Finally, a few words on Dr. Bossche himself and the rhetorical tricks he uses in his manifesto. I am sometimes accused of attacking the person instead of simply addressing the arguments, but appraising the messenger and the phrasing of the message can be very useful.
Dr. Geert Vanden Bossche is a veterinary doctor who also has a Ph.D. in virology. His
LinkedIn profile lists several jobs in upper management positions, including a three-year stint as the senior program officer for vaccine discovery at the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation. He is no stranger to vaccines. His academic publications essentially stop in 1995, except for
one 2017 article about his natural killer cell vaccine idea published in a journal belonging to a publishing group, OMICS Group Inc, that has been called “predatory” and was
sued by the Federal Trade Commission for deceptive practices.
When you read Dr. Bossche’s open letter, you should pick up on the Galileo gambit, which is when you infer that because Galileo was laughed at but ultimately correct, your laughable idea must also be correct. You should pick up on his apocalyptic language (“there is no time to spare”, “if we are committed to perpetuating our species”) and turns of phrases that would be more at home in a superhero movie (“guardians of mankind”). You should pick up on the tactic too often used by anti-vaccination promoters: “I am all but an antivaxxer.” You should subsequently pick up on the types of people who grab this manifesto and endorse it for their audience, people like
Robert F. Kennedy, Jr and
Del Bigtree, known figureheads of the modern anti-vaccination movement.
And if you have been at this for a while, like Dr. David Gorski who has followed and denounced the anti-vaccination movement since time immemorial, you may even pick up on similarities with the disgraced Andrew Wakefield. “Dr. Vanden Bossche is using an eerily similar argument about COVID-19 vaccines and SARS-CoV-2,” he
wrote for the blog Science-Based Medicine, “to the one used by Wakefield about [the measles-mumps-rubella] vaccine and measles. Actually, it’s not just eerily similar, it’s almost exactly the same, namely that immunity from vaccines is an evolutionary selective pressure just like the evolutionary selective pressure from antibiotics to which the organism can become resistant.”
https://www.mcgill.ca/oss/article/c...nce/doomsday-prophecy-dr-geert-vanden-bossche
