jake crosby: the boy who cried pharma shill
Sometimes, skeptical bloggers like to use a little snark to demonstrate our points. Oh sure, we get quite a bit of complaints about our tone and pleas to cut down on sarcasm from people who believe that civility is just as important as the facts of the matter, if not more. As I’ve said before, however, tone is overrated when dealing with today’s cranks. And even more importantly, those snarky, offhanded jokes we make really can manage to preempt the cranks’ future stunts. Why don’t we look back at a post about why anti-vaccination activists will never get the macro vaccinated vs. non vaccinated study they claim to want, and how they will instantly try to reject it the minute its results fail to support their beliefs about vaccines, and please allow me the minor indulgence of quoting myself for just a moment here…
Even if someone actually does such a cruel and unethical study and confirms that vaccines really are beneficial, they’ll find a way to reject it. One of a myriad of the hacks they employ will find that the uncle of a cousin of a friend of one of the nurses who worked with the study group was once a salesman for a pharmaceutical company, or something like that, and dismiss the entire effort out of hand as more propaganda from vaccine makers, manipulated by their secret agents.
You might consider this bit of hyperbole as just creative license on my part, but Age of Autism muckraker, Jake Crosby, apparently decided to take it as a challenge and present cancer researcher and skeptical blogger Dr. Dave Gorski as a secret agent of Big Pharma. Crosby’s logic, or lack thereof, says that because Wayne State University got research grants from Sanofi-Aventis, which makes vaccines, then Dr. Gorski must’ve surely got a kickback from a pharmaceutical company. Even though Gorski’s specialty is breast cancer. Which has zero, zilch, nada, to do with vaccines if you happen to know anything about anatomy. But that’s Crosby’s game. He’s the appointed AofA boy-who-cried-pharma-shill and this is exactly what he does with every article he’s written for J.B. Handley. Because he doesn’t know or understand anything about basic medicine, thinks of himself as a great investigative journalist, and sees conspiracies everywhere he goes, Jake tries to link anyone to a big pharmaceutical company to then play the pharma shill gambit and dismiss anything and everything said as a bunch of pharma sponsored lies without ever once having to tackle a scientific fact. As put by Steve Novella…
David does not get research grant money from Sanofi-Aventis or any pharmaceutical company. He has not received any pharmaceutical money at all in 14 years which is somewhat unusual for an academic medical researcher. He has never done vaccine research. He has never been paid to consult for vaccine, lecture about vaccines, or express an opinion about vaccines. … But according to Jake everyone salaried by any university that has ever received money from any pharmaceutical company that has ever produced a vaccine is a shill for the vaccine industry.
Poisoning the well is the easy way out and without any competence in the topics at stake and with only hatred and fear to guide them, anti-vaccination activists have to resort to demonizing their opposition, threats to sue their critics into silence, and comment policies which either censor any and all dissent on their blogs, or edit debates to hide any scientifically valid takedowns of their arguments. And just to go that extra crank mile, Jake actually tried to scare Dr. Gorski with ominous threats of “reveling his secret pharma connections.” Despite a very thorough and detailed rebuttal to his notions in public, Jake still went ahead with his asinine third rate conspiracy theory in which his only proof was a leap of logic that tars anyone who can be even indirectly linked to pharmaceutical companies. If his standards for outing someone as a supposed pharma shill are so low, I might as well be on the anti-vaxers blacklist because as a sophomore in college I applied for a freelance web design job at Merck and GSK. Surely, all my posts on vaccines must now be discarded as a smokescreen by an insidious agent of Big Pharma, regardless of the science I try to present. Or at least this seems to be Jake Crosby’s mindset as he writes what he no doubt thinks are feats of investigative journalism at its finest, or as we should probably call them, games of Six Degrees of Big Pharma.
