Investigators who run clinical trials testing the effectiveness of medical or surgical interventions are usually pleased when they manage to generate a positive result. Such findings are more satisfying, more productive, easier to publish and often a good basis for attracting further research funds.
Yet, clinical trials cannot be expected to always produce a positive result. The reason is simple: not all treatments that are being tested are effective; many are not and will thus be cast aside.
This is true for any type of medicine, but it is particularly true for therapies that lack a solidly rational basis, such as those abundantly found in the realm of so-called alternative medicine. One would therefore expect that investigators in this area are particularly often disappointed by generating clinical trials with negative results.
As obvious and logical this assumption might seem, it is not supported by the actual evidence. Researchers in CAM are not disappointed, because they rarely produce negative findings. I am often struck by how many researchers of CAM manage to publish one positive study of their favourite treatment after another. This phenomenon has fascinated me for many years, therefore I created, some time ago, something that I satirically named the ‘Alternative Medicine Hall of Fame’ (AMHF).
The AMHF is an illustrious group of CAM researchers who have managed to go through their entire career publishing nothing but positive results related to their favourite CAM. So far, this group consists of 27 mostly well-known people (name of individual, pet therapy, country):
What these people have in common is that they have published plenty of papers on their favourite CAM without ever producing a negative finding. For a researcher in homeopathy, for example, this means that, in his or her hands homeopathy works for whatever disease or symptom it is being tested.
It also means that our alarm bells should start ringing, and we might ask ourselves: how trustworthy are the results of the research in question?
In an attempt to quantify this research trustworthiness, I suggested already in 2012 to calculate the amount of a researcher’s papers arriving at positive conclusions and divide it by the amount of his or her papers drawing negative conclusions. This index would be low for strongly trustworthy research, and high for those whose conclusions are worthy of more scrutiny.
A realistic example might be the case of a clinical scientist who has published a total of 100 original articles. If 50 had positive and 50 negative conclusions about the efficacy of the therapy tested, his or her ‘research trustworthy index’ (RTI) would be one; if 90 had positive and 10 negative findings, their RTI would be as high as nine.
Depending on the area of clinical medicine in question, an RTI between one and four might be acceptable. Particularly for CAM, an RTI higher than four should probably invite further examination.
And this is where the members of my AMHF are so very special. Their RTI would invariably consist of a finite number (the number of positive studies) divided by zero (the number of negative studies). That means their RTI is infinite which in turn suggests the trustworthiness of the conclusions of the research would amount to zero.
Has the RTI been a success? Has it been widely adopted in CAM?
Joe Rogan is an interesting character when it comes to skepticism and conspiracism. While we might assume that everyone knows who Joe Rogan is, it’s easy to overlook him, especially in the UK, when you’re not his target audience.
Rogan is an American comedian and Ultimate Fighting Championship commentator, but these days he’s most famous for his podcast, the Joe Rogan Experience. It’s an incredibly prolific show – since launching in 2009, he has published over 2,300 episodes (our own podcast, Skeptics with a K, was launched the same year, and is still in the early 400s in terms of episode number).
The most staggering thing about the Joe Rogan Experience is its phenomenal reach. It is the number one podcast, according to Spotify, in the UK, US, Australia, Canada and New Zealand. It has amassed 19.7 million subscribers and over six billion views on YouTube alone. With that reach comes impact; researchers have identified that an appearance on Rogan can secure his guests a significant lift in book sales. Within a week of appearing on the show, pseudohistorian Graham Hancock saw a 519% increase in book sales. Claims made by Rogan’s guests regularly dominate the media discourse in the days after their appearance airs.
What does Joe Rogan do with this significant power in the media? Mostly, he interviews and platforms people with wild conspiracy beliefs, who often make quite dangerous claims, almost entirely without challenge (although there are podcast projects taking up that challenge).
Amid all of this, it’s easy to unconsciously dismiss the Joe Rogan Experience as just a place where the ‘cranks’ go to talk about their ‘crank views’. But with a listenership as sizeable and significant, there’s plenty within Rogan’s audience who wouldn’t describe themselves as conspiracy theorists, despite the media they’re consuming. And that means that some of the more fringe ideas that are circulated on Rogan’s show are suddenly accessible a huge audience, where they might start to take root.
Take, for example, fenbenzadole. The first mention of fenbenzadole on Rogan appears to happen in October 2023, in an interview with Graham Hancock wherein they discuss the initial postponement of Hancock’s debate with archaeologist Flint Dibble, due to Dibble’s cancer diagnosis. During the discussion, Joe spontaneously mentions fenbendazole – a medication he had presumably come across on Instagram or Twitter, since he goes to his saved posts during the episode in order to find its name. According to Rogan, “It’s some sort of a very low-cost drug that’s being repurposed. I think it’s some sort of an anti-parasitic drug that’s being repurposed and is having supposedly remarkable results.”
