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 recent spate of articles over the last couple of days report that Elle Macpherson is dating an antivaccine “icon,” disgraced antivaccine doctor and scientific fraud Andrew Wakefield. Given her love of “alkaline diet” woo, which she sells through her very Goop-like Wellco website, the attraction shouldn’t be surprising. It is, nonetheless, troubling. It wouldn’t surprise me if Macpherson is antivaccine herself, given that in “alkaline diet” lingo, vaccines are often viewed as “toxic acid” insults that “alkalinization” can reverse.
It may be two days after the 4th of July, but it’s never too late to deconstruct a holiday-inspired antivaccine rant about “zero tolerance vaccine laws” by the grand dame of the antivaccine movement.
