#1004: Tim O'Shea

A.k.a. The Doctor Within

Tim O’Shea might not be among the most famous altmed practitioners in the US, but he is surely one of the most consistently delusionally wrong (and has been awarded with a substantial presence at whale.to for his efforts). O’Shea is into, well, pretty much everything and anything. He is for instance a germ theory denialist. That’s right. Bacteria and viruses don’t cause disease. Evidence? We still get sick, and there are companies that earn money off of antibiotics – and, to make sure no one would think of him as anything but a loon, O’Shea also claims that Pasteur recanted his theory on his deathbed, and then Deepak Chopra has, according to O’Shea, also shown that there is little association between germs and disease. Actually conducting research couldn’t fit worse with O’Shea’s agenda, so you get none of that, of course.

Primarily, O’Shea is an anti-vaccinationist, Director of the World Association for Vaccine Education (WAVE), and author of Vaccination is Not Immunization (praised by David Ayoub). As you’d expect O’Shea holds vaccines responsible for all sorts of ills, from autism to peanut allergy (as well as measles), and as you’d also expect, he doesn’t have much idea about how to find or use evidence or research. Primarily, his “evidence” is his own use of his good common sense (that sense that also led him to germ theory denial), and various appeals to perceived but undocumented correlations.

The board of directors for WAVE – which is a significant player in the antivaxx movement – includes Boyd Haley, Sherri Tenpenny, HIV denialist Andrew Maniotis, Marc Girard (another whale.to mainstay), Dan N. Schultz, Eileen Nicole Simon, KP Stoller, and Mary Tocco (yet another whale.to hero).

Diagnosis: Absolutely astonishing madman, who is fully unable to distinguish evidence from his own powers of intuition – which seem to be calibrated toward giving him idiotic results.