How Alice Roberts Betrayed Science.

Science pundit Alice Roberts blames skeptics for low take-up of the measles vaccine but no-one undermined the credibility of scientists more than her when she denied basic biological facts.

Birmingham University’s Professor of Public Engagement in Science… is worried. If only we cared. Alice Roberts is one of the few faces of science left on the BBC now it has abandoned its public service mission in favour of drag queen formats. It should therefore matter, you might think, that she is concerned. About the low take-up of the measles vaccine, thanks for asking.

It’s desperately sad, she says.

And so it is.

Last year there were 2911 laboratory confirmed measles cases in England alone, the highest number since 2012. I blame the public’s growing reluctance to vaccinate their children on a dripfeed of revelations suggesting COVID vaccines were oversold. And their potential risks undersold. Unintentionally for the most part. But still….

Alice has no truck with that explanation though. Instead she points the finger of blame at vaxx deniers. She recently retweeted a complaint that a notable COVID vaccine critic hadn’t been struck off.

I don’t agree with everything Aseem Malhotra says; even about COVID vaccines. But the notion the lesson of the pandemic is that skeptics should have been silenced more than they were ….borders on the farcical. There was too little debate about everything from the effectiveness of masks to the type of lockdowns. I argued for the Swedish approach in case you’re interested. Not that it did much good.

The truth is I would love Alice Roberts to be able to persuade more people to vaccinate their kids against measles. Regrettably, she can’t. Her opinion on anything scientific is no longer taken seriously. Nor should it be.

That’s because Alice blew up her reputation in one of the most spectacular on-line spats of the gender wars.

It’s worth looking back at that argument and not just because I was a participant….before the Professor of Public Engagement in Science…. blocked me. I’m still blocked as it happens. Maybe I should be struck off too. By someone.

This Twitter conflagration in 2019 may seem like a distant internet row but I think it was important because it revealed how deep gender ideology had embedded itself in our society. And among our “public intellectuals” in particular.

When Alice Roberts denied the most basic fact in all of biology -the existence of two sexes in humans- and then promoted a series of ludicrous falsehoods she didn’t just expose herself as a gullible fool. She undermined the trust of the public in something much more important. In science itself.

Let me tell you what happened….