The vast majority of anti-vaccine ‘experts’ are, at best, people with some competence in areas far removed from anything related to vaccines. Ashley Everly, however, presents herself as “a toxicologist and a mother”, and since a toxicologist might actually possess some not irrelevant expertise, her anti-vaccine claims have been treated with some authority in antivaccine circles. Of course, Everly has no degree in toxicology beyond a BS. What she has, is the experience of being the mother of a child she has convinced herself is vaccine injured and a fear of toxins. (She is also – and nevertheless – ‘toxicology consultant’ to the anti-vaccine conspiracy group Health Freedom Idaho.) And her toxicology ‘research’, such as her conclusion that aluminum adjuvants in vaccines cause autism (it doesn’t) has not been published on anything but anti-vaccine websites and facebook.
If nothing else, her book and website The Vaccine Guide provides a good illustration of the nature of her ‘research’; it consists of collecting screenshots of cherry-picked studies, articles, and webpages, where Everly highlights passages that can be used to spin in an antivaccine manner or be used to look like they fit anti-vaccine conclusions if you don’t look too closely or know enough of the context to judge their validity. Do you, for instance, think she understands – or wants to help her readers understand – what ‘unavoidably unsafe’ means in legal contexts?
A major section of her website is the Vaccine Ingredients/Excipients/Contaminants section (discussed in some detail here), which tries to push several of the variants of toxins gambits that have been promoted by anti-vaccine activists over the years; and yes, it is indeed striking that someone calling themselves ‘toxicologist’ appears to be unaware that the dose makes the poison. Real and reliable information on vaccine ingredients paints a strikingly different picture than the one Everly is trying to paint.
She also has sections on (screenshots of) vaccine package inserts and on the most favored anti-vaccine trope of them all, shedding. Indeed, as Everly sees it, vaccines are not only unsafe (false), but ineffective (false), and she provides numerous links to non-relevant articles (like the one discussed here), to push her point. Her website also pushes various types of quackery, including naturopathy and chiropractic.
Diagnosis: A relatively typically clueless anti-vaccine activist who presents herself as – and may genuinely believe her position to be – science-based. But although Everly’s efforts are pretty incompetent, she seems to have managed to gain considerable influence among conspiracy-minded people in her parts of the US, and she is far from harmless.
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