Cranks love ’em: Cash “challenges” demanding that skeptics and scientists “prove” the scientific consensus. Of course, these challenges are always rigged.

Cranks love ’em: Cash “challenges” demanding that skeptics and scientists “prove” the scientific consensus. Of course, these challenges are always rigged.
Antivaxers like Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. bend over backwards to represent themselves as “not antivaccine.” Don’t believe them. They are. It’s how they suck in the clueless, like Robert De Niro and Pratik Chougule.
Longtime vaccine advocates will likely remember Jock Doubleday’s “vaccine challenge,” in which he offered up to $150,000 to anyone who would drink a body-weight calibrated dose of the vaccine additives in the childhood vaccine schedule. Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. and Robert De Niro have teamed up to issue a challenge every bit as nonsensical from a scientific standpoint, with the added bonus of its being a scam as well.
Andrew Wakefield, with the help of Del Bigtree, has directed and released an antivaccine propaganda “documentary.” It’s so blatant in its manipulation of facts that it would make Leni Reifenstahl blush.
Sigh. Here we go again. Robert De Niro is letting his antivaccine freak flag fly again, this time even higher than usual, by revealing that in the wake of the antivaccine debacle at his Tribeca Film Festival he is going to make his very own documentary about vaccines. It’s the continuation of a process that, […]