We follow one anti-vaccine crank with another. Louise Kuo Habakus is less powerful than Grossman, but quite a bit more unhinged. Habakus won the crackpot-and-lunacy organization Age of Autism’s “person of the year” award in 2009. She won it for “rallying vaccine advocates and concerned citizens in numbers that made the difference in the New Jersey governor's race, defeating Jon Corzine and carrying Chris Christie, the first candidate to go on record for vaccine choice, to victory” (AoA obviously entertains some delusions of grandeur). “Vaccine choice” means “vaccine denialism”, and Habakus’s stance is well covered here. She likes to talk about the vaccine gestapo.Her own website “Life Health Choices” is crammed with woo, strawmen and links to pseudoscience and conspiracy theories (she links to Mercola, for crying out loud). It is pretty transparently bad and would never have risen to notice were it not for the fact that certain news outlets sometimes seem to entertain an almost pathologic need to cover “both sides” of an issue regardless of whether that issue in fact has two legitimate sides.
Apart from her blog, Habakus gives lectures and talks on vaccines and other woo.
A good, concise primer on the Habakus-style anti-vaxxer is here.
Diagnosis: Not particularly original, but nevertheless scary peddler of disturbing woo and dangerous myths. Her influence is presumably a function of the influence of the despiccable Age of Autism organization, but she is notable enough nonetheless.
She's just out with a new book. It's as despiccable as anything else she's ever done.
ReplyDeleteHere is a video of Louise Kuo Habakus rocking out to "Vaccine Gestapo."
ReplyDeletehttp://vimeo.com/12094389
It's interesting. She now runs an organization called "Fearless Parent." In truth, they aren’t fearless at all because they are afraid of just about everything: vaccines, toxins, ( Reuben’s) monsters under the bed, vaccines, GMOs, governmental interference, toxins, SBM, gluten, vaccines and chronic illness- amongst a myriad of other threats to life, limb and sanity which are largely products of their own fevered, undisciplined imaginations.
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