At her Senate confirmation hearing, the nominee to lead the Food and Drug Administration affirmed MMR vaccine safety, and a research team treats the sentence as the discovery of the century.
FDA nominee Dr. Heidi Overton affirmed at her Senate confirmation hearing that the MMR vaccine is safe. One research lab finds the vaccine itself old news. The sentence, however, has them launching a major study.
A nominee to run the Food and Drug Administration told senators this week that a vaccine is safe. My lab has classified this as a major event. We have not slept.
Let me be clear about what is not new. The measles, mumps and rubella vaccine works, and it has worked for decades. Nobody on my team finds that interesting. Our coffee machine has shown more excitement about it.
What is new is the sentence. According to Scientific American, Dr. Heidi Overton affirmed the safety of the MMR vaccine at her confirmation hearing. A confirmation hearing is where senators ask a nominee questions. Usually the nominee finds a way not to answer them.
We needed to know if this could happen again. So we built a study. By Friday, twenty-six graduate students were watching hearing footage in shifts, logging every time a health official said a proven thing was proven.
Our control group was a room of volunteers asked whether ice is cold. Every one of them said yes. We found this unremarkable. The nominee, by contrast, said yes on television, in Washington, with the microphones on.
"The effect size is enormous," said Dr. Marcus Pell, our lead statistician. Effect size is how big a result is. "If this holds, officials may start agreeing with evidence. I do not think we are ready for that as a country."
"If this holds, officials may start agreeing with evidence."
There are limits to what we can say. Our sample size is one hearing. One hearing is not many hearings. We cannot rule out that the result came from good preparation, or from simply having read the research.
Not everyone down the hall was moved. Dr. Lena Okafor, who has spent her career stopping children from getting measles, looked up from her bench for about two seconds. "Yes, it's safe," she said. "I have a grant deadline."
We have flagged her as an outlier. An outlier is a data point that makes everyone else look bad.
The university has asked us to plan for wider fallout. If nominees keep saying true things about medicine, the whole field of watching hearings through our fingers could collapse. Twenty-six graduate students would need new hobbies.
The next step is replication. Replication means seeing it again before we believe it. My team has bought snacks. We expect to be there a while.
