Infectious disease outbreaks are costly in human and financial terms. An analysis of the 2013 Brooklyn measles outbreak shows just how costly one outbreak can be and how much it can strain already strained public health resources. This is the cost of antivaccine madness.
Thanks to the Dunning-Kruger effect, many antivaxers think they know more about vaccines than doctors, scientists, and other experts in infectious disease, immunology, and vaccines. It is this arrogance of ignorance that fuels their antivaccine activism and makes them resistant to disconfirming evidence.
Earlier this week, the New York Times ran a fascinating feature about Gwyneth Paltrow and Goop. In it, we learn—surprise! surprise!—that Gwyneth Paltrow does not like fact-checking. We also learn that the criticism of Goop’s selling of pseudoscience and quackery has reached the point where Paltrow has given in and plans to hire a fact checker. Unfortunately, I strongly suspect that it will do no good and that skeptics will have as much work to do refuting Goop’s quackery after the fact-checker is hired as we do now.
A few years ago, it was anthroposophic medicine. This year, it’s homeopathy. Quackademic medicine at the University of Michigan marches on.
Dr. Michael Klaper advocates a plant-based “whole food” diet and water fasts as the cure for what ails you, with demonstrably overblown claims for the benefits of such practices and invocation of nonsense “detoxification”? Yet Penn Jillette gave him a friendly forum on his podcast. Where did the Penn of “Penn & Teller: Bullshit!” go? Here we examine Dr. Klaper’s claims and find them weak on science.
