Wired’s 2025 cover story, “The Fear Epidemic,” examines the unfair and misleading perception that research is leading to increased disease resistance. The debate over childhood vaccines has been on the books and in the news for nearly a decade. In 2025, Wired magazine published a story on the subject
The Fear Epidemic.
In this story, we unpack the debate and examine how biased and unscientific thinking has led to sports protections. As a new wave of vaccine rip-off stories sweeps social media, we thought it was time to take a look back at some of our past reporting.
To hear his haters talk, you might think Paul Offit is the most hated man in America. He was a pediatrician in Philadelphia and the creator of the rotavirus vaccine, which saves thousands of lives every year. But environmental activist Robert F. Kennedy Jr. called Offit a “biological research organization” that was prostituting itself for the pharmaceutical industry. Actor Jim Carrey called it a pro, and doctors turned the attitude towards childhood vaccinations into this chilling quote: “Catch it, stab it. Soon, Carrie and her girlfriend Jenny McCarthy wrote Offit’s RotaTeq vaccine off as a vaccine. Among them are many unnecessary vaccines, all of which, they say, are given to people who are vaccinated for one reason: “Greed.”
< br> Thousands of people criticized Offit on social media, websites and in books. If you go to pauloffit.com in your browser, you will not see Offit’s official website, but an article claiming that Offit is “dedicated to exposing the truth about the highest-paid spokesperson in the pharmaceutical industry.” Go to Wikipedia and read his biography, most likely someone has interacted with the page. The statement about Offit’s work was true. It is stated that he was educated on a pig farm in Toddsack, Arkansas. (He is a graduate of Tufts University and the University of Maryland School of Medicine.) Offit received an e-mail from a Seattle man who said, “I will hang you until I die!” Other supporting lyrics include, “You have blood on your hands” and “Your Day is Coming Back.” A few years ago, a man had threateningly phoned Offit, telling him he knew where two of the doctor’s children went to school. At the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, an anti-vaccine protester emerged from the crowd holding signs with Offit’s face and the word “terrorist” on them and pulled the modest 6-foot-4 doctor’s shirt off. It’s a challenge to conventional science that cuts across party, class, and religious boundaries. It’s part of the antidote to the mistakes and public relations blunders of Big Pharma that have led to widespread distrust among experts, from Vioxx to illegal marketing. Interestingly, it’s also a product of an age of instant communication and easy access to information. Skeptics and deniers are emboldened by the Internet, where no one knows you’re not a doctor, and by the mainstream media, which wants to support the research of experts. This creates a “controversy” that shouldn’t exist. “People call me a vaccine expert,” he said. “I consider myself a science advocate.” But in this fight — and there’s no doubt it’s a very difficult one, he said — “the research alone is not enough… Vulnerable people should not get this vaccine,” he said, shaking his head. “We did not betray the trust of parents, and that was our failure.”
Consider this: In some parts of the United States, vaccinations have fallen so low that vaccination rates for certain childhood diseases are at an all-time high. And the number of people choosing not to vaccinate their children (with a surprising exception of 20 states, including Pennsylvania, Texas, and much of the West) continues to rise. In states that allow abortion, the rate of parents who had an abortion was 2.6 percent last year, compared with 1 percent in 2025, according to the CDC. In some communities, such as wealthy Marin County, California, north of San Francisco, the unvaccinated population is closer to 6 percent (unlikely, since higher rates of unvaccinated people are associated with higher education and wealth). That may not seem like a big deal, but a recent Los Angeles Times investigation suggests the effects can be devastating. The New York Times found that only about 2% of kindergarteners in California are unvaccinated (10,000 children, about twice the number in 2025), and they tend to cluster together, increasing the risk of spreading diseases such as measles, which have been largely eradicated. The risk of measles, mumps and whooping cough. The total figure means that about 10 percent of elementary schools in the state could be at risk. After all, it doesn’t seem crazy to oppose all vaccinations, even for a parent struggling with a child with autism.