Antivax tech bro Steve Kirsch “reinvents” challenging a scientific consensus

Regulars have probably noticed that my contributions over the last couple of weeks have been pretty sparse. There’s a good reason for that—actually two. First, I had a grant application deadline to try to keep my lab funded. That, as you might understand, takes precedence over my little hobby here. Secondly, there was a family health issue that occurred last weekend, making finishing my grant even more difficult than usual. I won’t give any details other than to say that the family member is doing better and I submitted my grant application yesterday, which frees me to try to get back to normal around here next week. (It’s a holiday weekend here in the US, and not everything is back to normal yet.) However, given my time constraints, I couldn’t do anything too strenuous for today…at least not yet. That’s why it’s a good thing that there was a particularly brain dead post by tech bro turned rabid antivax propagandist Steve Kirsch that I’ve been meaning to address. In it, he “reinvents” what it means to challenge a scientific consensus…very, very badly. Indeed, he claims to have found A better way to challenge scientific consensus. See if you can find the flaws in his “reasoning” (such as it is) before I apply a dose of well-deserved not-so-Respectful Insolence to it.

If there’s one thing about Kirsch, of course, it’s that he’s very good at discovering very old antivax and science denialist arguments and techniques and then regurgitating them for his thousands of paid followers on Substack as though they were new and he had discovered them. So it is here, as you will see, with his method of “challenging” the current scientific consensus that vaccines do not cause all the horrors that he and other antivaxxers attribute to them. When last we left Kirsch, he had finished blaming vaccines for turning kids gay and trans (also not a new antivax claim) after having incompetently used Excel to falsely claim that being vaccinated against COVID-19 makes one more likely to catch COVID-19. Such is the brain trust that wants to teach his followers how to “challenge” a scientific consensus. I could, of course, just tell you how it’s done, as it’s a topic that I’ve written about before on a number of occasions, but I thought I’d just amuse you first by quoting Kirsch:

In this article, I suggest a simple way to resolve scientific disagreements on important issues.

The method is simple:

1. The two parties mutually agree on a series of experiments to resolve the conflict.
2. The experiments are designed so the results are reproducible, for example, by having several independent efforts doing the same thing.
3. Win or lose, the “mainstream view” party (who should be led by a prominent scientist in the field being explored) agrees to write up the results of the experiment(s) and submit it to a prominent peer-reviewed technical journal.
4. The “mainstream” party gets a large monetary award (a research grant) upon publication. The more prestigious the author, the higher the reward.
5. We pay all costs in addition to the reward for people’s time and to fund the experiment(s).
6. The idea is to make this “an offer that nobody can refuse.”

Ah, yes. So seemingly reasonable. So seemingly fair, right? Well, not quite, but first let’s see Kirsch’s example, which should show you right away just how, under a facade of what seems on the surface to be reasonable and science-based is something that scientists recognize right away as being vacuous and deceptive. Kirsch chooses an old antivax example, one that antivaxxers have been deceptively claiming for the last three decades:

Suppose we want to prove whether vaccines cause autism.

The two parties could agree on two experiments and how they are carried out such as:

1. Gather data from a randomly selected list of parents of autistic kids which looks at the date the parents first noticed symptoms of ASD vs. the date of the most recent vaccination prior to the diagnosis.
2. Gather the same data from doctors who treat autistic kids.

The parties agree in advance what success (for each hypothesis) looks like.

The parties agree that if both experiments agree with each other on deciding the question that they will publicly accept the result as scientific truth going forward, until such time as there is more persuasive data showing otherwise.

On the surface, this seems to be a reasonable way to challenge the scientific consensus, but only if you are unaware of certain rather important things. A scientific consensus—any scientific consensus about any scientific question—by its very nature, is a conclusion that is based upon the best available data and experiments. Basically, Kirsch is ignoring all of the copious evidence from basic science, clinical studies, and epidemiology that already strongly supports the scientific consensus that childhood vaccination is not associated with an increased chance of being diagnosed with autism. It’s not as though this is a new question. It’s something that’s been studied many times and often going back, yes, nearly thirty years. He is “challenging” those defending that consensus, in effect, to reinvent the wheel by doing more experiments that are, in light of the huge body of existing evidence, unnecessary and quite possibly even unethical if they involve, for instance, anything resembling a randomized placebo-controlled trial that would randomize children to a group unprotected against infectious diseases by vaccines.

