Ben Goldacre is supercilious and puritanical — but he’s got a point

19 June 2010

Toby Young suffers from Status Anxiety

Until last week I didn’t have much time for Ben Goldacre, the Guardian journalist and author of Bad Science. He devotes his life to the exposure of snake oil salesmen, whether nutritionists with bogus qualifications or practitioners of alternative medicine, pointing out that there is no scientific basis for their claims. A useful service, to be sure, but he suffers from the Guardian columnist’s vice of being overly puritanical. He combines superciliousness with moral superiority, as if ignorance and stupidity are to be condemned rather than pitied. He is a self-proclaimed atheist, but exhibits a near religious attachment to the empirical method.

So what’s changed? The answer is that my three-year-old son Freddie has come down with chicken pox. I happen to know a bit about the varicella zoster virus because it almost killed my eldest son Ludo. Caroline was exposed to the virus less than a week before he was born which meant she transmitted it in utero without passing on any antibodies. Newborns are immunocompromised and as a result Ludo spent the first four weeks of his life in and out of paediatric wards. The mortality rate for neonatal varicella if left untreated is 31 per cent.

Luckily for Freddie, the risks associated with chicken pox fall dramatically after the immune system starts to work properly. Indeed, if you’re going to get chicken pox, you’re better off having it as a child than as an adult because the risk of developing life-threatening complications is lower.

Of course, not all parents know this and there have been times during the past week when I’ve felt a Ben Goldacre-style rant coming on. For instance, I took Freddie to the new playground in Ravenscourt Park last Saturday and was scolded by a yummy mummy for being ‘irresponsible’. I tried to persuade her I was doing her child a favour but she wasn’t convinced.

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