The Anti-GMO movements and Anti-vaccination movements are probably two of the biggest and most well known pseudoscience movements out there, with millions of people that adhere to their claims.
Besides the fact that both groups do have millions of proponents world wide and promote pseudoscience, both groups are a lot alike in other ways as well. Infact I've come up with about ten different reasons why they are so much alike, starting with the fact that...
Proponents of both get very emotional when you criticize and/or debunk them.
Ever get into an online discussion with someone whom either promotes Anti-vaccination or Anti-GMO nonsense, and you start to tell them what they claim is BS, and tell them why what they are claiming is BS? If you've answered yes then you know what usually ends up happening, and that is that they tend to go off the deep end and use all of these made up "facts" and logical fallacies and conspiracy theories, and in the end threats and accusations of being a shill are often made.
A proponent of one tends to be a proponent of the other.
It shouldn't be to surprising, but usually if someone is an Anti-GMO proponent, they usually tend to be an Anti-vaccination proponent as well, and vice-verse.
While this isn't necessarily true many websites that promote Anti-vaccination nonsense also tend to promote Anti-GMO nonsense as well. Infact some websites that claim to be "natural health" websites promote both equally instead of one overshadowing the other. Also, another thing about proponents of both are...
They tend to promote alternative medicine.
It shouldn't be to surprising that people in the Anti-vaccination movement are big proponents of alternative medicine, but it shouldn't also be to surprising that people in the Anti-GMO movement are also big proponents of alternative medicine as well.
Infact many people in the Anti-GMO movement will, besides just promote the usual alternative medicine nonsense, claim that organic foods can heal you of just about anything and everything as well (including stuff that doesn't even exist).
The only papers they've ever had published in creditable scientific journals have been debunked and retracted.
There are lots of studies that have been published over the years about the "dangers" of vaccines and GMO foods, and while the number of papers published may look impressive to some the reality is that it isn't, especially when you consider the fact almost all of these papers are published in "scientific journals" that a person pays to be published in.
Infact the only Anti-vaccination and Anti-GMO papers that I know of that have ever been published in credible scientific journals are the
Wakefield study (published in
the Lancet) and the
Séralini study (published in
Food and Chemical Toxicology) both of which have been formally retracted by the respective journals that they were published in after it was found that both studies data was founded off of both unethical experiments and fraudulent data, and they were only retracted long after both studies had been thoroughly debunked.
They both claim the same things about the products in terms of health effects.
Both the Anti-GMO and Anti-vaccination movements not only claim that both GMO foods and vaccines are bad for you and cause a large amount of health problems (all of which have been proven to be untrue), but they also claim that they cause the same health problems!
Both most notably are claimed to cause autism, but both are also claimed to cause the spreading of diseases, and increases in infant mortality, and sterility, and cancer, and who knows what else. It almost seems like Anti-GMO and Anti-vaccination movements are claiming that GMO foods and vaccines causes something new every week.
They both claim that the products have ingredients in them that they do not.
One of the biggest and most obvious BS things that both the Anti-vaccination and the Anti-GMO movement tend to do is that they both claim that the respective products that they believe are bad for you also contain ingredients that infact they do not contain at all.
For the Anti-vaccination movement they sometimes claim that vaccines contain the remains of aborted human fetuses (they do not) and the Anti-GMO movement claims that GMO foods contain animal DNA in them (they do not). While these are the more outrageous claims made by both respective movements, both also claim that the products that they are protesting against contain other chemicals in them that infact they do not.
Both groups claim that there is little to no regulation in either industry.
One of the main "claimed" reasons by so many people in the Anti-GMO and Anti-vaccination movements is that they believe that GMO foods and vaccines are dangerous because they believe that there is very little to no testing and safety regulations what so ever in either industry.
In fact this couldn't be further from the truth for either one. Both the vaccine industry and the GMO foods industry are heavily regulated and go through numerous testing stages, and have to go through numerous government agencies before they are able to put their products onto market.
Both groups make claims of a conspiracy.
Both the Anti-GMO and Anti-vaccination movements claim that the respective industries that they are protesting are involved in some kind of conspiracy. These conspiracy theories range from the plausible, but still disproven corporate greed and not caring about the health of others and putting out a product that has very little to no testing type of conspiracy theories, to some type of New World Order mass depopulation type of conspiracy theory (which if true then they've done a horrible job at it).
Also both groups claim that there is a conspiracy to suppress "information" (i.e. Anti-GMO and Anti-vaccination claims) about the "truth" about GMO foods and vaccines. If this happened to be true then whoever is suppose to be suppressing this "information" has clearly done a terrible job at it because there are thousands of Anti-GMO and Anti-vaccination websites, not to mention multiple groups that promote their beliefs.
Both groups have caused deaths.
One of the dark yet well known little secrets of both of these groups is that both groups have caused the deaths of thousands of people.
For the Anti-GMO movement the deaths caused by their propaganda comes in the form of people in developing countries starving to death because the leaders in some of these countries refused to accept food donations because they believed that the donations contained GMO foods (wouldn't matter if it did or didn't) and believed the Anti-GMO movement's claims that such food were poisonous.
For the Anti-vaccination movement the deaths caused by their propaganda comes in the form of children who's parents believed the Anti-vaccination movement's claims and didn't vaccinate their children, and their children got an infection from a disease that was completely preventable if they had been vaccinated, and the child died from that disease. Also the deaths are by children who were to young to be vaccinated, or couldn't be vaccinate for some medical reasons, but got a disease from a child that was infact old enough to be vaccinated but wasn't, and they died because of some other parent's carelessness.
While this fact about both groups are often ignored by both groups, it is not however ignored by skeptics and critics of the Anti-GMO and the Anti-vaccination movements.
Both groups don't talk about the good things what they protest have done.
Both groups just love to talk about all the "bad" stuff (i.e. made up stuff) about GMO foods and vaccines. What they don't tell you is all of the good things that GMO foods and vaccines have brought us, such a extending our life expectancy, and suppressing and even eliminating certain diseases, and over all improving our quality of life, as well as helping prevent people from dying.
Infact talking about all of the good things about GMO foods and vaccines almost seems like a kind of blasphemy to these Anti-GMO and Anti-vaccination groups...
