In 1979, as a young oncologist, I gave talks on cancer quackery. My patients were tempted, and sometimes lost, to laetrile — apricot pit extract sold as a suppressed miracle — and to a rotating cast of coffee-enema regimens, megavitamin cures and clinics just across the border with Mexico. I defined quackery for my audiences simply: knowledge of which one is ignorant. The quack sells certainty he has not earned.
The remedies came and went, but the sales pitch was always the same five claims. Doctors aren’t trained in the real cures. The drug companies profit from keeping you sick. There is a conspiracy to suppress what works. Here is a study “they” don’t want you to see. And beneath all of it, the engine: fear, and the desperate need for hope.
I have just finished “Science Under Siege,” the new book by climatologist Michael Mann and vaccine scientist Peter Hotez. I was startled to find my old lectures staring back at me. The two authors — both targeted for years with lawsuits, harassment and death threats simply for reporting what the evidence shows — describe the many forces behind today’s anti-science movement. And point for point, the machinery is identical to what I cataloged 46 years ago. What has changed is not the con. It is the size of the megaphone. The anti-science movement focuses on the “hoaxes” of vaccination and of global warming.
The lone quack of 1979 reached patients one pamphlet, one waiting room, one late-night radio spot at a time. Today the same five claims to frightened people are funded by oil-producing countries and billionaires, amplified by algorithms, broadcast by cable networks, and laundered through the credentials of a few contrarian doctors who should know better. “Doctors won’t tell you the real cure” is now the brand of every wellness influencer peddling ivermectin, hydroxychloroquine and supplements. The suppression conspiracy has changed from “organized medicine is hiding the cure” to the claim that thousands of climate researchers across dozens of nations are coordinating a global hoax.
The fear is exploited at industrial scale. Parents who now refuse routine vaccines are not fools. They are frightened people who love their children but have been deceived by those who profit — in money, clicks or political power — from that fear. This is the same quackery that I watched destroy cancer patients during my career.
The stakes are no longer measured one patient at a time. Measles, declared eliminated in this country in 2000, is roaring back wherever vaccination rates collapse. Public health infrastructure is being dismantled precisely as the risk of the next pandemic rises. And here, we no longer need computer models to understand a warming climate. We remember the 2021 heat dome that killed hundreds of our neighbors, and the summers when wildfire smoke gave Seattle some of the worst air on Earth. The science is quite correct and not for debate. The planet is heating at an alarming rate. Carl Sagan once called science “a candle in the dark.” That candle is now flickering.
Each of us can do more to speak up for science and evidence. Talk to hesitant friends and neighbors; a trusted voice moves more minds than any campaign. Know these anti-science quacks’ arguments. Insist that journalists and influencers stop staging phony debates between settled evidence and fringe opinion. And follow the money behind this anti-science movement.
I spent a career watching quackery prey on the frightened. It can be defeated not by ridicule, but by exposure. The machinery for anti-science quackery is bigger now, but it is the same machinery — and the candle does not keep itself lit.
