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.
Tag: Del Bigtree
RFK Jr. will hold a “healthcare policy roundtable” next week. One look at its list of “experts” shows that it will be a Quackapalooza of antivax misinformation. Unfortunately, RFK Jr.’s candidacy is normalizing old long debunked antivax tropes.
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.
Neil deGrasse Tyson invoked the concept of a scientific consensus while supporting vaccines in his debate with Del Bigtree. Why was his statement about how “individual scientists don’t matter” compared to scientific consensus so triggering to antivaxxers? Why do antivaxxers reject the very concept of a scientific consensus and promote a hyper-individualistic view of how science should be conducted?
Astrophysicist and famed science communicator Neil deGrasse Tyson appeared on The Highwire, an antivax video podcast, to “debate” its host, antivax propagandist Del Bigtree. This incident demonstrates quite well why it is almost never a good idea for a scientist to agree to “debate” science deniers.