The top part of the article is excellent, and literal worms as a confounding factor in trials of a deworming treatment makes a ton of sense. The end of the art

The top part of the article is excellent, and literal worms as a confounding factor in trials of a deworming treatment makes a ton of sense. The end of the article, where he speculates about vaccine denial, is less useful. It’s kind of funny that the author spends most of the article rigorously applying the empirical and inductive scientific method, but then at the end just takes off on a flight into his own mind like some kind of ancient philosopher, finding their way by the power of thought alone. It’s really easy to fool oneself into thinking that because you are smart and knowledgeable in one area, you are smart and knowledgeable in general. That’s how ego and the mind works. It turns out, that’s not how knowledge works though. You have to observe and test to build real knowledge. The author, in exploring vaccine denial, would probably be better served by following the same method he did for ivermectin: exhaustively surveying the current state of scientific studies of the phenomenon, and attempting to rigorously synthesize it.