The Ockham Awards

Since 2012, The Skeptic has had the pleasure of awarding the Ockham Awards – our annual awards celebrating the very best work from within the skeptical community. The awards were founded because we wanted to draw attention to those people who work hard to get a great message out. The Ockhams recognise the effort and time that have gone into the community’s favourite campaigns, activism, blogs, podcasts, and outstanding contributors to the skeptical cause.

Ockham Awards

The winner of this year’s Ockham award for Skeptical Activism is Knowledge Fight podcast. Knowledge Fight is the long-running podcast that dissects right-wing propagandist Alex Jones, and through that lens attempts to shine light on the larger community of extremists he exists within. Created in January 2017 by Dan Friesen and Jordan Holmes, it has amassed a sizeable fanbase, and has become an essential repository for understanding the conspiracy theory ecosystem of Alex Jones and Infowars.

Other past Ockham winners include the BBC’s Disinformation Unit, Dr Elizabeth Bik, Dr Natália PasternakProfessor Edzard Ernst, the European Skeptics PodcastSay WHY To Drugs podcastBritt Hermes, and more.

A photograph of the Rusty Razor award: a rusty classic style straight razor encased in plastic with "The Rusty Razor" etched at the bottom.

While we recognise the best in skepticism, our awards are also an opportunity to highlight the danger posed by promoters of pseudoscience with our Rusty Razor award. The Rusty Razor is designed to spotlight individuals or organisations who have been prominent promoters of unscientific ideas within the last year.

This year’s Rusty Razor went to Dr Asseem Malhotra, a registered cardiologist who has become one of the country’s most influential critics of the COVID-19 vaccine, spreading narratives that run contrary to the best available evidence. In 2022, he released a paper claiming that Covid-19 mRNA vaccines posed a serious risk to cardiovascular health and that the vaccines were “at best a reckless gamble”. Dr Malhotra and his campaign against the COVID-19 vaccine was subsequently praised in Parliament by Andrew Bridgen MP as part of the reasoning behind his ongoing anti-vaccine crusade. In January 2023, Dr Malhotra used a BBC interview about statins to claim that excess deaths from coronary artery disease were actually complications from the vaccine, prompting a slew of complaints, and an apology from the broadcaster.

Previous Rusty Razor winners have included the Global Warming Policy FoundationDr Mike Yeadon for his anti-vaccination scaremongering, Dr Didier Raoult for his promotion of hydroxychloroquine as a treatment for COVID-19, Andrew Wakefield for his ongoing promotion of anti-vaxx misinformation, and Gwyneth Paltrow for her pseudoscience-peddling wellness empire, Goop.

Nominees and winners from previous years:

 

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