#2805: Linda Elkins

Anti-vaccine activists have long tried to argue, with no basis in fact, that unvaccinated children are healthier than children who has been vaccinated according to schedule. And since, according to them, no such study has been carried out by the establishemt (that claim is abundantly false; real studies just don’t yield the conclusions antivaxxers would have liked them to yield), they do their own, so that they can violate any methodological constraint and contort the data as they like. An infamous example is the hilariously inept 2016 Anthony Mawson study (co-authors Brian D. Ray, Azad R. Bhuiyan and Binu Jacob should also be noted as untrustworthy pseudoscientists if their names ever come up in other contexts), which was so incompetent, dishonest and bad that it was formally “unpublished”, after having been provisionally accepted, even by the bottom-feeding journal Frontiers in Public Health (which is published by Frontiers Media, which is on Beall’s list of predatory publishers and which has also published – before retracting – e.g. a study on chemtrails).

 

But how did that “study” get provisionally accepted by Frontiers in the first place? It turns out that Frontiers was using a too-literal interpretation of ‘peer-review’ for such a piece of shoddy pseudoscience and sent it to Linda Mullin Elkins. And Elkins is far from being a reputable scientific authority on anything but a chiropractor at Life University, a non-accredited pseudo-educational business billing itself as a “Holistic Health University”; Life University offers studies “within the fields of Chiropractic, Functional Kinesiology, Vitalistic Nutrition, Positive Psychology, Functional Neurology and Positive Business” . Indeed, Elkins is not only a doctor of chiropractic (DC), but “DACFP, DGSS, FGCSS, FICPA, CACFP”, and there is little that signals dingbat pseudoscience more immediately than altmed alphabet soups; even more worrisomely, Elkins has apparently focused on pediatric chiropractic care.

 

Diagnosis: No, we haven’t determined what Linda Elkins’s personal views on vaccines may be, but regardless of that, she’s i) a woo-practitioner affiliated with a quack institution, and ii) partially responsible for promulgating antivaccine conspiracy theories, and that’s enough for us.