William Gaunt is a retired naturopathic quack, anti-vaccine activist and contributor to the antivaccine organization Age of Autism. Gaunt is convinced, by his own gut and motivated reasoning, that vaccines are responsible for all sorts of death and destruction and, since all evidence shows they’re not, that there is a vast conspiracy among medical researchers to hide the truth; yes, those researchers know it, but “if you want to keep your job” you’d better shut up – apparently the CDC, a powerful global cabal, controls that narrative. The CDC’s motivations remain somewhat unclear – Gaunt is not the type of person who lets concerns about details get in the way of a conspiratorial narrative – but apparently he views them as having set the safeness and efficacy of vaccines as a religious tenet and real doctors and medical researchers (as opposed to naturopathic mavericks like himself and those who say things that agree with his gut) are their zealous drones. That this is how Gaunt thinks researchers operate tells you quite a bit about Gaunt and his level of familiarity with medical research.
For instance, Gaunt believes that“many infant deaths classified as SIDS are actually caused by vaccines”, a claim that is demonstrably false– indeed, the rate of SIDS fell dramatically in the 1990s, when antivaxxers like Gaunt like to claim that the vaccine schedule expanded dramatically, but to people like Gaunt, correlation is causation and inverse correlation is causation, too. According to Gaunt and – in his eyes– supported by some dishonestdumpster-diving into the VAERS database (and deliberate misinterpretation of the results) by anti-vaccine mainstay and psychologist Neal Z. Miller, there is, of coourse, a conspiracy afoot: You see, according to Gaunt, with the introduction of ICD-9 “vaccines were no longer one of the accepted causes of infant death and the coroner would be forced to choose another cause of death”, a claim that easily falsified by just checking with ICD-9 (or the subsequent ICD-10– Gaunt, for obvious reasons, don’t link to them; we do), and he sees that (imaginary) change as being motivated by the rollout of the “measles vaccine” to hide the costs; never mind that the MMR vaccine isn’t scheduled for an age long past the age when SIDS would occur anyways. Further support for his claims is a Vaccine Court decision that Gaunt thinks shows a connection because “the evidence must be overwhelming and irrefutable for the petitioner to have any chance of winning the case” (false), even though the case in question was overturnedbecause the original decision was “arbitrary and capricious”, ignored previous decisions and applied a too-low standard of proof to the case even for the low standards of the vaccine courts. He also repeats, among other standard antivaccine nonsense talking points, the lie that shaken baby syndrome is a “misdiagnosis for vaccine injury.”
Diagnosis: He’s old, and has not only wasted a whole life on nonsense and quackery and mindrot but actively devoted it to, presumably unwittingly, making the world a worse place. One can almost understand and empathize with a desperate need to cling to the myths and conspiracy theories that would whitewash such an ugly waste of a life. If there were any accounting to be done, he’d be in bad shape.