No, it never stops. Teresa Conrick is yet another antivaxxer and conspiracy theorist, and she is associated with the antivaccine groupHealth Choice and writes for the antivaccine blog Age of Autism. Conrick, for the most part, employs the same oldlies and PRATTs antivaxxers tend to use to sow fear, uncertainty and doubt about vaccines that she has, and they have, on no good evidence whatsoever already decided are dangerous and worthless – and she appeals to the same old, groundless conspiracy theories to try to explain away why evidence from substantial and careful studies show the opposite of what she wants them to show.
Her reaction to the launch of Vaxelis, discussed here, is a case in point. Vaxelis, FDA-approved in 2018, was thoroughly tested (the FDA evaluated six clinical trials, two of which encompassed nearly 4,000 children in the US, and found no serious side effects). Conrick predictably concluded that it was basically untested, that serious side-effects were (or were going to be) covered up, that the manufacturers paid off the FDA, and that the vaccine was launched over the holidays so that people wouldn’t notice. Then she appealed to scary-sounding ingredients and what she deems to be ‘toxins’, which in real life are utterly harmless in doses many orders of magnitude bigger than those found in vaccines (besides, Vaxelis was thoroughly tested with those ingredients, so the toxins gambit would be moot anyways). Her rant is instructive, given that antivaxxers often claim to be not antivaxx but pro-safe vaccines and Conrick clearly illustrates why that claim is a lie: No amount of safety testing or evidence would be enough for Conrick, even in principle. Here is Conrick complaining, in 2019, how nothing has changed over the last decade: the label ‘anti-vaccine’ is still “being used to brand us all as kooks and paranoid conspiracy theorists” and the medical establishment is still claiming that vaccines are safe, effective based on testing and evidence. No, she doesn’t take the hint.
And of course, being unable to discuss the scientific evidence on scientific terms and get the results she wants, Conrick is quick to launch into conspiracy mongering, in particular the shill gambits. And the conspiracy is a huge one: “there are many groups who have been fighting hard to suppress the fact that vaccines can cause autism [they can’t]. They are people in the media, in public health, in medical organizations, in vaccine development and patents, in universities with autism gene chasing grants, in the public sector (NIH, CDC, AAP, et al) in the private sector, (pharmaceutical companies) and many in between”. You can identify them easily by using Conrick’s own method for identifying people with evil intentions: Does the person or institution in question agree with me? Responding for instance to Trine Tsouderos’s criticism of various quack treatments for autism endorsed by the antivaccine movement, Conrick managed to discover that Tsouderos’s sister worked for a company that did contract work for academic institutions and government agencies, including NIH, Harvard, HHS, and the Department of Defense; clearly, Tsouderos cannot be trusted on the issue of vaccines! And oh, not only does vaccines lead to autism, as Conrick falsely sees it; influenza vaccines are probably the cause of Alzheimer’s, too, mostly because autism, as Conrick delusionally sees it, is kind of like autism and both are “A MYSTERY”. The level of detail in the analysis behind her suggestion is telling.
Conrick isn’t just antivaccine, though; she is also anti-psychiatry and at least sometimes toying with mental illness denialism. In her post ‘Pharmagunddon: School Shooters and Psych Meds’, discussed here, she promptly blames the Sandy Hook shooting on Big Pharma, mostly backed up by selected examples of mass shooters who were on psychiatric drugs. Of course, as an antivaxxer, it is hardly surprising that Conrick struggles with the distinction between correlation and causation – it should be unnecessary to point out (though Conrick shows that it isn’t unnecessary) that a correlation between using psychiatric ills and mental illness and a correlation between mass shootings and mental illness doesn’t imply a causal relation between psychiatric drugs and mass shootings. The actual evidence for a connection is discussed here. Conrick’s evidence, however, is unsurprisingly little more than reports of adverse events in the FAERS database (yes: it’s roughly like VAERS, and antivaxxers do not understandVAERS).
Like many antivaxxers, Conrick is the parent of an autistic child whom she thinks – see the discussion of how to misunderstand the correlation/causation distinction above – is vaccine damaged. And Conrick knows that her daughter was damaged by heavy metal poisoning from looking into her daughter’s eyes – apparently the eyes changed color from “beautiful blue” to an apparently less attractive shade, and the cause, according to Conrick and no evidence whatsoever: mercury! Apparently mercury (thimerosal) in her daughter’s vaccines changed her eye color. How she tried to back up the hypothesis with evidence is telling (basically how chronic exposure to different chemicals than ethylmercury, such as elemental mercury vapor, could have discoloring effects under different circumstances). This one is also telling when it comes to the cognitive resources Conrick employs to orient herself in the world.
Diagnosis: Among the more wild-eyed gibbering idiots in the antivaccine clown movement, at least among the parts of that movement that are sufficiently cognitively functioning to organize themselves. A danger to herself and others.