In fact, I’d argue that Robert F. Kennedy, as much of an antivax crank as he is, seems to understand this principle, which is why when seven years ago he and antivax actor Robert De Niro offered a prize of $100,000 to any scientist or journalist who can prove that vaccines don’t cause autism, he didn’t insist on new experiments, but rather challenged scientists thusly:

We hereby issue a challenge to American journalists (and others) who have been assuring the public about the safety of mercury in vaccines. We will pay $100,000 to the first journalist, or other individual, who can point to a peer-reviewed scientific study demonstrating that thimerosal is safe in the amounts contained in vaccines currently being administered to American children and pregnant women.

At the time, I called this the “one true study” gambit, in which a crank challenges scientists to point to one study that proves the scientific consensus. As I have pointed out many times, there is rarely, if ever, any one single scientific study or observation that by itself can conclusively demonstrate a scientific consensus. That’s not how science works! It’s almost never the case that any one scientific study settles a scientific question.

What Kirsch proposes might be reasonable for a scientific question for which a scientific consensus has not yet formed, a scientific question for which the evidence is indeed conflicting in which there are two (or a small number) of competing hypotheses that are roughly similar in likelihood of explaining the phenomenon. Might be. I say “might” because, even then, in general, resolving scientific controversies is something that happens in the scientific literature and at scientific conferences, as scientists supporting competing hypotheses publish and report the results of their studies and experiments, while the scientific community decides which hypothesis is most consistent with the totality of the scientific evidence published on the subject.

Moreover, these sorts of questions are not resolved by, in essence, a bet or a prize. Once again, Kirsch reveals his obsession with monetary rewards in the form of bets and prizes. You probably remember that his go-to signature move has long been to challenge legitimate scientists to dubious bets (or to challenge anyone at all who pushes back strongly enough against his antivax disinformation) in which the winner of a debate wins the bet. Given that he is wealthy, he often likes to set the monetary amount of the bet so high that few people can afford to take such a bet, the better to crow about how “no one will debate” him, the implication being that they are too afraid of losing. Of course, when the occasional brave soul actually does accept one of Kirsch’s performative challenges, his usual move is to find any way he can to avoid paying up for losing or put so many conditions on the “debate” that no sane person would accept.

Of course, Kirsch gives the game way by immediately going on to say:

If we set the reward at $1M and there are no takers, the question is resolved by default.

And to conclude:

The problem with challenging scientific consensus is that the party with the mainstream beliefs simply ignores anyone who challenges them.

So it’s up to the challengers to get their attention.

By providing a large monetary incentive to create and execute a set of mutually agreeable scientific experiments to answer the question, we may be able to make progress on these intractable issues which have been unresolved for decades.

What’s new here is large monetary incentives combined with a mutually agreeable set of experiments.

This resolves the issue under investigation definitively. 

Either: 1) the mainstream party accepts and we do the experiments or 2) the mainstream party refuses to engage in which case it is a tacit admission of defeat. 

Either way, there is finally resolution on each issue explored.

Again, that’s not how science works, particularly when there is a scientific consensus that has a huge amount of data supporting it, like the conclusion that childhood vaccines do not increase the risk of autism. Because a scientific consensus is established by many studies that usually include lines of evidence from different scientists and scientific disciplines that converge on a single conclusion, which becomes the scientific consensus, it generally requires a lot more than one experiment or study to overthrow it. While it is true that, in theory at least, a scientific consensus can be overthrown by a single study, that rarely happens, if only because a finding that is so anomalous compared to existing evidence is usually far more likely to be erroneous than it is to be correct, which is why scientists will demand replication before accepting it.

Here’s how a scientific is usually modified or rejected. It often starts with a single study (or group of studies) that cast doubt upon the existing consensus and lead to more studies that also cast doubt upon the consensus. Ultimately, the accumulation of new data and new experiments will end up leading scientists either (1) to modify the old consensus to account for the new evidence or (2) less commonly, to reject it in favor of a new consensus.

Finally, Kirsch has rediscovered a common crank technique to call the scientific consensus about any topic into question. As I documented in a previous post, bogus “challenges” or bets like his have long been the M.O. of cranks, be they antivaxxers, creationists, HIV/AIDS denialists, 9/11 Truthers, climate science denialists, and, yes, Holocaust deniers. But Kirch gonna Kirsch and act as though he were the first one to think of using large sums of money to cast doubt on the scientific consensus when real scientists, quite sensibly, recognized a rigged game and a trap when they see it. In reality, as usual, Kirsch is utterly unoriginal and not even that imaginative in regurgitating old science denial tropes and techniques. No one should take him seriously unless and until he can come up with some scientific evidence far more compelling than his usual poorly designed Internet surveys administered on his Substack. I won’t hold my breath waiting.