A.k.a. Sean David Cohen (real name)
S.D. Wells is a Mike Adams minion who writes for the crank website NaturalNews, one of the craziest (and most popular) conspiracy websites on the Internet. Wells’s contributions are characterized by the website’s trademark instantiation of the Dunning-Kruger effect, paranoia, complete lack of understanding of science, and complete lack of comprehension of how evidence, confirmation and reasoning works.
Wells is, unsurprisingly, a hardcore antivaccine conspiracy theorist, who is unafraid to deploy any and of the classic antivaccine talking points and PRATTs, regardless of how silly or thoroughly refuted they are, with perhaps a particular fondness for variations on the toxins gambit. Indeed, Wells is responsible for what might be some of the most ludicrous versions of the toxins gambit ever used by the anti-vaccine movement, which is no small feat. One thing is easily refuted nonsense about Polysorbate 80 and aluminum, but did you know that the HPV vaccine might expose you to up to 10 mcg of sodium chloride, for instance? We suspect that Wells is not entirely aware of what sodium chloride is, and he is certainly not aware that the amount in question is 1/240,000 of recommended daily limit for sodium chloride intake (or at least he expects his readers not to be aware of this). Of course, Wells pretends to be (and might of course be) entirely unaware of all the large studies showing that the HPV vaccine is safe; in Wells’s fantasy world “not one single vaccine ever produced that is recommended by the CDC today has ever been proven safe or effective. Why? They dont have to prove it. All they have to do is scare the living hell out of everyone using propaganda, and its worked for 75 years.” For in Wells’s alternative fantasy world all the science, all the clinical trials and large studies, and all the epidemiological studies showing that vaccines are safe and effective just never happened. Wells even points out that, for MMRV, “they’ve added monosodium L-glutamate, neomycin, and MRC-5 cells.” It is almost as if Wells doesn’t know that the cells used to grow the virus aren’t actually put into the vaccine itself, but that confusion would be too silly to attribute even to him, wouldn’t it?
Or what about recombinant human albumin? As Wells interprets it, “human albumin is the protein portion of blood from pooled human venous plasma and when injected causes fever, chills, hives, rash, headache, nausea, breathing difficulty, and rapid heart rate. Injecting ‘pooled blood’ can result in a loss of body cell mass and cause immunodeficiency virus infection, or contain SV40, AIDS, cancer or Hepatitis B from drug addicts.” It’s hard to make sense of the reasoning unless you interpret him as thinking that pooled human venous plasma or pooled blood is added to vaccines. Apparently the “recombinant” part went missing somewhere along the way, but that would certainly not be the only part undermining any claim by Wells to possess a minimum of intellect (or integrity, or honesty) in that passage.
Wells is also an anti-fluoridation conspiracy theorist. After all, “drinking chemicals” is (apparently) a cause of cancer, and “[m]ost tap water contains sodium fluoride (not the organic fluoride they want you to believe is in there). Sodium fluoride is a toxic by-product of the chemical industrial complex of China, and is exported to the USA to fuel the cancer industry.” And rest assured: “This is not a hypothesis or conspiracy theory. There are literally hundreds of videos” supporting his claim.
Here is Wells mongering conspiracy theories about the human genome project. As Wells sees it, the government spent over $3 billion and enormous efforts to sequence the human genome, only to bury the results to keep people from finding out about “natural cures” for cancer and Alzheimer’s disease.
Diagnosis: Wild-eyed conspiracy theorist, scared shitless (or at least out to scare you shitless) by things he consistenly doesn’t even begin to comprehend or understand. Indeed, we can almost sympathize: imagine being so profoundly ignorant and confused about how the world around you works – we imagine it would be scary. And Wells’s lack of understanding of human physiology and medicine and – not the least – the language used to describe it, is striking even for wild-eyed conspiracy theorists – he really doesn’t have the faintest idea. Which, of course, is just as well when you’re writing for NaturalNews.