“How can we not end war?”
I wasn’t there, but I first became aware of science writer John Horgan 10 years ago after he gave a talk to the Northeast Conference on Science & Skepticism titled Dear “Skeptics,” Bash Homeopathy and Bigfoot Less, Mammograms and War More. Horgan felt that conference attendees shouldn’t spend their free time in ways they enjoyed or discuss topics that interested them. He said:
“The Science Delusion” is common among Capital-S Skeptics. You don’t apply your skepticism equally. You are extremely critical of belief in God, ghosts, heaven, ESP, astrology, homeopathy and Bigfoot. You also attack disbelief in global warming, vaccines and genetically modified food.
These beliefs and disbeliefs deserve criticism, but they are what I call “soft targets.” That’s because, for the most part, you’re bashing people outside your tribe, who ignore you. You end up preaching to the converted.
Horgan had a much bigger assignment for these skeptics. He tasked them with ending war. He said:
Meanwhile, you neglect what I call hard targets. These are dubious and even harmful claims promoted by major scientists and institutions. In the rest of this talk, I’ll give you examples of hard targets from physics, medicine and biology. I’ll wrap up with a rant about war, the hardest target of all.
Indeed, Horgan ended his screed by saying:
I don’t expect you to agree with my framing of these issues. All I ask is that you examine your own views skeptically. And ask yourself this: Shouldn’t ending war be a moral imperative, like ending slavery or the subjugation of women? How can we not end war?
In Horgan’s view, the cause of world peace would have been meaningfully advanced if the attendees of a small skeptic’s conference ignored pseudoscience and instead devoted themselves to ending war. Horgan portrayed these people, mostly science geeks, as having enormous power and influence. However, their talents were being wasted on problems he deemed insufficiently important, such as global warming and vaccines. He felt skeptics, who were simply enjoying a weekend conference, were fundamentally apathetic and neglectful. How can they not end war?
“Countering antivaccine misinformation is worthwhile and saves lives.”
Drs. David Gorksi and Steve Novella wrote powerful rebuttals at the time. Dr. Gorski presciently wrote:
Countering antivaccine misinformation is worthwhile and saves lives. It’s also a direct outgrowth of skeptical activism against alternative medicine, as many antivaccine views derive from pseudoscientific health beliefs.
It’s certainly not Dr. Gorski’s fault that sanctimonious scolds like Horgan deliberately undermined his warnings about the anti-vaccine movement. One study regarding COVID estimated that:
At least 232,000 deaths could have been prevented among unvaccinated adults during the 15 months had they been vaccinated with at least a primary series.
According to Horgan, this was all a “soft target.”
Dr. Novella pointed out Horgan’s ignorance of skepticism, writing:
Here are almost 40 articles from science-based medicine on overdiagnosis in mainstream medicine, including several articles on mammography. The pattern should now be clear – Horgan gives a simplistic summary of an issue, showing that he himself has a superficial understanding of the relevant points, accusing skeptics of not dealing with such issues sufficiently. Meanwhile, there is already an in-depth discussion of the issue in skeptical circles, which is much deeper that Horgan’s treatment.
Dr. Novella concluded:
The big lesson here is this – if you are going to criticize a movement, discipline, subculture, science, or group from the outside, to the point of telling them what they should be doing, you should at least have a working knowledge of that group.
After reading his article, it is safe to say that Horgan does not have the first clue about scientific skepticism. The result was a parade of straw men supported by cherry picked and often misinterpreted examples.
Indeed, although Horgan accused skeptics of “tribalism” and rightly identified Richard Dawkins, Stephen Pinker, Michael Shermer, and Lawrence Krauss as skeptic royalty at the time, that is no longer the case, and we have been unafraid to say so here at SBM. So much for “tribalism.”
“I still find much to admire in Prasad. “
While Horgan was clueless in 2016, he’s either learned nothing or is simply dishonest today. His most recent article was titled Vinay Prasad and Other Complicated Experts, and it completely whitewashed the dismal record of some of the pandemic’s most egregious disinformation superspreaders and MAHA/MAGA propagandists. He promoted his article on social media by asking:
A cancer expert I admire becomes a Trump collaborator. Should he be dead to me?
I’ve already answered that question- “There’s no reason to trust him or care about what he says today” – and it was an easy question to answer. The answer was obvious, at least for those of us who sincerely care about “hard targets” with MAHA and MAGA in charge.
However, Horgan answered “no.”
Horgan did not criticize Dr. Prasad for his silence about the evils of war. Unlike skeptics a decade ago, Dr. Prasad was magically exempt from this requirement. He was free to speak about whatever he wanted without Horgan policing his choices.
Instead, Horgan mostly lavished Dr. Prasad with praise, while failing to tell his readers the truth about him. He wrote:
Prasad co-founded the site Sensible Medicine, which looks skeptically at medical practices and takes seriously the Hippocratic dictum: First, do no harm. Sensible Medicine reinforces my cranky anti-medicine perspective.
SBM readers will know this is false. In reality, Sensible Medicine is a monetized misinformation Substack that published MAHA/MAGA agitprop such as Why Doctors Should Learn to Stop Worrying and Love MAHA, The Nomination of Robert F. Kennedy Jr. As Secretary of The Department of Health and Human Services: A New Beginning? and The MAHA Report: A Seismic Shift in US Health Policy. Horgan refused to share that with his readers and continued:
After the covid pandemic struck in 2020, Prasad accused federal officials of overreacting. He challenged the benefits of masking, shutting down schools and businesses and mandating covid vaccines (when those became available).
