#1400: Leslie Botha

And still they come. Now, we have encountered SANEVax before, but to sum up: SANEVax is an anti-vaccine group specializing in stupid misunderstandings and lunatic conspiracies about Gardasil, often by way of toxin gambits. Leslie Botha is their Vice-President of Public Relations. She also has a radio show (and website) called Holy Hormones Honey!, which is … not a place to turn to for medical advice. The show is an outlet for anti-vaccine propaganda and “complementary and alternative medicine” quackery. The pitch? Well, here she claims that “[i]f one does the quick math, it becomes obvious that nearly 10% of the women who received the Gardasil vaccination experienced an adverse reaction,” based on 7802 reports of [possibly] adverse reactions out of eight million vaccines given. It is not an isolated math slip incident. And Botha’s medical information is not better than her math. She has even promoted Andrew Moulden and appeared with Mike Adams on the Alex Jones show. Heck, she has even been involved in the Shaken Baby Syndrome denialist movement.

Diagnosis: Oh, there are plenty of these, and Botha is a standard case: utterly confident in her own delusions, and completely uninterested in anything that would go against the conclusions she has intuited her way into. And of course: completely, insanely wrong.