Having found the saved post, appearing at the time on a website called “vigilantnews.com”, Rogan proceeds to try to read the highly technical language outlining what is said to be so remarkable about fenbendazole:
[It] has at least 12 proven anti-cancer mechanisms in vitro and in vivo. It disrupts microtubulate polymerization, a major mechanism, induces cell cycle, whatever that means, arrest, blocks glucose transport, and impairs glucose utilization by cancer cells, increases P53 tumor suppressor levels, inhibits cancer cell viability, inhibits cancer cell migration and invasion, induces apoptosis, induces autography, induces… They’re trying to get me with all these words. Preoptosis and necrosis, induces differentiation and senescence, inhibits tuner angiogenesis, reduces colony formation and inhibits stemness in cancer cells, inhibits drug resistance and sensitizes cells to conventional chemo as well as radiation therapy. A very similar drug in the same family has already been approved by the FDA. And that is mebendazole. And it is in several clinical trials right now for brain cancers and colon cancers. So why are [there] no fenbendazole clinical trials for cancer?
This is clearly in the “huge if true” category, so what actually is fenbendazole?
Fenbendazole
Fenbendazole is a wide spectrum anti-parasitic medication that’s used for sheep, cattle, horses, fish, dogs, cats, rabbits and seals. It treats a range of gut parasites like hookworms, roundworms and tapeworms. It works by binding to a protein called tubulin, which makes up microtubules – exactly as Joe Rogan read. Microtubules are a crucial part of the cell’s structural system, and when microtubules can’t form properly due to this binding, the cells eventually die.
Mebendazole, the other drug Rogan mentions, is essentially the human version of fenbenzadole. It’s given to people to treat threadworms and other gut based parasitic infections. And, surprisingly, much of what Rogan is reading out is actually scientifically reasonable. Drugs that bind to tubulin will have an impact on apoptosis, cell migration, autophagy, differentiation, senescence and p53, which is very frequently mutated in cancer. And drugs that bind to microtubules are also given as anti-cancer medications. For example, docetaxel is a chemotherapy that targets microtubules, used against a range of cancers including breast, lung, prostate, stomach, head and neck, and ovarian cancer.
Rogan is right about something else, too: there are pre-clinical trials, and some very early clinical trials, investigating mebenzadole for use in cancer treatment, and they show some promise. There are also early pre-clinical trials investigating fenbenzadole for cancer therapeutics, too.
But here’s the issue: these two treatments not being rolled out for patient use yet has absolutely nothing to do with big pharma thinking they’re not marketable. Getting a medication from conception through to patient use is a phenomenally expensive process with a high failure rate. Pharmaceutical companies love an opportunity to use a drug that’s already reliably used in humans, already has some safety data available, and already actually does the thing you want it to do – in this case, bind to tubulin and disrupt the microtubule formation. We see this in business all the time; taking something that already exists and bringing it to another market for a higher price to make a good profit.
It doesn’t take something being available cheaper elsewhere to prohibit sales for the same thing at a higher price point; people will spend more for the same thing for a whole range of reasons, including brand loyalty, a trusted source, convenience or accessibility. If fenbendazole was actually approved as an anti-cancer medication, healthcare organisations would be lining up to buy it from a pharmaceutical company, rather than a veterinary practice, and patients are much more likely to want to take it if it’s prescribed by their oncologist instead of having to buy it online from a random source. That is likely even true in places like America, where insurance companies (or a lack of insurance) come into the equation, but where there are plenty of ways to justify why it’s important to buy a medication from a pharmaceutical company, even if the drug is identical to one sold elsewhere.
Chemical structures of benzimidazole anthelmintics commonly prescribed for human (mebendazole and Albendazole) and veterinary (Fenbendazole and Flubendazole) use. Via Guerini et al., Cancers 2019, 11(9), 1284; https://doi.org/10.3390/cancers11091284 (Figure 1)
But even taking that out of the equation, mebendazole and fenbendazole aren’t very good drugs for this purpose at the moment, because they don’t pass across the gastrointestinal barrier well. This is good when they’re being taken as antiparasitic drugs for gut parasites, since there’s very low toxicity for the patient as a result but decent toxicity for the parasites. It makes it a safe and reliable treatment. But, if we want to treat cancer, we need the medication to get further around the body, depending on where the tumour is.
If mebendazole or fenbendazole are to be effective as anti-cancer medications, we need to figure out a way around that, which means changing the molecular structure of the medication somehow. That might mean adding something to the drug to help it get into the system better, or changing how it’s administered – perhaps instead of an oral tablet, it might need to be injected. These are things that pharmaceutical companies can test and patent, so that their version of the drug is the effective one – and the saleable one.
When Rogan asks on air, “Why aren’t there clinical trials for fenbendazole?” his guest, Graham Hancock, provides a confident answer (about the medication he’s only just heard about): “Big Pharma don’t see a margin in it.”
To which Rogan replies: “I mean, if that, who knows? But if that is the case, I mean, what an enemy of the people. They’re preventing information and preventing people from using things.”
Rogan’s said ‘if’ – so he might argue that he’s not saying it’s definitely the reason… but he is clearly implying it, and leaving it to his (well-trained) audience to make that connection. But he’s flipped the narrative here: instead of saying “researchers have found that mebendazole might be useful, so they’re starting to do pre-clinical trials and then clinical trials, and then they’re following the same route with fenbendazole, but they just started a bit later on that one so they haven’t got as far as clinical trials yet” he’s saying, “Why are They withholding progress on fenbendazole?”