SBM readers will know this is false. In reality, Dr. Prasad treated rare, temporary vaccine side-effects, even mere abnormal lab values, as a fate worse than death, and published his article Should We Let Kids Catch Omicron during the worst wave of the pandemic for children. That pro-infection article advocated for the mass infection of unvaccinated children to have them theoretically serve as human shields for more vulnerable adults. Horgan refused to share that with his readers however, and instead claimed, “Prasad was applying First, do no harm to the pandemic.“
It gets worse. Horgan continued:
Prasad defended, sort of, Robert Kennedy, now Trump’s secretary of health.
SBM readers will know how this is false. In reality, Prasad openly campaigned for Kennedy (and Trump), and in his article Sabotaging RFK Jr’s Confirmation Will Increase Vaccine Hesitancy said:
At this point, the best way to curb vaccine hesitancy is to approve RFK Jr, and redirect his energies to generating more data. More data will answer the key questions that remain unanswered: which childhood immunization program is optimal. The worse (sic) thing we can do is tank his nomination. Then vaccine hesitancy will explode.
Horgan refused to share that with his readers and concluded:
So here’s the question: Should I stop citing Prasad because he “collaborated” (my term) with the Trump regime? Because he discerns upside in Trump and Kennedy? I’m woke, Prasad is anti-woke. Shouldn’t this guy be dead to me? No. I still find much to admire in Prasad. He’s smart, driven by evidence, fearless, unafraid to take on the medical establishment.
SBM readers will know how this is false. In reality, Dr. Prasad didn’t “take on” the medical establishment, he is the medical establishment. He is a full professor at a top medical school who spent a disastrous year as a top official at the FDA. While there, he continued to treat asymptomatic vaccine side effects more seriously than literal death, refused to meet with patient advocates, faked that the COVID vaccine killed at least 10 children, and was loathed by staff for his abominable behavior. According to one article:
Prasad was mercurial, pushing at least 7 subordinates out of their positions & repeatedly overruling career scientists to limit vaccine availability. Hundreds of workers left CBER during his tenure as morale slumped & he earned the ire of the rare disease community, rejecting at least five drugs.
Horgan refused to share this with his readers and instead falsely claimed Prasad “welcomes pushback and debate.” In Horgan’s view, Dr. Prasad did not fail at the FDA, rather he was failed. The only story Horgan shared about Dr. Prasad’s time at the FDA was to portray him as a victim, specifically of “Trump attack dog Laura Loomer and biotech execs trying to make a buck”.
From this, an obvious question emerges- what could Dr. Prasad do to make him lose Horgan’s admiration? The answer, it seems, is nothing. Horgan didn’t care about Dr. Prasad’s COVID disinformation. Horgan didn’t care about Dr. Prasad’s incompetence and malevolence at the FDA. Horgan didn’t care that Dr. Prasad relentlessly fluffed Trump and Kennedy. Because Dr. Prasad scratched his need to feel contrarian and heterodox, Horgan was willing to overlook it all. Even though Horgan correctly acknowledged that Dr. Prasad was a Trump collaborator, he nonetheless “admired” him.
“He’s smart, driven by evidence, fearless, unafraid to take on the medical establishment.”- John Horgan
This was not a one-off. Horgan also had kind words to say about Dr. John Ioannidis writing:
Ioannidis has been pointing out problems with the peer-reviewed scientific literature for decades. When the covid pandemic struck, Ioannidis, like Prasad, argued that federal authorities were overreacting. He got bashed for airing this view on conservative media. I continue to admire Ioannidis because I find his analyses of the scientific literature sound.
SBM readers will know this is false. In reality, no one “bashed” Dr. Ioannidis for merely appearing on conservative media. Rather, we justifiably criticized him for what he said there and elsewhere. Dr. Ioannidis predicted COVID would kill 40,000 Americans and then spread doubt and disinformation about the death toll to avoid admitting error. Horgan refused to share that with his readers and instead concluded:
I was at a weekend workshop with Ioannidis a while back, and I liked him. He struck me not as an ideologue but as a modest, earnest researcher who goes where data take him.
“All I ask is that you examine your own views skeptically.”
So, let’s be clear what happened here. In 2016, Horgan was full of condescending scorn towards doctors who desperately tried to warn of Kennedy and his ilk. Today, as measles spreads, Wakefield takes a victory lap, Kennedy warns of chemtrails, and war worsens in the Middle East, Horgan, is full of glowing praise for the doctors who helped enable all this.
This is what I mean by toxic apathy, and if Horgan disagrees, he can rewrite his defenses of Drs. Prasad and Ioannidis and simply be honest about what they actually said. That’s what we do here at SBM, and it doesn’t take any special effort or skill, just integrity.
However, we also have the right to apply Horgan’s lofty 2016 standards to Horgan in 2026. I don’t expect him to agree with my framing of these issues. All I ask is that he examine his own views skeptically. I want him to ask himself this: Shouldn’t ending war be a moral imperative, like ending slavery or the subjugation of women? How can we not end war?
Put another way, Horgan should fluff MAHA/MAGA doctors less, and bash war more.