Vaxxed-Out: A Response To Scott McLachlan
By: Ed Prideaux
Tags: Vaccine, Pandemic, Conspiracy Theories, Misinformation

The vaccine- and pandemic-sceptic Scott McLachlan wasn’t happy with a critique I made of him — here’s my final word

Let it be known: I am the mystery co-author. My name is Ed Prideaux, and I put together the Dark Horse Investigation with David Fuller, the co-founder of Rebel Wisdom. I work as a freelance writer, journalist and researcher, and have published articles with the likes of the BBC, The Financial Times, The Guardian, The Independent and others.

One section of our Investigation — which interrogated a vast gamut of claims made either directly or indirectly through the ecosystem of the Dark Horse podcast, helmed by Bret Weinstein and Heather Heying — appraised a preprint paper, written primarily by Dr Scott McLachlan of Queen Mary’s, University of London.

McLachlan’s paper staged an analysis of 250 ‘adverse events’ reported after the administration of the vaccine. These events, collated under so-called VAERS reporting, are a frequent point of contention among vaccine-sceptical voices, and have grounded suggestions that the vaccines have killed as many as 25,800 people: something else David and I addressed in our Investigation.

Last week, McLachlan published a spirited response to our critique, to which I will now respond in kind.

Setting The Scene

From the outset, McLachlan is right that neither David Fuller nor I have any medical qualifications. With McLachlan’s focus on the small details — including that one link to David’s Medium page is misphrased — he’s not right, though, that Bret Weinstein and Heather Heying are ‘journalists’.

Most importantly, as we acknowledge in the piece, much of our critique of his paper is one of credential. What one calls ad hominem or an ‘argument from authority’, another calls a restatement of something we all do, and need to do anyway. Being that claims around the pandemic involve high-level details of stats, epidemiology and virology — and that these issues are ones of life-and-death — some measure of ‘outsourcing’ to better-informed authorities has to be a basic prerequisite. With this in mind, our Investigation was conducted in close correspondence with experts like Gideon Meyerowitz-Katz, Dr Graham Walker of the Evidence Base, and Yuri Deigin of DRASTIC, and many others behind the scenes.

Indeed, whom we should outsource our authority to is the critical question. Anyone armed with a PhD and a large and thesauristic vocabulary can steamroll you. Those who appear definitely credible, especially those drawn from our mainstream institutions, may have far more complicated incentive structures than merely telling the truth.

This dilemma is a foundation stone for the entire Rebel Wisdom project.

What McLachlan May Get Right

It’s along these lines that I’ll centre my response to McLachlan.

I’m happy to concede that some errors were made in our critique. As advertised in the introduction to our Investigation, the project is a live ‘sensemaking’ exercise, with rounds of revisions and edits to be made as new information comes in.

For instance, it may indeed be right that McLachlan’s Twitter account was not removed, as claimed in the article, but that he was subject to a hack. Whether my boss David was involved in this affair — a possibility McLachlan raises — I don’t know what to say. The fact that David was initially unsure who McLachlan was seems to count against it.

It may be right, too, that mask wearing does involve some risk of bacterial infection. The ‘debunking’ of self-appointed ‘fact-checkers’ of such claims rests heavily on the suggestion that masks are regularly washed and replaced. Mask washing is clearly not universal. One survey reported in October 2020 said that 80% don’t.

It may also be right that false positive tests are a serious problem, not least when these results provide the grounds for lockdowns with serious economic and social consequences.

Lastly, it may be right that two co-authors in particular — Chiketero and Choi — are more medically qualified than first appeared. As we discussed, Chiketero is not an expert in medical statistics or vaccines — being employed in safety for Network Rail, the British train provider — but she does have a nursing degree, as McLachlan claims.

How invested we should be in Chiketero’s claims, though, is still an open question, especially when they’ve been — as McLachlan boasts in his response — read or downloaded 89,000 times, and provide the grounds for vaccine hesitancy that likely kills people. The same goes for Yvonne Choi, of whom I still struggle to find any record, but who I’m willing to accept has health science qualifications.

Where McLachlan Is Very, Very Wrong

With these concessions made, I will maintain that the twofold problem we raised in our Investigation is clearer-than-ever. One, that McLachlan is someone to whom you should be very reluctant in outsourcing your authority. Second, that Weinstein and Heying were greatly wrongheaded to do so in their Substack article.

Now that McLachlan’s Twitter is fully re-activated, we can look beyond the screengrabs captured by ‘UberFeminist’ before its temporary disappearance and see what else he’s had to say — and tell whether Scott McLachlan is a sober and serious academic who should be taken seriously, or if, well, he shouldn’t much at all.

‘It’s all a CCP scam’, he writes of COVID-19.

‘The “pandemic” was a false flag operation’.

Bill Gates is involved ‘to do all sorts of potentially eugenic things’, and public health scientists are ‘making bank and getting eyeballs’.

Virus variants are ‘made-y up-ium diseases’, likely designed and organised to delay unlocking and keep us under control.

The vaccines are part of a ‘salami slicing’ operation for the ‘Totalitarian Great Reset Agenda’— perhaps related to concerns he broadcast together with his co-author, that pandemic lockdowns are the ‘precursor to climate lockdowns’ (something we raised in our Investigation, but which, we note, was not dealt with in his response).

He makes at least two serious equivocations between government responses and the activities of the Nazis, including suggestions that regional quarantines are ‘concentration camps’ and that Justin Trudeau is comparable to Adolf Hitler.

‘Will they be made to wear a yellow star and be as poorly fed as many who were locked in hotel quarantine in the big cities?

‘Sounds familiar. Remember your history!’, he says.