The truth is, we don’t know yet whether these two medications will prove to be reliable for cancer use. We do not have enough data to say either way. There are countless medications that seem “promising” for cancer, but turn out to be useless once we give it to human patients. In fact, in the case of mebendazole, as promising as it may be for treating and even preventing some cancers, there’s data to suggest it might also accelerate the progression of some other cancers. We need to do more research to make sure it is effective as an anti-cancer medication, can get to where it needs to get to treat those cancers, and is safe for use as an anti-cancer medication. There’s a lot of research left to do, and until then it’s just not safe to use this medication to treat cancer.
It might seem like there’s no harm here – after all, these two medications are minimally toxic in humans. But low toxicity is not zero toxicity. There are also risks associated with taking the wrong medication for your cancer diagnosis – we need to make sure that we’re being safe and taking something that works, and, if we eschew what the oncologist says and take something else, we might be avoiding a treatment that truly works in favour of one that doesn’t.
Mebendazole is in clinical trials for glioma – a brain cancer that we find exceptionally hard to treat. If you decide to take it experimentally for something like breast cancer, which we’re really very good at treating, you’re potentially missing an opportunity to take a treatment that works in favour of something we just don’t have evidence for.
In addition, there have been cases where patients have taken fenbendazole and been considerably unwell, including one patient in Japan with non-small cell lung cancer who took fenbendazole based on social media advice and ended up with drug-induced liver damage. Thankfully, after the patient ceased their month-long course of fenbendazole, their severe liver damage resolved – but after a month of the treatment, there was no evidence of tumour shrinkage in her case.
This case was widely reported in 2021 – long before Rogan found a post on a dubious-looking website that persuaded him to start talking up the benefits of fenbendazole.
The fenbendazole scandal was an incident wherein false information that fenbendazole, an anthelmintic used to treat various parasites in dogs, cured terminal lung cancer spread among patients. It started with the claim of American cancer patient, Joe Tippens, but rather became sensational in South Korea.
The truth is, Joe Tippens was also part of a clinical trial for a new anti-cancer medication, but under the care of a veterinarian he chose to attribute his survival to taking what is now referred to as the ‘Joe Tippens protocol’ of fenbendazole plus vitamin E supplements, CBD oil, and bioavailable curcumin. The news really took off in South Korea, when a local comedian shared his intention to take fenbendazole for his cancer diagnosis. The comedian later shared that he would not take or recommend fenbendazole and ultimately died from his cancer in 2021.
In a study researching the impact of the social media misinformation around fenbendazole in South Korea, a survey of 86 people living with cancer showed that “about half of the cancer patients had taken non-prescription anthelmintics during their chemotherapy, and 96.5% of them did not inform the clinicians.”
Meanwhile, Rogan – at least in this interview with Hancock, where he first discusses fenbendazole – never actively recommends that people should take it. He says of Flint Dibble: “I hope he’s interested in even just examining it”. He comes across as relatively balanced on the whole thing, even saying
The problem is when these people that are creating these incredible drugs, these scientists and doctors and these people that are having these amazing medical advancements, they’re connected to something that just wants to make money. The people that are selling the drugs and the people that are running the companies are completely different than the scientists that are legitimately developing these things, and many of them turn out to be very effective for all sorts of ailments and diseases.
Joe Rogan isn’t therefore anti-science – he’ll tell you the science. He’s not even anti-medicine. He just wants to give people access to the best science and the best medicine. And that would be great if mebendazole or fenbendazole were proven to be useful treatments for cancer… but we’re just not there yet, and it might be that we never will be.
In a world where people living with cancer are bombarded with advice and recommendations of ways to treat their cancer, it is doubtlessly tempting to listen when your favourite podcast host talks up the scientific properties of a new or repurposed drug.
But you should never take medical advice from a podcast. Especially not the Joe Rogan Experience.
The Skeptic podcast, bringing you the best of the magazine’s expert analysis of pseudoscience, conspiracy theory and claims of the paranormal since its relaunch as online news source in September 2020.
Earlier this month, Time magazine published a striking news article highlighted on its cover: the dire wolf is back. The newsmaker was a biotechnological company called Colossal Biosciences, which focuses on de-extinction of species that no longer exist. Across numerous magazine articles, they shared the photos of three nice snow-white pups with wolf-like faces and claimed that they are representatives of Aenocyon dirus – a canid species that roamed across the Americas until the end of the last Ice Age, and went extinct after the intrusion of the first humans.
Dire wolves are familiar to modern people due to the TV series Game of Thrones, which even provided reference for the name of the youngest pup, a little female wolf, Khaleesi. Two other pups were called Romulus and Remus — in honour of the fabulous founders of Rome which were suckled by a she-wolf. But are they really dire wolves? Do they really belong to the same species that inhabited the Americas ten thousand years ago?
First of all, significant biological results are usually published as academic papers. They contain detailed scientific descriptions of the discovery itself and the methods that led to it. This format allows us to understand the results comprehensively and decide how to interpret them. If the review process of a traditional journal seems unacceptably slow for disclosing the urgent results, there is an option of preprint.
bioRxiv, the largest preprint server for biology, aggregates thousands of early-stage papers, which are posted immediately to be discussed in the scientific community, while a final edited version is undergoing a thorough peer-review process. But Colossal Biosciences has not even posted a preprint about their “resurrection” experiment, to say nothing about a formally published article.
