1. Organic Consumers Association, and the groups it funds, like US Right To Know and the lawyer-run partisan attack site Sourcewatch, may be in a lot of trouble. Shortly after being revealed as the financial source for promoting anti-vaccine sentiment, they have now been shown to be working in collusion with the propaganda arm of the Kremlin.
ACSH In The Media
A legal document in California suggests the American Council is why $1 billion in environmental fundraising is failing to convince Americans their food is unsafe. Our president is too modest to agree – but it's a terrific compliment.
Science advocates had been insisting that this weekend's marches were not anti-Republican. While the majority of people attending had an earnest interest in science, they were also duped into believing science was suddenly in peril. Here's a look at that, and some other events that concerned us.
Your donations at work: Here are our media appearances, including some bizarre conspiracy tales about science.
Emmy-winning TV anchor Ernie Anastos kicks off his new show with this "Doctors on Call" segment. Urologic oncologist Dr. David Samadi & Dr. Jamie Wells, our Director of Medicine, answer the public's questions.
It was another week of us doing what we do best: separating health scares from health threats. So when we get pushback from those in the health-scare business – a shifty faction that includes academic journalism professors and a former bureaucrat who insists checking your email will give you brain cancer – it's time for us to get busy.
1. Conspiracy Fantasy Camp
A rather bizarre article mentioned us in the Duluth News-Tribune - a small-town doctor tells our Dr. Josh Bloom, who testified at the FDA on the opioid crisis and brought fentanyl to national attention, that he didn't know what he was talking about when it comes to opiods, and then goes off into a conspiracy after spending five seconds on Google and finding a wiki entry on the political activism site Sourcewatch which manufactured all kinds of stuff that anti-science people believe about science. He writes (bold mine):
ACSH's Director of Medicine, Dr. Jamie Wells, traveled to Washington, DC to tape at Al Jazeera for a live television program. It engaged a global discussion on sickle cell anemia, its perils and the advances in gene therapy that are showing great promise for this genetic disease.
1. Nature magazine covered our ranking of the good and bad science journalism sites last week, highlighting our concern that "Not only is it susceptible to the same sorts of biases that afflict regular journalism, but it is uniquely vulnerable to outrageous sensationalism”.
RealClearScience was even more blunt. “Much of science reporting is a morass of ideologically driven junk science, hyped research, or thick, technical jargon that almost no one can understand”.
Our Best and Worst Science chart sure got a reaction – mostly from those sites selling a veil of science legitimacy while providing very little.
We were all over media last week, including in not-so-flattering ways, thanks to a cabal of anti-science activists.
Kooky social authoritarian activists don't want the public to read science - it ruins their business model. So they want us banned.