February 1, 2025
We launched the Pseudoscience Awards (“Pseudys,” see Fig. 1) in 2022 to celebrate our five-year anniversary of this blog site and to give added recognition and opprobrium to individuals or groups “for particularly egregious or outlandish, disastrously wrong, claims allegedly based on science, which have fueled massive harmful misinformation among the public.” It is time now for a new slate of awards, based on our posts from 2023 and 2024. We give three new one-time awards below, as well as two lifetime achievement awards for careers filled with repeated science denial or conspiracy promotion about subjects essential to public policy.
Project 2025:
Project 2025 is a 920-page report (see Fig. 2) prepared by the Heritage Foundation which, according to Donald Trump himself, is intended “to lay the groundwork and detail plans for exactly what our movement will do.” We have outlined its blanket denial of climate change in our post on The Increasing Partisan Divide in Trust in Science. The plan proposes to:
- Eliminate U.S. Department of Energy funding support for research on renewable energy, battery storage, and other efforts to improve climate resilience.
- Remove federal regulations on fossil fuels and greenhouse gases.
- Open up currently protected federal lands for drilling and excavation of oil.
- Halt attempts to change or update federal infrastructure to adapt to climate-induced threats, such as more frequent severe floods, wildfires, and extreme heat waves.
- Close down the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Association (NOAA), which the report labels as “one of the main drivers of the climate change alarm industry.”
- Eliminate the 2009 “endangerment” ruling by the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), which labeled greenhouse gases as a threat to public health.
- Withdraw the U.S. from all international climate accords.
We prefer to tie our one-time Pseudy awards to specific quotes from the awardees. For this purpose, we refer to a quote from Bethany Kozma, the former Deputy Chief of Staff at the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID) in the first Trump administration. In one of the training videos for Project 2025 Kozma said:
Bethany Kozma: “If the American people elect a conservative President, his administration will have to eradicate climate change references from absolutely everywhere.”
In short, Project 2025 is an alarming example of denying science one doesn’t like. The climate change sections of the report read as though written directly by the fossil fuel industry. Rather than even trying to refute any of the decades-long science that convincingly demonstrates the reality and danger of ongoing climate change, the proposal is simply to try to bury research on the issue (along with the Administration’s head in the sand) and pretend the dangers don’t exist, but merely constitute “alarmism.” Tell that to the millions of people who are already suffering from more frequent and severe climate-related disasters, such as the current wildfires engulfing Los Angeles. U.S. policies following Project 2025 would endanger not only Americans but the entire world. In addition they would eliminate millions of U.S. jobs in the new energy sector and stick a pin in an important driver of economic growth. As we wrote in our previous post: “the report advocates combating threatening natural processes with blanket denialism. Nature will not be impressed.”
Emma Posey Waters:
Members of the Christian Nationalist movement in the U.S. are flush with their success in getting the 1973 Roe v. Wade decision overturned by the Supreme Court and highly restrictive, in some cases downright draconian, anti-abortion laws passed in many states. For many members the next goal is to restrict access to contraception, especially hormonal contraceptives, in the U.S. They have engaged in a campaign to convince young women of the dangers of birth control methods that women worldwide have used willingly and successfully for some 60 years to gain control of their own reproductive freedom.
The campaign, however, threatens to expose the hypocrisy of many anti-abortion activists. Abortions result from unintended and unwanted pregnancies, while modern contraceptive methods are highly effective in preventing unintended pregnancies. We have shown in our previous post on this subject that there is strong evidence from lived experience in many countries, as well as from research projects, that providing access to modern contraceptives dramatically reduces abortion rates. Restricting access to contraception will increase the number of abortions, even in locations where abortion is very highly restricted. Indeed, Fig. 3 shows that the percentage of unintended pregnancies ending in abortion has increased steadily since 1990 even in countries that have very restrictive abortion laws.
So how are Christian Nationalists to sell contraceptive restrictions when they will increase the rate of procedures those same advocates have previously called murder of unborn children? Emma Posey Waters (Fig. 4) of the Independent Women’s Forum and the Heritage Foundation has attempted to solve this conundrum by outright lying about the evidence:
Emma Posey Waters: “increased access to birth control leads to increased abortions.”
Her claim is dead wrong on both scientific and logical grounds. It simply denies extensive evidence. Many other Christian Nationalists offer an even simpler explanation that all forms of non-natural contraception are forms of abortion because they violate so-called “personhood” laws that claim that life begins at conception. Life beginning at conception may be a viable philosophical stance adopted by some, but hardly all, religions; it took the Catholic Church 18 centuries to come to this view, when Pope Pius IX decided in 1869 that it was necessary in order to support the claim of Immaculate Conception. But it makes no sense as a legal doctrine because conception in vivo cannot be detected. Pregnancy can first be detected by emission of the hormone hCG when the embryo developed from a fertilized egg is successfully implanted in a woman’s uterine lining. That occurs typically 10-11 days after conception. Current U.S. federal law defines pregnancy as beginning at implantation, following this first detection. Personhood laws would, for example, define a non-viable ectopic pregnancy, where an embryo implants in the fallopian tubes rather than in the uterus, as a viable life (murdered by whom, exactly?).
The fertilization of a human egg can be detected when it is in vitro fertilization (IVF). So personhood laws would be likely (as in Alabama) to render IVF illegal, denying a popular method to address Christian Nationalists’ underlying goal of increasing Christian birth rates.
Dr. Peter McCullough:
The COVID-19 pandemic produced a wave of false or misleading claims on social media; we reviewed some of the most blatant in our blog post on COVID, The Disinformation Dozen. Even among this group, Texas cardiologist Dr. Peter McCullough stood out for the baseless and inflammatory statements he made regarding the pandemic.
At one time, McCullough was highly regarded in his field. He was Vice Chief of Internal Medicine at Baylor University Medical Center and a Senior Professor of Internal Medicine at the Texas A&M Health Sciences Center. About the time that the mRNA vaccines against COVID-19 were released, McCullough and collaborators recommended treating the virus with a protocol that included zinc lozenges, hydroxychloroquine, aspirin and antibiotics (later, ivermectin was added to this list). The editors of the American Journal of Medicine, where this protocol was published, later commented “What seemed reasonable last summer based on laboratory experiments subsequently has been shown to be untrue.” When subsequent large-scale clinical trials demonstrated that ivermectin was useless against COVID, McCullough responded “There’s absolutely no grounds for doctors and administrators … to deny patients ivermectin. There is a global collusion, specifically in U.S. hospitals, to cause as much harm and death as conceivable.”
Peter McCullough on the COVID mRNA vaccines: “Will go down in history as the biggest medical biological product safety catastrophe in human history, by far.”
Dr. McCullough further claimed that the dramatic reduction in COVID deaths was not due to the mRNA vaccines, but to his recommended at-home treatments for the disease. “We have saved millions of lives, spared millions and millions of hospitalizations,” McCullough asserted. He then claimed that the mRNA COVID vaccines would produce a wave of brain, cardiac, liver, lung and kidney injuries, predicting that the COVID vaccines “Will go down in history as the biggest medical biological product safety catastrophe in human history, by far.” In fact, the mRNA vaccines have proved highly effective in preventing hospitalization and death, and thus far have shown no major negative effects; and the researchers whose work enabled the development of mRNA vaccines were awarded the 2023 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine. So, McCullough’s advocacy for ivermectin and hydroxychloroquine and his baseless attacks on the COVID vaccines have not “saved millions of lives,” but rather have proved harmful to people who took his advice.
The American Board of Internal Medicine (ABIM) has revoked the board certification of Dr. McCullough for both internal medicine and cardiovascular disease. Presently, Peter McCullough is chief scientific officer of The Wellness Company. The owner of that company has allegedly invested in a dating site for anti-vaxxers and launched a brand of coffee aimed at “anti-woke” consumers. The Wellness Company also sells a supplement called “Ultimate Spike Detox,” which sells for $89.99 for 120 capsules. Dr. McCullough has richly deserved his Pseudy award.
Awards for lifetime achievement in pseudoscience
Robert F. Kennedy Jr. (Fig. 6) is a former environmental lawyer. As the founder and head of the Children’s Health Defense group, he has now spent decades promulgating claims that vaccines are unsafe and ineffective. In fact, vaccines are one of the safest and most effective medical treatments ever devised. Vaccines have been responsible for eradicating the deadly disease smallpox across the globe, and they have very nearly wiped out polio. Cases of measles in the U.S. declined dramatically after the measles vaccine was approved in 1963. A second dose of the vaccine was recommended after a brief spike in cases in 1989, and by 2000 it was declared that measles had been eliminated as an endemic disease in this country. Figure 7 shows measles cases in the U.S. as a function of time; clearly, the measles vaccine essentially eliminated endemic measles by the year 2000. However, a campaign led by Kennedy’s Children’s Health Defense group is leading to large numbers of people opting not to vaccinate for childhood diseases. This suggests that diseases such as measles, chickenpox, whooping cough, diphtheria and others are likely to make a comeback, particularly if RFK is confirmed as Secretary for Health and Human Services.
RFK Jr. has appeared in several of our blog posts about vaccinations and public health. He was one of the people we profiled in our discussion of anti-vaxxers in our post on Vaccinations. In March 2021, the Center for Countering Digital Hate issued a report that highlighted the work of various individuals in spreading misinformation on the Web. Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. was one of the most active in promoting false statements about vaccines, and he was included in our post The Disinformation Dozen about these individuals. More recently, after Kennedy had announced that he was running for President, we published a post Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., Conspiracy Theorist. That post reviewed RFK’s misinformation about vaccines, but in addition discussed several other conspiracy theories that he has espoused.
We have reviewed Robert F. Kennedy’s claims in various books he has written, including the 2023 book Vax-Unvax: Let the Science Speak (written with Brian Hooker), and the 2021 book The Real Anthony Fauci. His statements from these books and his public appearances demonstrate that he understands neither medicine nor science. He disseminates anecdotal evidence about vaccines and HIV/AIDS while he never mentions large controlled clinical studies that contradict his claims. He advocates “vitamin A and chicken soup” for measles, instead of the safe and effective measles-mumps-rubella (MMR) vaccine that eliminated endemic cases of measles in the U.S. (see Fig. 7). He further claims that vaccines “poisoned an entire generation of American children.”
Robert F. Kennedy Jr. on the polio vaccine: “98 million people who got that vaccine … and now you’ve had this explosion of soft tissue cancers in our generation that killed many, many, many, many more people than polio ever did.”
In spreading misinformation regarding vaccines, Kennedy collaborates with a number of scientific advisors. These people constitute a “rogues gallery” of discredited and disbarred researchers. Andrew Wakefield’s paper alleging a link between the measles-mumps-rubella (MMR) vaccines and autism has been shown to be fraudulent, for which Wakefield has lost his license to practice medicine in the U.K. We reviewed Judy Mikovits’ allegations that mouse retroviruses have contaminated the U.S. blood supply in a post on our blog, and we found that Dr. Mikovits’ claims were without merit. However, Kennedy wrote a laudatory introduction to Mikovits’ book Plague of Corruption. Dr. Mark Geier has had his medical license revoked in several states, yet Kennedy refers to Geier’s “research” in alleging a link between trace amounts of thimerosal in vaccines and autism. Kennedy was the producer of the 2019 anti-vaccine propaganda film Vaxxed II. It presented conspiracy theory claims of a link between MMR vaccines and autism. Discussing a recent measles epidemic in California, RFK claimed that 79% of measles cases occurred in patients who had been vaccinated, while a CDC study found that only 11% had been vaccinated.
While RFK, Jr. insists he is not an anti-vaxxer but just wants safe vaccines, he has not yet found any vaccines he is willing to call safe and effective. After a deadly measles outbreak in Samoa, following sharp reductions in vaccine acceptance that were fueled by anti-vaccine activists affiliated with Kennedy’s Children’s Health Defense organization, RFK instead blamed the vaccine itself for the epidemic. Although Kennedy denied playing any role in causing or exacerbating the Samoan measles epidemic, Hawaii governor Dr. Josh Green, who flew to Samoa in an effort to combat that epidemic, stated that Kennedy’s denial was a lie. RFK continues to assert that the measles vaccine causes autism, despite overwhelming evidence that no such link exists. He made the preposterous claim that the Pfizer COVID-19 vaccine has killed many more people than it has saved. He also claims that mRNA vaccines damage a person’s DNA, when the vaccine does not penetrate into cell nuclei where the DNA resides. If RFK is confirmed as HHS Secretary he is likely to lobby for the removal of vaccine mandates. In cases of highly transmissible diseases such as measles, that approach will lead to new and entirely preventable epidemics.
Robert F. Kennedy, Jr, Dec. 2021, The COVID-19 vaccine was “the deadliest vaccine ever made.”
RFK, Jr. publicized debunked claims that AIDS is not caused by HIV. Antiretroviral treatments for HIV allow millions of people to live safely and avoid transmission of the virus; but RFK has suggested that those treatments, which include the chemical AZT (zidovudine), may amount to “mass murder.” He also made the demonstrably false claim that “it is undeniable the African AIDS is an entirely different disease than Western AIDS.” In the book The Real Anthony Fauci, Kennedy expresses admiration for Peter Duesberg, a Berkeley biologist who denies that HIV causes AIDS. In 2000, Duesberg served on a committee that recommended that South Africa not authorize antiretroviral treatments for AIDS. It has been estimated that this policy resulted in 350,000 needless deaths of South Africans from AIDS. Among the many conspiracy theories that he subscribes to, RFK has made the bizarre claim that COVID-19 is a Chinese bioweapon deliberately engineered to save Chinese and Ashkenazi Jews.
Robert F. Kennedy, July 2023: “Covid-19 is targeted to attack Caucasians and Black people. The people who are most immune are Ashkenazi Jews and Chinese.”
Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. has propagated a number of false and misleading claims about vaccines. In addition, he has made some outrageous claims about HIV/AIDS and about fluoridation in water, while he has minimized the health dangers of drinking unpasteurized (raw) milk. If he is confirmed as Secretary of Health and Human Services, he will almost surely minimize our reliance on vaccines for public health. He will also likely call for “investigations” into the safety of vaccines which have already been shown to be safe and effective. And he is likely to rely on the fraudsters and charlatans who comprise his “scientific advisors” in any such investigations. His Children’s Health Defense organization already advocates for parents to opt out of childhood vaccinations. Such a policy would guarantee a re-emergence of serious childhood diseases which have essentially been eliminated. It would mean that many Americans would die needlessly. Kennedy’s false narratives about public health would deprive our citizens of science-based advice on vaccines and medicine.
For his activity over several decades, his willingness to make outrageous false claims about vaccines and health policy, and for his espousal of numerous conspiracy theories, Robert F. Kennedy Jr. has earned a Pseudy Award for Lifetime “Achievements” in Pseudoscience.
The Heartland Institute:
The Heartland Institute is an industry-supported science denial factory. It has now been in operation for four decades, applying many of the elements from the Science Denier’s Toolbox to cast unmerited doubt on the scientific underpinning of federal regulatory protections for the environment. We have previously devoted two lengthy posts on this blog site to debunking in detail their rather scattershot attempts to convince the nation’s science teachers and students that the science of human-caused climate change is deeply flawed, first in their 2017 booklet Why Scientists Disagree About Global Warming (hint: they don’t) and more recently in their 2022 publication Climate at a Glance (see Fig. 8).
Figure 8. Covers of two Heartland Institute booklets sent to U.S. science teachers in 2017 (left) and 2022 (right), using standard science denial tools in attempts to undermine the science of human-caused global climate change.
In the 1990s the Heartland Institute actively collaborated with the tobacco industry to question links of smoking and secondhand smoke to cancer and other lung diseases. They advocated against the threats posed by acid rain. They were particularly outspoken in criticizing the state of scientific understanding of chlorofluorocarbons (CFCs) and their impact on Earth’s stratospheric ozone layer, even after a growing ozone hole was discovered above Antarctica and Sherwood Rowland and Mario Molina were awarded the 1995 Nobel Prize in Chemistry for their research exposing the dangers of CFCs. Heartland vigorously opposed the 1987 Montreal Protocol in which all nations agreed to halt production of CFCs. In fact, even after the results of the Montreal Protocol had begun to tame the ozone hole and industry had long since found cost-effective alternatives to CFCs, the Heartland Institute still claimed in 2010 that CFCs did not cause ozone depletion and that the Protocol was the result of a hysterical over-reaction by the scientific community.
The Heartland Institute’s climate change booklets, with which they hope to mis-educate a generation of young people, are filled with half-truths and outright lies. Our posts debunking these documents point out all the specific ways they manipulate evidence to mislead readers about the reality of human-caused global warming and climate change. Here are some examples from our post debunking their more recent (2022) booklet:
- They claim that “temperature stations that have not been corrupted by the urban heat island effect report significantly less warming than temperature stations corrupted by urban heat island impacts.” This is untrue and was extensively refuted by the Berkeley Earth project a decade before the Heartland publication. Yet that publication fails to even refer to Berkeley Earth.
- They seek to undermine the reality of global warming by claiming that “The United States has experienced no significant warming since 2005.” First of all, they are cherry-picking data for a restricted time period and region. Second, they plot data month by month so that significant fluctuations bury any trend. And third, they fail to point out that over five decades the mean temperature trends in the U.S. are consistent with the clear global warming trend.
- They cherry-pick data from a U.N. report to claim that “…the number of climate-related disasters, as well as the number of victims from those disasters, has been declining over the past hundred years…”. They fail to mention that, in fact, the U.N. report they rely on concludes from the totality of data over the past four decades that there “is clear evidence that…the impacts [of global warming] are being felt in the increased frequency of extreme weather events including heatwaves, droughts, flooding, winter storms, hurricanes, and wild fires.”
- They claim that “The United States has benefited from additional precipitation and a reduction in drought conditions as the climate has modestly warmed,” ignoring the fact that precipitation effects of global warming are expected and observed to be regional. Droughts have become much more severe in the American southwest and flooding has been more prevalent in the East and Midwest. Also note that their admission here of modest warming contradicts their earlier claim that the U.S. has not warmed.
- They claim that “Global sea levels have been rising at a relatively steady pace of approximately 1 foot per century since at least the mid-1800s…with very little, if any, recent acceleration.” Measurements of global mean sea level in fact show a very clear acceleration in the increase since 1970, when warming began to be noticeable.
In short, the Heartland Institute has been intentionally misleading people about the science of environmental hazards since their establishment. They are a political organization masquerading as scientists. While they did not prevail on the issues of second-hand smoke, acid rain, and ozone depletion, their denial of climate science has been used by many Republican politicians to back efforts to delay any meaningful U.S. action to address one of the most important problems the planet faces. The Heartland Institute richly merits a Lifetime Pseudoscience Award.
Debunking Denial 