#731: Nick Haas

The legendary Ted Gunderson, erstwhile American Federal Bureau of Investigation Special Agent famous for handling the Marilyn Monroe and John F. Kennedy cases and major promoter of Satanic panic, chemtrail conspiracies, and the New World Order, decided to call it a day in July 2011. Nick Haas may be less colorful, but is just as clueless. Haas is one of the founders of the anti-vaccine, crank-nest Medical Voices, and president the International Medical Council on Vaccination (which counts, among others, Harold Buttram as a board member). Haas’s own educational background is in sales and logistics. His medical background is from the University of Google.

Haas is famous for challenging his opponents to live debates while being unwilling to answer critics in any other format – in particular, when Mark Crislip wrote a response to a particularly stupid naturopath screed (David Mihalovic, who will be covered later) – because in other formats evidence, reason and accountability might count more than rhetoric, falsehoods are more easily caught, and Gish gallops and similar tricks are harder to carry out. Indeed, challenges to public debates is a well-known favorite ploy of pseudo-scientists who have the evidence against them everywhere, and one suspects that is perfectly aware of this.

Haas himself has apparently made few specific statements about vaccines himself, leaving that job to his clueless crew of cranks, but his involvement with the organizations in question is enough to qualify him for inclusion in our Encyclopedia – particularly when the organizations team up with

the denialist crank of all denialist cranks, Mike Adams.

Diagnosis: Crank-promoter par excellence, and important facilitator for all things woo and denialist. Rather dangerous, really.