NZD-SOS

Late last week NZ Skeptics published a spoof website built by Mark Honeychurch (NZ Skeptics Secretary and past Chair, and alternating newsletter author).

We've written about the NZDSOS site in the past - a small number of doctors (and other “allied” health professionals) who are speaking out “with science” about the COVID-19 vaccine. I hope you note all the “scare quotes” in that last sentence!

Mark put together a site which superficially resembles the NZDSOS site, but with a subtly different URL - nzd-sos.com. But this site is different - it highlights the number of doctors, with a specific first name, who do support the COVID vaccine. For example, there are over 100 doctors with the first name “Sarah” who support the vaccine, as opposed to about 56 doctors on the NZDSOS site!

The project took inspiration from Project Steve. Project Steve was run by the US-based National Center for Science Education (NCSE) and curated a list of scientists whose first name was Steve or a derivative thereof (Stephen, Steven, Stephanie, Stefan, Etienne, Esteban, etc.) and who supported the scientific consensus on evolution. Creationists (or Intelligent Design Proponents) were fond of making lists of scientists who doubted evolution.

But, “Steves” made up about 1% of all scientists, so the point of Project Steve was to demonstrate that there were more scientists named Steve that supported evolution than all of the scientists who doubted it.

If you visit our nzd-sos site, you might be offended by the ugliness of the site design. This is unfortunately intentional, so as to spoof the original site. Mark notes that he had to work hard to make the site look as ugly as the original.

The site has received some great attention. We put the message out on Twitter, and this was then picked up by Siouxsie Wiles, who has a much larger audience than @NZSkeptics does. The Twitter Analytics numbers speak for themselves:

So, we're pretty happy with this. While some will view the numbers with some distaste, it's good to get our message out to a wider audience.

My favourite response to our tweet was this: