Sunday, October 27, 2013

#771: Mary Holland


Mary Holland is a lawyer and antivaxx champion who attempts to use legal arguments to bolster the case for the thoroughly discredited idea that vaccines cause autism. She is on the board of editors of the antivaxx and crackpot woo magazine The Autism File and coauthor (with Louise Kuo Habakus) of the anti-vaccine propaganda piece Vaccine Epidemic: How Corporate Greed, Biased Science, and Coercive Government Threaten Our Human Rights, Our Health, and Our Children, an astonishing display of paranoid delusions and crackpottery gone off to conspiracy land. Holland also does “studies”. Not actual, scientific, controlled studies, mind, but badly mangled rants about the evils of vaccination using anecdotes, goalpost moving, JAQing off, and seemingly deliberate mischaracterizations, in particular “Unanswered Questions from the Vaccine Injury Compensation Program: A Review of Compensated Cases of Vaccine-Induced Brain” (with Louis Conte, Robert Krakow, and Lisa Colin). Tellingly, the article mentioned is disguised as a paper on law, in order to avoid accountability with regard to the authors’ mangling of science.

Holland (with Habakus) also runs the Autism Action Network, which were – for instance – responsible for a New York rally to protest Bill Gates’s financial support for vaccination campaigns, and included a rather shameful attempt to promote their book.

Diagnosis: A persistent and zealous enemy of evidence, reason, and reality, who has the influence to do real harm. 

1 comment: