A big date has arrived. Those of us who have been following pseudoscience for some time will remember that way back in 2014, MIT computer scientist and American Loon #2234 Dr. Stephanie Seneff, predicted that “half of all children will be autistic by 2025“. The culprit, in her opinion, would be glyphosate, an herbicide initially manufactured by Monsanto for genetically engineered crops. As you can imagine, an MIT scientist using the buzzwords autism, Monsanto, and *G…
A big date has arrived. Those of us who have been following pseudoscience for some time will remember that way back in 2014, MIT computer scientist and American Loon #2234 Dr. Stephanie Seneff, predicted that “half of all children will be autistic by 2025“. The culprit, in her opinion, would be glyphosate, an herbicide initially manufactured by Monsanto for genetically engineered crops. As you can imagine, an MIT scientist using the buzzwords autism, Monsanto, and *GMOs *made quite the splash in the wooisphere back then. It was very big deal at the time.
Well, 2025 is over, and we can now check in with Dr. Seneff’s prediction. Brace yourself. It turns out that no, glyphosate did not turn half of all children autistic.
However, I would like to use this occasion to make a prediction of my own- *Dr. Seneff will never admit error. *To do so would violate the fundamental code of disinformation influencers. Deliberate amnesia is central to their project, and they often act aggrieved and offended whenever anyone reminds them of their past predictions. How dare you remember the thing I said! Predictably, instead of apologizing and retreating from public commentary as someone with integrity would do, Dr. Seneff has seamlessly moved on to spreading rank disinformation about vaccines and autism. It’s always onwards to the the next thing.
She’s hardly alone in this regard. Failed predictions- both of catastrophes and better days ahead- are a key feature of misinformation, and much of my writing has documented instances of similarly credentialed academies making bold, confident declarations, only to act like they never happened when reality intruded into their fantasy. A smattering of examples are:
- Dr. John Ioannidis April 17, 2020: Acknowledging for the fact that the epidemic is still evolving, and we cannot be sure whether we will hit even higher peaks in the future, although this doesn’t seem to be the case, at least for the European countries, and it seems to be that even in the US, in most states we’re very close to the peak, if not past the peak, the risk is something that should be manageable as opposed to the panic and horror stories that are circulating about.
- Dr. Martin Kulldorff May 2020: Daily reported COVID-19 cases has dropped to half in Stockholm, where herd immunity will arrive first, while it is currently flat in the rest of Sweden.
- Dr. Sunetra Gupta May 2020: The epidemic has largely come and is on its way out in this country.
- Dr. Jay Bhattacharya July 2020: There’s some places where I think we’ve reached herd immunity.
- Dr. Vinay Prasad February 2021: This NYTimes story on Jan 24th “Vaccines alone won’t end pandemic” Did not age well (as of Feb 18). It was completely off, and just another squeeze of fear Enough with these models They have often been erroneous.
- Dr. Monica Gandhi February 2021: We are just facing like complete dawn of hope and light and love. Like it’s gonna be so great. It is getting so great…I think that may be a little soon, but we will get to herd immunity and it will all fall away. It will all fall away. All this anguish, all this yelling at each other, all this politicization, all this depression, it will fall away.
- Dr. Lucy McBride March 2021: I’ve been yearning for an end to the pandemic. Now that it’s here, I’m a little afraid.
- Dr. Marty Makary May 2021: Most of the country is at herd immunity.
- Dr. John Mandrola, June 11, 2021: It appears to me that we have crushed COVID by simply vaccinating susceptible adults. Why not wait for more data before extending these novel therapies to young people?
And though I never put it into writing, I can now reveal a failed prediction of mine- I honestly thought more people, especially “leaders” of American medicine, would have cared about all this. Instead, they ignored or praised MAHA doctors, and as a result of their indifference and enabling, Kennedy is in charge and taking a wrecking ball to things today with *promises, assurances, *and predictions of a health utopia just around the corner.
I don’t know what 2026 will bring, but I predict that most of it will be very bad, and unlike the doctors I write about, I will admit it if I am wrong.
Dr. Jonathan Howard is a neurologist and psychiatrist who has been interested in vaccines since long before COVID-19. He is the author of "We Want Them Infected: How the failed quest for herd immunity led doctors to embrace the anti-vaccine movement and blinded Americans to the threat of COVID."
Posted by Jonathan Howard
Dr. Jonathan Howard is a neurologist and psychiatrist who has been interested in vaccines since long before COVID-19. He is the author of "We Want Them Infected: How the failed quest for herd immunity led doctors to embrace the anti-vaccine movement and blinded Americans to the threat of COVID."