Last Friday, Bill Maher went full transphobe, repurposing old antivax trope commonly used to deny a predominantly genetic component to autism and claim vaccine causation in order to mock the idea that there is a biological basis to being transgender and claim its prevalence is increasing now because it’s “trendy.”
Andy Serwer of Yahoo! Finance interviewed Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. It did not go well. Serwer allowed RFK, Jr. to spew his antivax propaganda largely unquestioned.
Autism quack Dr. Mark Geier recently won a $2.5 million judgment against the Maryland Board of Physicians for having violated his medical privacy by including the name of a drug he was taking in a public cease-and-desist order. Antivaxers are trying to spin this as some sort of vindication of his antivaccine quackery. Make no mistake, the board appears to have screwed up, but that has nothing to do with whether its revocation of Geier’s medical license was justified.
Cranks love ’em: Cash “challenges” demanding that skeptics and scientists “prove” the scientific consensus. Of course, these challenges are always rigged.
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.
