Lawrence Solomon, Anti-Vaxxer: Part Bazillion

Enter Lawrence Solomon. You remember Lawrence Solomon, don’t you? He’s what I referred to last summer as a rising star in the antivaccine movement. A conservative columnist for the Financial Post, when first we met him he was complaining about a “conservative failure of skepticism” on vaccines because, apparently, conservatives haven’t been antivaccine enough for his liking. (Maybe he’s happier with more recent developments.) Indeed, Solomon used some seriously brain dead arguments about herd immunity indistinguishable from the nonsense they regularly spew over at the antivaccine crank blog.

I've said it before; The Star published one piece suggesting that Gardisil might have some hidden dangers and the whole media shit.  Quite properly, too, and The Star issued a grovelling apology. Because The Star is a class act where people worry  about accuracy and journalistic standards.  What kind of crap newspaper must The National/Financial Post be to offer this guy an ongoing platform for spouting dangerous gibberish.  Do these people have absolutely no shame?

The National Post Should Fire That Anti-Vaxxer Prick

National Post columnist Lawrence Solomen is now running an anti-vaxxer website.  You can see it here.  This is from the "About us" section:

VaccineFactCheck, headed by Lawrence Solomon, is a project of Consumer Policy Institute.

The "Consumer Policy Institute" is also just more Solomon, another part of his "Energy Probe" network of  astro-turf groups pushing various corporate causes.

Now, Solomon probably wouldn't call it an anti-vaxxer site; he'd probably just claim he was trying to "teach the controversy".  But that is, of course, bullshit.  And after that whole thing with The Star's Gardisil article I thought the whole nation had come to the conclusion that this kind of ant-vaccine  fear mongering was beyond the pale.  But not the National Post, apparently.

So here's a call out to Andrew Coyne, who is apparently some kind of editorial big-wig over there at the NP these days:  fire Lawrence Solomen.  Ditch the kook.  Show some class.