All we have is the press release from a company – the least informative form of scientific communication. The article in Time and information on the commercial website (arranged rather more in a commercial style than in a scientific style) is insufficient for critical analysis. This undermines any trust we might have in the company’s claims: broad statements like resurrection of a new species cannot be taken on faith and marketing.
Having no proper scientific publication, we are forced to discuss the few details available in press releases. But even these details throw the claims of “de-extinction” into question. Colossal Biosciences has deciphered the genome of a dire wolf – this is the only part of their work on which they have published a paper as a bioRxiv preprint. The company claims that they have further identified key genes responsible for the characteristic traits of dire wolves, and edited those respective genes in common grey wolves. In total, researchers edited 14 genes corresponding to 20 phenotypic traits, including a white coat, larger size, and characteristic vocalisations, such as howling and whining.
If one edits 14 genes in the genome of a grey wolf, is this sufficient to render it a new species? The exact answer depends on the criteria of species we use.
If we start from a genetic criterion, the answer will be evident. Gene editing introduces far fewer changes into a genome than traditional breeding. Even 14 changes represent a negligible proportion of the whole canid genome, which contains around 19,000 genes. So, from the genetic point of view, three fluffy white pups of Colossal Biosciences differ from a random grey wolf living in a forest less than a spaniel differs from a husky. But both a spaniel and a husky are considered to belong to the same species. A subspecies of grey wolf, by the way.
Let’s also remember that dire wolves and modern grey wolves are separated by a huge evolutionary distance. Their last common ancestor lived more than four million years ago, and dire wolves are more distant from grey wolves than coyotes and jackals. In contrast, if we read the genome of Romulus, Remus, or Khaleesi, they will almost merge with grey wolves on the phylogenetic tree. They are so far apart on the evolutionary scale that it would be absurd to attribute these three fluffy canids to the Aenocyon dirus species.
This image from a preprint by Colossal Biosciences shows the evolutionary tree of canids. You can see that dire wolf is a distant relative of an extant grey wolf — more distant that jackal. The last common ancestor of dire wolf and grey wolf lived 4.52 million years ago. Image credit: Gregory L. Gedman, Kathleen Morrill Pirovich, Jonas Oppenheimer et al. On the ancestry and evolution of the extinct dire wolf. bioRxiv. CC-BY-NC-ND 4.0 International.
If the most genes in Colossal’s pups are still of lupine origin, their physiology and biochemistry should be almost the same as of regular grey wolves. We still have the last criterion of species to consider: a reproductive criterion. Individuals are normally considered as the parts of a same species if they can crossbreed and give fertile offspring. We cannot check this criterion directly; the last dire wolves, which could be controls, are extinct.
Even if we could, this experiment would be far from insightful. The canid family is rich in interspecies hybrids: wolves can give viable and fertile hybrids when matched with jackals and coyotes, but they are considered separate species. Even the successful hybridisation with dire wolves would not mean these gene-edited pups should be recognised as dire wolves.
In the 2000s, when I was a schoolboy, I engrossed myself in reading magazines with futurological predictions. They promised that by 2035 we would have gene-edited pets with external features of their wild counterparts. For example, domestic cats that look like small lions. The case of Romulus, Remus, and Khaleesi is highly reminiscent of such “customisation” of animals. A hypothetical lion-like cat will not become a real lion, it’s just a slightly tweaked cat (and that’s for the best – its owner has no need to worry that they would be eaten someday instead of Whiskas). Likewise, the pups of Colossal are not dire wolves – they are customised grey wolves.
Surprisingly, this could be the greatest take-home message from the “dire wolf” story and a real step of progress. The work of Colossal Biosciences is valuable as a case of gene editing of a mammal, and it could possibly pave the way to industrialising this technique and starting to use it en masse. What if we really are on the cusp of the era of gene-edited pets? It could offer the shocking prospect of having a lion-like maned cat… or a dog that looks like a dire wolf. These techniques could change an animal’s appearance, without having to undergo a long breeding process and risk undesirable effects such as hereditary diseases.
This technique could offer some more tempting prospects – for example, the industry of gene-edited animals to grow organs for transplants. Colossal Biosciences really has made a great scientific advance – not in de-extinction, but in animal customisation.
Indeed, the company is forced to take a pragmatic approach to the problem of de-extinction. The full instruction to make a new (or a well-forgotten, old) species lies in its DNA, and the only way to re-create a species is to express its full genome in a new organism. However, it is technically difficult to synthesise the whole mammal genome to render it fit for expression in a new cell. And, even in the case of success, the created embryo of a new species could be incompatible with any of the extant female animals – there will be no mother for it.
In these conditions, all we could do is to render an extant species to make it resemble the extinct one. Colossal Biosciences works hard in this direction: they have already created woolly mice on their way to a more ambitious goal – create a woolly elephant that could serve as a “resurrected mammoth”.
The advocates of such an approach say that we need to fill the ecological niches of the extinct species – and such “customisation” is a good option. Here we, all of humanity, act as collective customers – thus the biotechnological industry is focused on customisation of wolves and elephants, not domestic pets (they can wait).
