Seth Mnookin: Bald-faced Liar, Utter Hypocrite, or Both?

I thought I’d give Gorski a small break. I mean, how often can you comment on his narcissistic ego masturbation and mind-numbing hypocrisy without it growing stale?

Instead, I thought I’d focus on an article I read by Seth-not-a-doctor-not-a-scientist-Mnookin.

Seth doesn’t like Dr Bob Sears. Not at all. Seth accuses Dr Sears of being a “first-rate huckster” who is only motivated by greed, not by the genuine concern for his patients. All while Seth makes money from his book.

I won’t go into too much detail about the article itself. Seth mainly pulls a Gorski and pats himself on the back about how “sciency” he is. He goes on to mention an exchange between him and Dr Sears concerning child zero in the killer California measles epidemic of 2008, where a whopping 17 children were infected and recovered with absolutely no adverse effects from a relatively benign (here in the US) childhood illness.

Dr Sears responded to this accusation, saying that he was not patient zero’s paediatrician, and that he never spoke with Seth-not-a-doctor-not-a-scientist-Mnookin. Seth responds that he did, indeed, have a discussion with Dr Sears, and links to a recorded exchange between he and the doctor from 2008…almost 4 years ago. Then he goes on to mention an email exchange back in 2009…almost 3 years ago.

Could it be absolutely reasonable that Dr Sears may not recall a brief exchange that he had with some hack journalist that he never actually met in real life? Nah…couldn’t be possible.

Instead of accepting this very real possibility, Seth-not-a-doctor-not-a-scientist-Mnookin accuses Dr Sears of lying. He links to newspaper articles showing that Dr Sears’s office was the origination point for the deadly Measles epidemic of 2008.

According to one of their own Vaccine defenders, Science Mom, the index case was from a Children’s Clinic in La Jolla. Dr Sears’s office is in San Diego. So, it would appear as if Dr Sears was telling the truth about the index case. Curiouser and curiouser.

Going to Seth-not-a-doctor-not-a-scientist-Mnookin’s site and perusing his comments on this article, I see the commenters, and Seth, continuing to repeat this lie. So, being the trouble maker I am, I left a comment, shown below:

Click to embiggen

If the comment is too difficult to read, here it is again;

“And the proof that the child wasn’t one of Dr. Sears’s patients is here:

http://justthevax.blogspot.com/2012/04/retraction-of-sorts.html

Now, will Seth be honest and retract his defamatory statement about Dr. Sears, I wonder? I have my betting pool ready…”

Now, you’ll notice that the comment was left on Seth-not-a-doctor-not-a-scientist-Mnookin’s site two days ago. My comment has still not shown up, so I can only assume that it is either still in moderation, or it has been removed. Remarkable.

Which is outright hilarious when you take into account a comment that Seth-not-a-doctor-not-a-scientist-Mnookin (hey, don’t laugh…Gorski uses this trope all the time...just returning the favor) left on his site:

“Example #10882 of why it’s so much easier to prove your point when you don’t censor comments and let people show themselves to the world.”

I will give him a few more days to see if my comment shows up. But for now, it is pretty clear that Seth-not-a-doctor-not-a-scientist-Mnookin is both a liar and a hypocrite.

I’ll let you, my dear readers, decide.

Addendum: So finally, 3 days later, my comment shows up. Interesting that it didn’t show up until after I made this blog post. Also, I still don’t see him retracting his statement about Dr Sears. So, my assessment of Seth-not-a-doctor-not-a-scientist-Mnookin remains unchanged.