Two interesting news are worth mentioning this week. The first one concerns the press conference held by Vytenis Andriukaitis, EU Commissioner in charge of Health and Food Safety, on the State of Health in the EU. The second one concerns the publication of a report on risk perception of genome editing among German consumers, conducted by the German Federal Institute for Risk Assessment (Bundesinstitut für Risikobewertung). Although their plain diversity, there is a common lesson to be learned from this two news.
In his press conference, Mr Andriukaitis was expected to present the yearly report on the State of Health the EU. Although a chapter of the report was devoted to vaccines and vaccination, this topic was only one among others and probably not the most momentous. Yet, in the course of the press conference, vaccines, vaccination, and objections to vaccination fuelled most questions. Answering one of them, Mr Andriukaitis stated “I would like to draw attention to the fact that all these movements, which use different arguments, do not understand what they are doing. It would be a shame if the families belonging to this movement were to bury their children, as happened this year in the Member States where children have died of measles. I would like to invite those who are against the vaccines to visit families, to visit the tombs of the children of those families, and to think what they are doing. I would like to invite all these anti-aging movements to visit the European cemeteries of the nineteenth century, of the eighteenth century, beginning of the twentieth century: they will find many tombs of small children, because there were no vaccines”. Mr Andriukaitis’ answer was not only laudable for strength and determination, but it was almost perfect in communication terms, although commentators and scientists would have probably preferred more sober and reasoned arguments. On the one hand, Mr Andriukaitis described vaccination as a fundamental right of the child -which is a vital move in this debate -and on the other hand, he did not rely on rational arguments, rather he evoked a powerful narrativethrough the symbol of “European cemeteries” (the same potent image used by pope John Paul II during his 1979 visit to Auschwitz).
On Nov 24 - the day after Vytenis Andriukaitis’ press conference - the German Federal Institute for Risk Assessment (BfR) presented the results of a new study on risk perception of genome editing. The study was conducted in Germany on a sample made of 39 focus group interviews. Research was quite limited both in number of participants and in geographical scope, yet its great interest relied in being one if the first studies on public perception of CRISPR/Cas9 methodology. Results were summarised by BfR President Professor Dr Andreas Hensel, who said “Although the respondents were hardly aware of genome editing and knew little about these technologies, the majority of them reject the use of these methods in the food sector". In early 2017, the High Level Group of Scientific Advisors of the Scientific Advice Mechanism of the European Commission, suggested to consider CRISPR technologies as “new breeding techniques (NBT)”, keeping them distinct, also in regulatory terms, from established techniques of genetic modification (ETGM). Now, the BfR study warns against this attempt to “downgrade” CRISPR technologies and to subtract them from regulations ruling GMO products. Wisely enough, the BfR study takes seriously people’s concerns, and suggests policy makers to do the same, avoiding any attempt to circumvent existing regulations on GMO products, using people ignorance as an alibi.
These two stories show – although from different perspectives – that education and public awareness, while still important, are not as relevant as they were in the past. People are not simply “uninformed” or “uneducated”, rather they do not think it is any more necessary to know to deliberate. Most people think to be legitimate to have an opinion on problems that they deliberately ignore. Knowledge of facts is no longer supposed to be relevant in public decision making, this is the dramatic paradigm shift of our epoch, like it or not.