These considerations have one significant drawback: ecological niches have significantly changed for thousands of years, and the “resurrected” animals share the majority of genes with their common extant counterparts. This way, their ecological behaviour might differ from the expected one. This is one more criterion of species – an ecological criterion – and only long, natural experiments could show whether it is met or not. Only at that moment could we hypothesise a partial resurrection of the extinct species – if the experiment will be successful.
Romulus, Remus, and Khaleesi are not an answer, but a living question to science. And the answers will eventually be published as academic articles – not press pieces in Time magazine.
Pope Francis died recently at the age of 88. This sets the stage for the imminent gathering of cardinals in Rome to elect his successor. The traditional mourning period and funeral rites are underway, and soon the conclave will begin – a process steeped in centuries-old tradition and secrecy. As anticipation builds, attention has turned to Africa. African cardinals are seen as serious contenders. Among the leading African candidates are Cardinal Fridolin Ambongo Besungu of the Democratic Republic of Congo, Cardinal Peter Kodwo Appiah Turkson of Ghana, and, though less likely due to age, Cardinal Robert Sarah of Guinea.
There has never been a black pope in the modern history of the Catholic Church, and the prospect of electing one has generated considerable excitement and debate around the world. For many, the possibility of a black pope is seen as a powerful step toward inclusivity and a recognition of the continent’s increasing significance within the Church. Supporters argue that such a choice would symbolise unity in diversity and reflect the Church’s demographic realities. However, others view the prospect with apprehension, interpreting it as a troubling omen.
The idea of a black pope as a bad omen is increasingly being interpreted in apocalyptic terms, with some people conflating spurious prophecies attributed to both Saint Malachy and Nostradamus. Saint Malachy was a renowned 12th-century archbishop and church reformer who played a major role in aligning the Irish church with Roman practices and restoring ecclesiastical discipline. Although he was celebrated for his piety and leadership, a set of cryptic predictions known as the Prophecy of the Popes was falsely attributed to him centuries after his death; these prophecies were first published in 1595 and are widely regarded by historians as a pseudepigraphic fabrication. Enthusiasts of these prophecies claim that after Pope Francis – the 112th and final pope as per the count of the prophecies – comes a period of tribulation and the destruction of Rome (possibly spearheaded by a figure named “Peter the Roman”).
Despite widespread speculation, Saint Malachy’s prophecy does not mention anything about a black pope; the idea is entirely absent from his list of cryptic Latin phrases, which simply describe each pope in symbolic terms and conclude with Peter the Roman.
The connection between a black pope and apocalyptic prophecy instead comes from interpretations of Nostradamus, the 16th-century French astrologer whose enigmatic quatrains have been linked to countless world events. Nostradamus published his famous work, The Prophecies, in 1555, filled with poetic and ambiguous verses. One such verse reads:
“Born in the shadows and during a dark day/He will be sovereign in realm and goodness/ He will cause his blood to rise again in the ancient urn/ Renewing the age of gold for that of brass.”
“He will be born of the gulf and unmeasured city/ Born of obscure and dark family/He who the revered power of the great King/ Will want to destroy through Rouen and Evreux”
Century V, Quatrain 84
With a bit of imagination, it is possible to read into these verses and establish a connection between darkness or the colour black and ominous figures in prophecy. However, Nostradamus never specifically mentioned a pope with dark skin; his quatrains are famously ambiguous and open to interpretation, but none directly refer to a black or African pontiff. That has not stopped some from falsely claiming otherwise, such as when The Daily Mail recently attributed to Nostradamus the verse:
“A young man of dark skin with the help of the great king will deliver the purse to another of red colour.”
In reality, this verse does not appear anywhere in Nostradamus’ published works.
Not that it matters what Nostradamus actually wrote – even if he had predicted a pope with dark skin, so what? Nostradamus was, by most accounts, a charlatan whose reputation rests on the deliberate vagueness of his writings, making them endlessly adaptable to any event or figure. In reality, we shouldn’t take any prophet seriously, but Nostradamus is an especially poor candidate for credibility: his quatrains are so cryptic and ambiguous that they function like poetic Rorschach tests, allowing anyone to see whatever they wish in the text. This is a classic trick used by prophets throughout history: by employing deliberately opaque and nebulous language, they ensure that after something happens, it’s always possible to retroactively fit the prophecy to the event. The enduring popularity of Nostradamus’s predictions is less about genuine foresight and more about our innate tendency to find patterns and meaning, even where none truly exist
Although Nostradamus may have been a charlatan, he was not a racist. His use of dark or shadowy imagery was symbolic rather than racial, reflecting a long-standing tradition in many cultures – including several African languages – where darkness often represents mystery, danger, or misfortune, not necessarily skin colour. The tendency today to interpret these metaphors as literal references to race, especially in the context of a pope’s ethnicity, reveals more about contemporary biases than about Nostradamus’s intentions. It is those who link a pope’s race to ominous predictions who are perpetuating racist ideas, rather than the prophet himself.
