#2849: Edward 'Ted' Fogarty

And back to the anti-vaccine activists! Ted Fogarty is a radiologist – indeed, he is former Chairman of Radiology at the University of North Dakota School of Medicine and Assistant Professor at the Heart of America Medical Center – who has deluded himself and perhaps some fellow anti-vaccine conspiracy theorists into thinking that he understands and knows something about vaccines, all to the embarrassment of his profession. And it doesn’t help that he is vocal about expressing his misunderstandings, too, having for instance composed a silly antivaccine rant, posted to the website of the anti-vaccine organization Informed Choice Washington (yet another corollary of Badger’s Law; they do want choice but are excruciatingly resistant to the informed part) in the format of an open letter to the Washington State legislature. And the letter, Philosophical Exemptions as Behavioral Economic Signals of Fraud: An Open Letter is a textbook pseudoscience rant in which Fogarty for instance

 

-       highlights radiologists’ role in diagnosing ASIA, which is a fake disease invented by anti-vaccine activist Yehuda Schoenfield that Fogarty characterizes as a “well described” vaccine injury that he, as a radiologist, is well positioned to diagnose.

-       not only characterizes influenza vaccines as “covert biological warfare” due to what he wrongly perceives as “lack of any safety studies”, but the flu vaccine program as something that can be used to covertly spread slow viruses or prions in the population.

-       posits that many cases of traumatic brain injury are really due to aluminum from vaccines; Fogarty has no evidence for his false claim, but does have Gish gallops, technobabble and findings that have nothing to do with his hypothesis but may sound like they do if you don’t look closely.

 

Fogarty has also tried to argue that mRNA vaccines are “manipulating genomics at a ribosomal level,” which anyone passingly familiar with molecular biology will immediately recognize as meaningless but which his target audience (not people with passing familiarity with molecular biology) will not.

 

As for background, Fogarty has an autistic son whose autism he has wrongly convinced himself is a vaccine injury; more specifically, his son “has an epigenetic risk of neuroimmunologic and neurodevelopmental problems related to metals handling in his body due to Methylene Tetrahydrofolate Reductase genes.” And yes, that is MTHFR pseudoscience in its most crackpot fashion.

 

Nevertheless, Fogarty has, because he does have credentials that might initially sound relevant to those not in the know, been a somewhat sought-after figure in antivaxx circles. He has apparently been able to serve as expert witness for parents bringing action for “vaccine injury”, and serves on the editorial board of James Lyons-Weiler’s antivaccine pseudojournal Science, Public Health Policy & the Law.

 

And of course, Fogarty’s pseudoscience and denialism doesn’t limit itself to vaccines. Fogarty has long been familiar in alternative health circles for his advocacy of hyperbaric oxygen therapy for more or less any condition, including Alzheimer’s and advanced COVID-19, at his business, MoPlatte Hyperbarics. He is also anti-mask, of course.

 

Diagnosis: More antivaxx brainrot, and unlike what Fogarty claims, hyperbaric oxygen therapy doesn’t help. But Fogarty is far from a no-one in antivaccine conspiray circles insofar as he has, in addition to a penchant for conspiracy thinking and not being afraid to proclaim loudly on issues he doesn’t understand, has some largely irrelevant credentials.

 

Hat-tip: Respectful Insolence