One quirk of having blogged so long is that sometimes cranks you’ve blogged about reappear after a long disappearance. So it was when antivax wunderkind Jake Crosby retracted a bogus critique of a study that failed to find a link between MMR vaccines and autism.
Search: “"Andrew Wakefield" MMR autism”
We found 381 results for your search.
In 2014, Andrew Wakefield unveiled Brian Hooker’s “CDC whistleblower” conspiracy theory featuring William Thompson, a CDC scientist who claimed that a vaccine-autism link was being covered up. Now, Steve Kirsch and other COVID-19 antivaxxers are resurrecting it.
Steve Kirsch interviewed Andrew Wakefield, demonstrating that there is no distance between “new school” and “old school” antivaxxers anymore. Also, they are antivaccine, with Wakefield saying there is no safe vaccine.
Last Friday, Bill Maher went full transphobe, repurposing old antivax trope commonly used to deny a predominantly genetic component to autism and claim vaccine causation in order to mock the idea that there is a biological basis to being transgender and claim its prevalence is increasing now because it’s “trendy.”
Steve Kirsch is known for his ludicrous challenges issued to vaccine advocates to “debate” vaccines. Now he wants to “collaborate” with provaccine scientists to test whether vaccines cause autism. His proposal is equally ludicrous.