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.
The Brownstone Institute long ago went full anti-COVID-19 vaccination. Now it’s embracing old antivax tropes about the measles vaccine. This was inevitable.
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.
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.
It was 25 years ago last week that Andrew Wakefield launched the modern iteration of the antivaccine movement.In doing so, he laid down a template that antivax quacks today still follow.
