Falsus in uno, falsus in omnibus (false in one thing, false in all things) is a legal principle. That doesn’t stop cranks from misusing it to cast doubt on science that they don’t like. Overall, it’s just another form of black/white dichotomous thinking.
Barbara Loe Fisher is back. This time, instead of Nazis and the Holocaust, she’s comparing vaccine mandates and bad press about antivaxers to McCarthyism and their “persecution” to that faced by anyone suspected of Communism in the early 1950s.
It’s ba-ack. In response to efforts to make personal belief exemptions harder to obtain, an old and particularly vile antivax trope is back: Vaccine mandates as rape, with a new #metoo-inspired twist, namely “vaccine injured” children as victims of sexual assault whose assaulters are trying to silence them.
Dr. Gary Kohls is an antivaccine doctor who writes for The Duluth Reader. After Orac criticized him, he decided to strike bacik. It did not go well. Let’s just say that Dr. Kohls is good at hypocrisy and projection.
Recently, Dr. Peter Hotez characterized antivaccine groups as “hate groups,” and antivaxer Barbara Loe Fisher took great umbrage, accusing Dr. Hotez and the public health community of “bullying” parents of “vaccine-injured” children. Did Dr. Hotez go too far? And what about Fisher’s hypocrisy, given that Dr. Hotez has received death threats credible enough to warrant police protection and Fisher herself has sued her critics, in effect trying to bully them into silence?