Just these vaccines?

Here’s the kicker. Since the first announcements around the vaccine programme, the vaccine-sceptical movement — far and away from the blanket assignment of ‘antivax’ — has been a broader coalition than first appears. On the one hand, you see the newly vaccine-cautious: perhaps understandable amid the use of novel vaccine technologies brought to scale under the pressure of pandemic. On the other hand, though — and behind vaccine scepticism of all kinds — is a well-established ecosystem of longtime anti-vaccine activists, armed with passionate, partisan and battle-worn arguments, and helmed by public figures hawking their own ‘alternatives’ in defeating the virus (if they believe it exists at all, that is).

Nearly everyone expressing caution about ‘these vaccines’ is at pains to point out they’re not ‘anti-vaccine’ generally. They can’t afford to associate with ‘antivaxxers’. God, no. Yet Scott is not so careful.

McLachlan has shared that it’s ‘time to question ALL vaccines and their safety and find out why 54% of kids under 18 have a chronic illness’.

Crucially, consider his obvious sympathy for Andrew Wakefield: a disgraced medical researcher behind the meme that ‘vaccines cause autism’. In an observation of 12 children drawn from a London hospital in the late-90s, Wakefield seemed to have uncovered a causal link between the mumps, measles and rubella jab and autistic behavioural pathology, by means of a novel disease of the gut called ‘autistic enterocolitis’. The study was published to media fanfare, and later a visible spike in vaccine hesitancy.

The investigative work of Brian Deer, however, revealed that Wakefield’s study was riven with interest conflicts he never disclosed. He was being paid £150 an hour of taxpayer pounds by an activist lawyer looking to sue vaccine manufacturers, with every child in the study sample drawn directly or indirectly through the lawyer’s network. He was petitioned to find a ‘new syndrome’, with commercial designs — including tests and patents projected to earn £28 million — downstream of their ‘discovery’. What’s more, a deeper look at the data revealed wide-scale fudging and bad ethics, including the acquisition of blood samples at children’s birthday parties and invasive experiments without adequate consent.

These seem like the kind of details you might include, but McLachlan makes no mention of them at all. Rather, McLachlan considers culture to have wrongly ‘cancelled’ Wakefield — who’s since joined the lucrative ranks of vaccine scepticism in the States — before he could further corroborate his breakthroughs.

In our Investigation, we raised that McLachlan, at the very least, deemed Wakefield’s work ‘better than we think’. In his response essay, McLachlan conveniently cropped the broader context of the tweet thread we excerpted, in which he defends Wakefield’s original (now-retracted) paper.

In his presentation, it seems that Rebel Wisdom leapt on an innocent, obviously credible, suggestion that mood and mind are shaped by gut health: the imputed mechanism behind Wakefield’s fraudulent disease. Yet if you zoom out, you see that he does exactly as we suggested: call Wakefield’s paper better than we think.

It’s ‘revisionist history’ that Wakefield drew a link between MMR and autism, he suggests — ‘show us’ where he says that, McLachlan asks. ‘The main “claim” of the paper’ was that modest suggestion around gut health — nothing more, nothing less, McLachlan argues.

True, Wakefield did concede in his paper that he and his co-authors ‘did not prove [emphasis added] an association between measles, mumps, and rubella vaccine and the syndrome described’. But science doesn’t proceed by proof — viz. Karl Popper, falsifiability — but suggestive results. On what his results suggested, Wakefield is clear:

‘Intestinal and behavioural pathologies may have occurred together by chance, reflecting a selection bias in a self-referred group; however, the uniformity of the intestinal pathological changes and the fact that previous studies have found intestinal dysfunction in children with autistic-spectrum disorders, suggests that the connection is real and reflects a unique disease process.’

Yet his results really suggested no such thing. His paper was an elaborate fraud. Why McLachlan doesn’t acknowledge this, it’s not clear.

Crossing The Line

No matter your position, then, it’s obvious that McLachlan has crossed a line from objective science into something like ideology - if not conspiratorial thinking. It’s not certain that McLachlan’s deep-rooted convictions shaped the nature of his analysis of VAERS statistics, which, indeed, lend strength to fears that the jabs are killing people.

But certainty is always elusive. And it frankly stretches credulity to think otherwise — not least when, as discussed in our Investigation, McLachlan devotes a full 1,000 words in a prima facie academic article to dismantling ‘the media narrative’.

McLachlan compares this section to a standard ‘Discussion’ entry in academic papers, in which the authors typically balance their findings with the broader literature and appraise its implications and shortcomings. How similar the two really are — McLachlan’s chock-full of social media links and a takedown of ‘fact checkers’ and NPR reporters — is up to the reader. And while not obviously disqualifying, acknowledging the political in the pretense of pure science is something we need to stay abreast of.

Summing Up

Combine McLachlan’s ideological direction, florid conspiracy around the pandemic in general, and then throw in his admission that the paper’s “sample is heavily biased” and “the clinical results… not generalisable”, and the result seems obvious: something far, far stronger should have been cited by Weinstein and Heying in their vaccine fears. Recall, these are issues of life-and-death.

As we allude in our original write-up, Rebel Wisdom isn’t a priori beholden to any ‘standard narrative’ or institution. It’s a matter of balancing estimates of credibility. Making sense relies on adjusting your ‘authorities’ in real-time. And when serious, anti-institutional voices aren’t sounding the vaccine alarm in any comparable way — yet likely-biased and incredible voices are — it’s reason for pause and reflection on whether McLachlan is making as much sense as he supposes.

That his paper has received so many downloads isn’t a sign of authority, as he boasts. It’s a sign that something is going wrong in a very basic way.