into that role, and inflate one's already powerful sense of patriotic purpose, must be enormous.

Publishing in March 2017, Why They Stay explores the possible reasoning and motivation behind why political wives stay with their husbands after the husbands cheat. For updates on the book launch, sign up at whytheystaybook.com.

Outlaw Hate Speech in the U.S.

A version of this op-ed column first ran in Newsday , June 24, 2015.

Years ago, I took a journalistic excursion through the nation's white supremacist scene. I read books and spoke with professors, attended rallies with Aryan Nations members and Keystone Skinheads and interviewed their leaders. I kept in touch with the pre-eminent hate group watchdog, the Southern Poverty Law Center.

When I heard about Dylann Roof, I suspected that he had trod the same path.

The signs were familiar. Roof reportedly said to the nine African-Americans he shot point-blank inside a South Carolina church that he resented black men routinely raping white women -- a paranoid fiction long spread by white supremacists. Roof also said the shootings were meant to set off a "race war." White supremacists envision an armed battle leading to a breakaway, all-white, Gentile nation within the United States.

So, where did Roof acquire his racial hatred? At 21, he's lived in a post-civil rights era in a country that has never been so diverse.

He was active in an online white supremacist community. Roof started a site called The Last Rhodesian, a reference to apartheid-era southern Africa. He also may have posted as AryanBlood1488 on the DailyStormer.com, according to the Southern Poverty Law Center, which has identified 784 hate groups, from Klansmen to black separatists and border vigilantes.

We should consider whether people who run such websites bear some responsibility for the nine dead at Charleston's Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church. It would be difficult, but perhaps we should carve out an exception to our First Amendment protection of free speech to hold people accountable for hate speech.

We have harsher federal penalties for hate-motivated crimes, which Roof will presumably face. What about prosecuting those who inspired the action?

The digital world has raised the stakes since the Founding Fathers put their doctrines on paper. Now, instructions on building a bomb, the home address of an abortion doctor, or the location of a church at the heart of slavery resistance live online forever. They spread information across generations and at the click of a mouse.

What's more, these dangerous websites serve as live communities to validate people feeling outcast, unhappy and isolated. Hate speech doesn't cause someone to act against his will, of course, but it sets the stage for violence in which a sympathizer may even anticipate praise for taking action. According to news reports, Roof hesitated at the rear of the church as he listened to the prayer group, but then felt he must finish his mission to "kill black people."

Hate speech is illegal in Canada. The law bans exposing a person "to hatred or contempt . . . on the basis of a prohibited ground of discrimination" and to "willfully [promoting] hatred against any identifiable group."

That isn't the same as outlawing dissent. Hate speech as Canada defines it targets humans based on identity -- a skin color, a turban or walking to a temple on Saturday.

In 1990, the Canadian Supreme Court wrote that "hate propaganda can operate to convince listeners . . . that members of certain racial or religious groups are inferior," which can "increase acts of discrimination . . . and even incidents of violence."

In the United States, we prize our freedom to speak, but in fact our laws uphold many limits. Sedition, for example, or advocating force as a way to change the government, is illegal. Threats, defamation, false advertising and profanity on public airwaves are illegal. Companies protect trade secrets, and courts enforce gag orders in legal settlements.

After the horrific violence in Charleston, we should ask whether we can condone hate speech living online to inspire another twisted youth.