To their credit, the Catholic Church has never officially embraced apocalyptic prophecies like those attributed to Malachy or Nostradamus, and among Christian groups, Catholics are often the most restrained in their public expectations about the end times. While Protestant traditions sometimes focus intensely on biblical timelines and predictions, Catholic teaching tends to steer clear of overly fear-based interpretations. Nevertheless, the Church is not entirely immune to apocalyptic fascination. The rise of the Fatima cult in the 20th century, with its emphasis on secret messages and warnings about global catastrophe, captured the imagination of millions and became a focal point for end-times speculation. Pope John Paul II, in particular, had a deep personal devotion to Our Lady of Fatima, interpreting his survival of the 1981 assassination attempt as a sign of her protection and publicly linking his papacy to the Fatima apocalyptic messages.
It’s no surprise that the Catholic Church, with its long-standing power and global influence, has never fully embraced apocalyptic worldviews – apocalyptic movements typically arise among people who are disenfranchised or marginalised, seeking hope for divine intervention to overturn their oppression. Even Jesus, living under the shadow of Roman rule, spoke passionately of imminent cataclysm, famously declaring that some of his contemporaries would witness the world transformed before their deaths – a prophecy, it turns out, that never came to pass. The institutional Church, by contrast, is far from disenfranchised and has little incentive to promote visions of imminent upheaval. Yet, the appeal of apocalyptic timelines persists among those who feel alienated or powerless, for whom the promise of dramatic change is deeply attractive.
The real danger of apocalyptic ideas lies in the temptation for enthusiasts to actively hasten doomsday, turning symbolic expectations into concrete – and sometimes catastrophic – actions. While efforts to breed a red heifer – seen by some as a fulfilment of the ritual described in the biblical book of Numbers and a sign of the coming end times – or speculating about the election of a Black pope may seem relatively harmless, the risks become much greater when these beliefs inspire more drastic interventions. For instance, some extremists have advocated for the destruction of the Al Aqsa mosque in Jerusalem to make way for a third Jewish temple, believing this will trigger the messianic age. Similarly, certain apocalyptic-minded groups view the proliferation of nuclear weapons as a tool for bringing about the end times.
All of these apocalyptic expectations, of course, are rooted in delusion and superstition. But that doesn’t mean we should ignore the possibility of catastrophe altogether; rather, we should approach the prospect of disaster with rational concern and proactive planning, not with the feverish enthusiasm that characterises religious end-times thinking. Unlike the fantastical visions of antichrists, apocalypses, or cosmic battles between angels and demons, the real threats facing humanity – such as pandemics, asteroid impacts, wars, and global warming – are tangible and scientifically grounded. These dangers require thoughtful, collective action and a commitment to prevention, not resignation to fate or the hope that destruction will somehow usher in a better world.
Whoever is elected as the new pope – regardless of race, needless to say – will inherit a role that extends far beyond religious ritual and doctrine. The pope is not only a spiritual leader for over a billion Catholics but also a figure with significant influence on global affairs, often shaping public opinion and policy on issues ranging from peace and social justice to climate change and nuclear disarmament. While much of what the pope says will revolve around theology, which will not resonate with us skeptics, his voice carries real weight in the secular world and can mobilise action or shift attitudes on pressing global challenges. As skeptics, we can only hope the next pope adopts an “apocalyptic” mindset in the secular sense – concerned not with mystical end-times, but with the urgent, real-world threats facing humanity.
As much as I hate to sully the pages of such an esteemed source as The Skeptic with something as vulgar as geometric details on how one should go about fucking RFK Jr. in the ass with a Honda CR-V, his latest swerve into anti-autism eugenics more or less demands it. So, with apologies to those with overly developed visual imaginations, it should be done by backing the CR-V in slowly with all four doors open. Because a regular “go fuck yourself” would fall gravely short of the moment. RFK Jr. needs to go fuck himself as hard as “himself” can get fucked. He needs to go fuck himself right in the brain-worm with the whale corpse and the chainsaw.
Of course, my standard level of ire for Secretary of Health and Human Services Robert F. Kennedy Jr. is quite high. He is an anti-vax, science denying, fear-mongeringconspiracy theorist who has a disturbing history with the corpses of megafauna. So it came as a surprise to me just how much more hatred I was able to muster for him on April 16th, when he launched a dangerously misguided crusade against autism. The opening bid of which was a grotesquely inaccurate speech that pushed the common alternative medicine refrain that the increased prevalence of autism is the result of some environmental toxin rather than the increase in testing people for autism. In the speech, Kennedy pledged to find the “cure” for autism by September, and he vowed to do so with a wildly unethical collection of private medical data from people’s doctors, pharmacies, insurance companies, and wearable devices.
The speech, which was occasioned by a new CDC report that noted an uptick in rates of autism, was ripe with misinformation. Kennedy dismissed the prevailing science about genetic inheritance, declaring it a “dead end” — on no scientific authority other than that which he gleaned in law school; accused the public and the media of succumbing to a “myth of epidemic denial,” and thereby implied that the scientific community was perpetuating a myth of denial; and in so doing, he grossly disparaged people with autism. He described children with on the spectrum as:
“[K]ids who will never pay taxes. They’ll never hold a job. They’ll never play baseball. They’ll never write a poem. They’ll never go out on a date. Many of them will never use a toilet unassisted.”
And, of course, much of the immediate response consisted of people pointing to all those tax-paying, baseball-playing, job-holding, poem-writing, date-going, unassisted shit-taking people with autism that so very clearly disprove his point. But as instinctual as that might be, it subtly plays into the Nazi-esque framing that he’s crafted around the issue.
