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I wasn’t sure what to do when I realized the guy at the party wasn’t joking around. As he got into the details of the conspiracy theory explaining how Lady Gaga killed Lou Reed, I stopped laughing and started backing away, nodding as I went.

You can bump into conspiracy theorists pretty much anywhere, except at vaccination clinics. And I’ve yet to meet one who wears a tinfoil hat out in public. They appear to be ordinary folks who believe extraordinary things. And while I don’t really care if you think Lada Gaga is an assassin —that has zero bearing on my life — other conspiracy theories threaten public health.

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Like many of you, I have tried to take on a few of the ‘vaccinations cause autism’ peeps over the years, explaining step-by-step how the original journal article that suggested a link was junk science and its author has been completely discredited. It’s baloney.

I rarely engage with those who claim 9/11 was an inside job — you don’t get the time back. But now, with the release of a pile of documents about the 1963 President Kennedy assassination, we know there will be a fresh round of ‘Who killed JFK’ conspiracy theories (and that Lee Harvey Oswald spoke “terrible, hardly recognizable Russian.”)