Monday, March 23, 2015

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?

3 comments:

jrkrideau said...

[b]“This leads to a paradoxical situation whereby measles in highly immunized societies occurs primarily among those previously immunized,” Dr. Poland stated.[/b]

Where the devil did he get that? I had a look at Poland's 2012 paper and it is certainly not apparent from Table 1 although if one counts the 1 shots as a complete immunization which we know is false then you might get something but not what Solomon is saying.

Other than that all he is saying is that Dr. Poland feels that we have a good vaccine but we could make it better. Gee, I've never heard a scientist say anything like that!

Carl said...

Solomon is a climate change denier as well. I'd say he has some pretty strong anti science views in general.

jrkrideau said...

@Carl
I don't remember where I read it, but someone said a couple of years ago that Solomon was such a technophobe that whenever a reporter had a tech or science oriented story for the National Post Solomon would run in panic to the editor demanding it be spiked.

Probably an exaggeration but I like the picture :)