Are “high IQ” folks as dismissive of vaccines as they are of climate change? It seems so. An Integra (January) response from one David Simmons shocked and gobsmacked Janice. That was in his dismissal of Dr. Anthony Fauci as:
“A smirking, highest paid confirmed liar.”
As Janice asked when I showed her the issue and the article (‘P A Stahl’s Leftist
Hoax’):
“Who confirmed it? That
anti-vaxx moron RFK Jr? The guy who claimed his 2008 diagnosis of spasmodic
dysphonia – could be traced to a Covid vaccine injection?”
But as I pointed out to her, this wasn’t surprising given Simmons
also denigrated the text suggestion (This is Climate Science: A
Visual Guide To The Facts) I offered in my original article responding
to another climate change denier Alana Sullivan. Simmons dismissed it as “written
by two students”, therefore unworthy of attention far less careful reading.
Failing to note:
i)
The pair, David Nelles and Christian Serrer, were
actually grad students.
ii)
Grad students are often published in high profile
venues, as I was with my first two papers in the journal Solar Physics
iii)
The book received rave reviews in New Scientist,
i.e.
"Explains
climate change with the help of more than 100 scientists, presenting complex
science in a way that everyone will find easy to understand.”
But back to the vaccine issue. Medical quackery in the guise
of disinformation is now running rampant even as we behold outbreaks of measles
and Covid is still hospitalizing 20,000 a week, killing 2,000. In Florida, where top quack Joseph Ladapo reigns as surgeon general the adult Covid booster rate is 7.7% as reported by LA Times columnist Michael Hiltzik. This explains the rash of new cases as well as hospitalizations.
Hiltzik has decribed Ladapo as “one of the most assiduous dispensers
of anti-vaccine claptrap” and doing so from “an official perch, inserted into
the post by Florida governor Ron Desantis”.
Specifically, Hiltzik points to Ladapo’s approach to the Florida measles
outbreak, noting:
“His approach includes downplaying the need for children to be vaccinated and allowing parents to make their own decisions about sending even unvaccinated children to schools experiencing an outbreak”.
In other words a policy that is as reckless
and insane as Trump’s advice (in 2020)
that people should drink bleach to avert a Covid 19 infection. No, you can’t
make this shit up, including David Simmons’ nonsense that Dr. Fauci is a “confirmed
liar.”
This has led columnist Hiltzik to now reference what he calls “herd
stupidity” which appears to be taking over millions of brains, especially with
Trump and the Reeps on the rise with disinformation. Connected with this is “Brandolini’s
Law” coined in 2013 by an Italian software engineer named Alberto Brandolini
which ‘cleaned up’ states:
“The amount of energy needed to refute B.S. is an order
of magnitude greater than that needed to produce it.”
Which I have found abundantly applies simply to the climate
change denial popping up in the high IQ societies like Mensa and Intertel. Where none of the denizens seems to accept if
they don’t have a grounding in thermal physics then they are spouting B.S. Same
applies to vaccine denial.
As for Robert F. Kennedy Jr. he is also part of the quack universe and enterprise. Kennedy alone, in Hiltzik’s parlance:
“has allowed his dangerous anti-vaccine hogwash to be mainstreamed into the body politic like an IV drip of strychnine.”
Adding:
“His pitch so bristles with disinformation and pseudo-science that it’s been disavowed by virtually his entire family”.
That disavowal
includes a pathetic 2013 book that claimed polio was not caused by a
virus. That despite the fact we know the
critical Salk vaccine introduced in the 1950s finally brought the crippling
disease under control. (I still recall taking the oral vaccine in 1956.)
The fact is, as Hiltzik showed,Polio had become a massive threat to public health in the 1940s-50s. The per capita infection rate in the U.S. alone reached 87.2 per 100,000 in 1952 sending tens of thousands of children to the hospital and killing a half million people per year worldwide. Jonas Salk’s polio vaccine underwent a massive trial involving 1.6 million children and was licensed in 1955. Salk became an international hero for refusing to patent the vaccine or profiting from its distribution.
By 1960 the cases had declined to 2,525 in the U.S. with
only 230 deaths. In our modern era polio has almost disappeared thanks to the
vaccine. The same success applies to the
subduing of measles with cases decreasing from 763,000 in 1958 to 22,231 cases
in 1968 a few years after the vaccine became available. So vaccines DO work, we
have the proof!
The question remains how do we deal with the herd stupidity,
including amongst the high IQ cognoscenti, related to vaccine disinformation.
The best antidote as Hiltzik notes may be this downloadable book:
Practical playbook for addressing health misinformation (centerforhealthsecurity.org)
This 65 page easy read “amounts to a road map for identifying misinformation and disinformation” in the words of Michael Hiltzik. Also, for applying the best strategies for counteracting this mind virus before it spreads. That means “pre-bunking” false information before it spreads, as well as highlighting the motivations of the anti-science propagandists.
See Also:
The Intelligent Irrationalists: Why So Many High IQ Folks Deny Sound Science
And:
History of polio vaccination (who.int)
And:
And:
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