Because yes, there are some places on the autism spectrum where people can’t use the bathroom unassisted. But so what? Do we value human beings now based on how hard it is for them to take a shit? How much their existence inconveniences us? And why the hell are the first two items on that list about “productivity to the state”? Paying taxes and having jobs? Is that how Robert Kennedy sees human beings? As potential contributions to the state?
Photograph taken by an autistic participant, Joe, reproduced from an open access publication: Klein, U. (2021). No selfies: the social world of autistic male adults as depicted in their everyday photographic practices. Visual Studies, 38(1), 17–33. https://doi.org/10.1080/1472586X.2021.1942188
As terrifying as Kennedy’s “conclusions-first” approach to science is, the far more concerning element here is the eugenic presumptions that undergirds his presumptions; this idea that what we want is a world without autism. But a world without autism is a world without so many of the people that I love. And even if you could somehow extract the autism and leave the person, you’d be siphoning away a lot of the “them” that I love.
But as we all know in the skeptical community, this seam of eugenics runs beneath a lot of the alt-medicine scene; never acknowledged openly but always just below the surface. It’s there in the bigoted horror some parents feel when they realise their genes could be faulty enough to make a kid with autism and scramble for some external villain to blame. It’s there in all their ableism about us making our health in our minds; a mindset that necessarily excludes those with congenital conditions and necessarily ostracises anyone unfortunate enough to develop a chronic condition after adopting this worldview. And it’s there in RFK Jr.’s presumption that neurotypical is an ideal that we should be trying to funnel people into.
Everything about RFK’s position is terrifying beyond belief, but nothing is more terrifying than the eugenics groundwork he’s laying by defining people with autism as leeches on the state who need to be cured and prevented. I know a lot of people who can’t play baseball or hold a job or write a poem or take an unassisted shit. What will Kennedy’s cure for them look like?
From the pages of The Skeptic magazine, this is The Skeptic podcast, bringing you the best of the magazine’s expert analysis of pseudoscience, conspiracy theory and claims of the paranormal since its relaunch as online news source in September 2020.
Skepticism often means asking whether something really works. Whether it’s a trendy herbal remedy or the criminal justice system, the key question is: does it do what we want it to do? Unfortunately, while government officials often talk about getting tough on crime, there is little concern to back up current approaches with evidence of effectiveness. That may be because the evidence suggests that current approaches have the opposite of their desired effect, and that there are better alternatives that face resistance from entrenched interests.
Before we assess whether our criminal justice systems work, we have to understand what we want them to be doing. There are at least five distinct goals one could have for a criminal justice system, though most systems theoretically serve multiple goals: retribution, deterrence, rehabilitation, restoration, quarantine.
Of these, deterrence, rehabilitation, and quarantine are the most self-explanatory, as they are all just approaches to harm prevention. Conversely, retributive justice is entirely about figuring out who deserves to be punished and harming them proportionally to the harm they caused, even if doing so serves no other function. Finally, restorative justice focuses on the needs of all involved with the goal of healing past harm and preventing future harm.
While retribution remains a strong desire for many people, defenders of modern criminal justice systems typically argue that these systems are functioning properly by claiming they deter crime, rehabilitate criminals, or keep them quarantined if the first two options fail. For example, the UK’s Justice Secretary Alex Chalk stated in 2023: “We must ensure dangerous criminals face the full force of the law by serving their time in prison. But we must also be honest: if we don’t use prison in a targeted way, we will run out of it.”
Advocates often speak confidently that these systems are working as intended.
For those fortunate enough to be unfamiliar with the detail of risk reduction interventions within UK prisons, ‘Building Choices’ is a Risk-Needs-Responsivity course based in cognitive behavioural techniques that has been rolled out in the last year aimed at people who have been convicted of violent and/or sexual offences. The Ministry of Justice (MoJ) describes the course as follows:
The Building Choices programmes has been designed with a person-first approach at its core, recognising and addressing the individual needs of participants in order to address both offence-specific and wider offending behaviour risks and needs to target the versatility of offending behaviour.
This sounds very much like it will fit the bill if the aim is rehabilitation and offence reduction. The course is also ‘accredited’ with the Ministry of Justice, which they state signifies confidence that a programme is designed based on the best available evidence, monitored to make sure it is delivered as intended, and evaluated to show the outcomes.
However, thanks to a FOIA request, we can see that, far from having strong evidence to support their claims, in many cases the UK government failed to even study the issues. When asked to provide the evaluation justifying the rollout of ‘Building Choices’, the MoJ responded in December 2024 as follows:
FOIA request 241204008 to the Ministry of Justice, consisting of 5 separate requests.
No such evaluations exist. To be fair, it will be difficult to prove if a course reduces reoffending until people have gone through it and time has passed to see if they go back to their crime committing ways. Building Choices has only been rolled out estate-wide in the last couple of months.
This invites the question: what is the evidence for other, older courses? Building Choices is being rolled out as a replacement to other courses which have been in place since around 2017. In fact Building Choices is set to replace almost all accredited programmes, with the exception of those designed to address specific sexual paraphilias and extremist ideology.
