270 Robert A. Aronowitz communities, as reflected in the easy recruitment for vaccine trials and the early lay criticism of the lack of medical interest in preventing LD. Speaking at the 2001 VRBPAC meeting, Dr. Dixie Snider recalled the very different atmosphere at the 1998 meeting, during which lay advocates told clinicians and scientists that they were insensitive to the needs of the communities that wanted the vaccine. But shortly after the launch of LYMErix, many people in the LD activist community began to understand that the vaccine’s scientific efficacy stabilized the vaccine’s target: the orthodox view of LD that they so bitterly opposed. Reinforcing these connections were lay activists’ opposition to the LD experts and drug companies’ promotion of the vaccine (my enemy’s friend is my enemy), the narrow case definition used in the trials (if the vaccine worked, then so did the case definition), and the construction of the vaccine’s immune dangers in ways that reinforced the heterodox position (severe side effects attributed to the vaccine proved the protean, immune consequences of “natural” LD). From the orthodox perspective, an effective prevention tool—the product of determined and creative laboratory and clinical science—was withdrawn because LD activists contaminated its potential market by spreading fear and confusion. But why was this lay opposition so effec- tive at weakening the demand for these products? Labels like “yuppie vaccine” and “personalized vaccine,” cited by medical experts in regula- tory hearings, point to why the LD vaccines were extremely sensitive to efforts to paint them as dangerous. The social and psychological efficacy of risk-reducing products and practices is to provide safety, reassurance, fear reduction, and control of uncertainty. This efficacy was easily unrav- eled by the LD advocates’ promotion of the vaccines’ putative immune dangers. The LD vaccine controversy resembles the recent HPV vaccine contro- versy in which societal wariness regarding another marginally effective, highly profitable, risk-reducing product played a large part (Aronowitz 2010). The HPV vaccines have been resisted by groups suspicious of big pharmaceutical companies, “abstinence only” supporters, and oth- ers. Unlike the LD controversy, there has not been a concerted attempt to link the HPV vaccine to a specific, if theoretical, safety risk. My anal- ysis implies that such a risk might be the nidus in which a lot of other oppositional positions might form. In this sense, the LD vaccine con- troversy has more parallels with the recent Vioxx controversy, a product whose market niche was to reduce risk (of gastrointestinal complications