The Gish Gallop is a strategy named after the creationist Duane Gish. The idea is simple. You throw out so many arguments that the opponent doesn’t have time to refute every point leaving the audience with many points left unchallenged. I have no doubt anti-vaccine debaters use this strategy in live debates but it is used in social media posts very often. It goes something like “164 papers proving the autism and vaccine link” with a link to a website that has individual links to pages of scientific papers. Something that no doubt many people would have seen on Facebook or Twitter.
So what’s the deal? Where is the lie? Has this person found the hidden stash of research by rogue scientists that are sick of their cheques from Big Pharma? Research that somehow got published by reputable journals who just didn’t know what they were publishing? Of course not. None of the papers actually show what the poster claims they show. In reality, the person originally putting the post together has likely just gone to Pubmed and typed in “autism” and then just put a random set of links into a blog post. The person sharing the post never bothers to read even a single paper. They see a big number and think “wow that’s a lot of evidence” and just click share.
The reason I compare this to the Gish gallop is that it would take days to read every paper and explain why they don’t show a link between vaccines and autism. I’ve seen bloggers actually go to the trouble of doing this but I do feel like it’s a waste of time (unless you really like reading papers of course). The person who posted it generally doesn’t care and by the time you refute every paper (or even just the top ten) they have a new list. It’s whack a mole. I’ve heard someone suggest asking for a top 5 or 10. Tell them to just give the cream of the crop, if you’re the kind of masochist that engages with antivaxxers on a regular basis.
This is a very common tactic in a range of pseudosciences. It’s not always in the form of the gallop. I’ve seen petitions for various things where they cite a single paper. I saw a petition once that was calling on the government to withdraw the HPV as it allegedly caused cancer. Attached was a link to a “damning paper” that apparently confirmed how deadly this vaccine was. The paper referenced in the petition didn’t even mention the vaccine. It even predated its invention. It did however, mention cervical cancer which was enough for the creator of the petition.
The message here is if you see someone posting a paper that supposedly supports something (whether or not it seems dubious since fact-checking is always important) just be sure that paper says what the person showing it to you claims it does. If they go for the full gallop, ask for the best stuff only or chose a random 5 or so yourself if you don’t want to engage. Even if you just read the abstract, and if the paper is behind a paywall, the abstract is usually available. That should give enough of an idea what the paper says. If you aren’t all that scientifically literate you can at least see if the paper even mentions vaccines.
Studoscience 