Steven Higgs is a photographer, author, former editor and publisher at The Bloomington Alternative and journalist for a variety of outlets, including Counterpunch. Higgs is also an antivaccine activist, and many of his articles have, over the years, been pushing antivaccine propaganda, usually in the form of reports on complaints from antivaccine organizations, like SafeMinds, and portraits of various leaders in the antivaccine movement, like JB Handley. The Handley portraits and Higgs’ angle is discussed in some detail here. In particular, Higgs has been pushing the myth that vaccines cause autism, and he makes sure to cover all the standard gambits, like blaming thimerosal and pushing Generation Rescue’s idea that nations with higher vaccination rates have higher autism rates (and that vaccination does not correlate with lower childhood mortality) based on one of the most incompetent “studies” ever done.
Higgs describes his approach to the issue rather well himself: “I’ve spent most of the past 28 years journalistically investigating conflicts between environmental victims and experts in the relevant fields. And, I can say without qualification, the victims have been right and the experts wrong in every significant story I’ve covered. I can’t think of a single exception,” and he is apparently going to make damn sure vaccines ain’t gonna be an exception either: or, in other words, since medical scientists clearly agree that vaccines don’t cause autism, they must be wrong. At least it is hard to argue with something like that. This one at least tries to pick apart some of the layers of anger, nonsense and motivated reasoning that grounds Higgs’s efforts.
Diagnosis: Though pretty dumb, most of the antivaccine content from Steven Higgs’ hand seems to be pretty old, and his current stuff seems to be mostly concerned with travelling and photography. Maybe he has come to his senses?
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