The main predecessor course for Building Choices is a course called Kaizen. So, what is the evidence for Kaizen working as a rehabilitative tool? Again it appears that no such evaluations exist.
Going back further – the reason Kaizen was rolled out in 2017 was in part because one of its predecessors, the less euphemistically named Sex Offender Treatment Programme (SOTP), had been shown to at best make no difference and at worst increase reoffending rates. SOTP had been running in UK prisons from the early 1990s. An evaluation of SOTP was undertaken in 2012 which indicated that it was counter-productive. However this information was not published and the course was not pulled until 2017, with the MoJ insisting that it was effective until very shortly before it was pulled.
Things are not looking good for accredited programmes aimed at offending behaviour.
There is also a similar story in relation to other interventions designed to address offending in those diagnosed or believed to have personality disorders. The Offender Personality Disorder (OPD) Pathway is a collection of interventions both in custody and the community. An evaluation of the effectiveness of the OPD Pathway between 2012 and 2017 was published in late 2022. The outcome of this evaluation was that the interventions were found to have no quantitative impact on risk reduction. There was no published reason given as to why the publication of this evaluation had taken five years – a similar length of time to the SOTP delay.
But it’s not just about the programmes themselves. We also need to consider the broader environment in which these interventions are delivered.
Staffing shortfalls further exacerbate these problems. HMCIP reported that acute staff shortages were “widespread” and that many prisons were “unable to deliver even basic regimes,” with some residents locked in their cells for over 22 hours a day.
Housing is another key issue. Stable accommodation on release is strongly linked to lower reoffending, but many people leave prison homeless or in precarious temporary arrangements. In 2022–23, only around half of people released from prison had confirmed accommodation upon release. The situation is especially dire for people on probation, many of whom face weeks in hostels or nights spent rough sleeping.
Mental health provision is similarly inadequate. The prison population has a high prevalence of mental health needs – estimated by the Ministry of Justice to be as high as 70% – but access to treatment is often limited or delayed. HMCIP found in multiple inspections that services were “under pressure, with long waiting lists and insufficient support for those with complex needs”.
Recall rates are also climbing. In the year ending September 2023, over 11,000 people were recalled to custody, often for non-criminal breaches, such as missing appointments. This revolving door undermines continuity of care and disrupts engagement with any rehabilitative services that do exist.
When these structural issues are taken together, it becomes difficult to see how any rehabilitative intervention – no matter how well-designed – could be expected to succeed. If the conditions are so poor that programmes can’t be delivered properly, people can’t access housing or treatment on release, and many are recalled for administrative reasons, then the entire rehabilitation project begins to look more like rhetoric than reality.
If rehabilitation is unlikely to succeed in the absence of social reforms, are the prospects for restorative justice approaches any better? Restorative justice programs, which arose as a response to the adversarial nature of modern justice systems, aim to provide alternative methods of accountability and harm prevention.
Restorative justice relies on mediated discussions with offenders and sometimes between offenders and victims where participants share their understanding of the harm caused by the actions and the personal and community needs that have to be met to satisfy the need for genuine accountability and to reduce the risk of future harms. Advocates of restorative justice claim it is both a more humane and more effective method of dealing with harmful behavior than the current systems, while critics object that it is too offender-centric and is only functional for addressing minor harms.
As with any form of justice, the effectiveness of restorative programs depends on the specific methods they use, but a recent meta-analysis of restorative justice research found that “restorative justice programs resulted in greater victim and client satisfaction, victims’ views of procedural justice, and client accountability compared to traditional legal system approaches”. Increased emphasis on victim needs over punishment is the most likely explanation for the greater victim and client satisfaction, as well as improved views on procedural justice as a concept.
Restorative justice also does better on more subjective assessments of accountability, such as “self-report assessments of accountability for the criminal act, victim perceptions of client accountability, and whether or not the client expressed feelings of accountability, such as through apologizing”. So, there do appear to be some legitimate benefits of restorative justice as an alternative to traditional approaches.
It is likely that research will continue to emphasize the broader truth that criminal justice systems are not a solution to social injustice
Unfortunately, when we take into consideration the quality of restorative justice studies, the current quantitative data suggests that restorative justice practices do not have a significant impact on recidivism. The authors of the meta-analysis caution though that we should be careful not to read too much into these results, as the primary aim of restorative approaches is not to reduce recidivism, and those approaches could be functionally combined with more empirically supported rehabilitative models like Risk-Need-Responsivity to more reliably reduce recidivism.
Risk-Need-Responsivity models also focus on addressing the needs that lead to harmful behaviors, while assessing the risk posed by the individual when determining how significant the intervention needs to be in terms of intensity and duration. However, as we see from the FOIA results above, the effectiveness of Risk-Need-Responsivity approaches and empirical support for them may also be overstated. Progress towards more humane criminal justice is likely to involve synthesising various needs-based approaches, while continuing to weed out the retributive urges that create a persistent demand to focus on punishment.
More research is clearly needed to determine what balance of criminal justice principles and practices works best, which in turn depends on what we want that system to accomplish. However, it is likely that any such research will continue to emphasise the broader truth that criminal justice systems are not a solution to social injustice; at best they can ameliorate the symptoms long enough for us to correct the systemic causes of harmful behavior.
