Antivaccine nonsense
Respectful Insolence
Category archives for Antivaccine nonsense
Respecting parental concerns versus pandering to antivaccine fears
Posted by Orac on September 13, 2012 In common colloquial usage, there is a term known as “gaydar.” Basically, it’s the ability some people claim to have that allows them to identify people who are gay. Whether gaydar actually exists or not, I don’t know, but I claim to have an ability that’s similar. That ability is the ability to sniff out…
More data on why people reject science
Posted by Orac on September 10, 2012 Although I focus mostly on medical topics, such as vaccines, alternative medicine, and cancer quackery, I don’t limit myself to such topics. True, I used to write a lot more about evolution and creationism, the paranormal, and other standard skeptical topics, but over the last couple of years I’ve realized where my strength is and…
Andrew Wakefield appeals?
Posted by Orac on September 7, 2012 On the antivaccine front, this year began with antivaccine hero Andrew Wakefield filing suit against investigative reporter Brian Deer, the BMJ, and Fiona Godlee (the editor of BMJ) for libel based on a series that Deer published in the BMJ outlining the evidence for Wakefield’s scientific fraud in his (in)famous 1998 Lancet case series. This…
Does all this blogging about quackery really accomplish anything?
Posted by Orac on September 7, 2012 Believe it or not, after nearly eight years blogging and around five years before that cutting my skeptical teeth on that vast and wild (and now mostly deserted and fallow) wilderness that was Usenet, I have occasionally wondered whether what I’m doing is worthwhile. Sometime around 1998, after I first discovered Holocaust denial on Usenet,…
If only… (Or, no science for you!)
Posted by Orac on September 6, 2012 I must admit, there are times when I see something that someone else has written and, in a fit of intense envy, wish very much that I had written it. This is just such a time, and Tony Ballantyne has written just such a piece. Even better, his piece, entitled If only…, was published in…
Pertussis outbreaks and vaccine effectiveness
Posted by Orac on September 5, 2012 About a month ago, I deconstructed a typically dishonest and deceitful attempt by that Overlord of Quackery on the Internet (in my opinion, of course), Joe Mercola, to claim that the acellular pertussis vaccine doesn’t work. It was a typical Mercola bit of prestidigitation that, as so much antivaccine propaganda does, took a grain of…
Perhaps this line of work is not for you…
Posted by Orac on September 4, 2012 Over the long weekend, I came across a bunch of things that in normal times I would have blogged about, but because I was trying to chill, work a little on the yard, and also work a bit on grants, I intentionally took Monday off of blogging. As I get back into the swing of…
They say that about the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation as though it were a bad thing
Posted by Orac on September 4, 2012 Why is it after a three day weekend, it always feels as though I have to “catch up”? After all, it’s only one day more than the average weekend, and I didn’t really do anything that different. A little yard work, out to dinner, a bit of grant writing, a bit of chilling, that’s it.…
Antivaccine fear mongering? What antivaccine fear mongering? I don’t see any antivaccine fear mongering.
Posted by Orac on August 31, 2012 Here we go again. Every so often, criticism of the antivaccine movement builds to the point where it extends beyond the blogosphere to enter the national zeitgeist in a way in which people other than blogging geeks like myself start to take notice. It happened a few years ago, when washed up actress Jenny McCarthy…
Wielding religion as a weapon against vaccines
Posted by Orac on August 28, 2012 I might as well lay it on the line right at the beginning. It’s not as though it will surprise my regular readers given what I’ve been writing here, most recently about when Rob Schneider played the Nazi card to express his opposition to California Bill AB2109. It’s a bill that does something very simple…
Despicable: A parents’ guide to blaming the death of their child on vaccines
Posted by Orac on August 24, 2012 When I first started this blog, I had little idea of what I was in for. I thought I had some idea from having read a bunch of blogs and found role models whose blogging style I tried to emulate back in those early days, long before I developed the persona and writing style that…
It’s getting to be that time of year again, people…
Posted by Orac on August 21, 2012 …that’s right. It’ll soon be time to get your flu shot. Listen to ZDoggMD: I think I’ll ask for the thimerosol-containing version of the vaccine again this year.
Alternative medicine as religion, one more time
Posted by Orac on August 17, 2012 A couple of days ago, I did one of my usual bits of pontification about alternative medicine, this time around pointing out how religion facilitates the magical thinking that undergirds so much pseudoscientific medicine and how the belief systems that underlie so so much of alternative medicine resembel the belief systems that underlie religion. However,…
Alternative medicine as religion
Posted by Orac on August 15, 2012 Over the years, I’ve often likened non-science-based medical belief systems to religion. It’s not a hard argument to make. Religion involves believing in things that can’t be proven scientifically; indeed, religion makes a virtue out of ignoring the evidence and accepting various beliefs on faith alone. Similarly, alternative medicine frequently tells you that you have…
Jamy Ian Swiss on science-based skepticism
Posted by Orac on August 10, 2012 As the last full weekday of my vacation passes, I thought about whether I’d bother to post anything or not, given that I happen to be traveling. After yesterday’s post, the subject of which was profoundly depressing to me because I hate it when quacks take cynical advantage of a grieving family to promote their…
A sad, premature death cynically exploited by antivaccinationists
Posted by Orac on August 9, 2012 I must admit, I’ve been enjoying my vacation thus far and have hardly paid attention to the blog, other than a couple of quick posts. For me, this is quite amazing. Still, every so often there pops up a story that I can’t resist commenting on, particularly given that I’m just sitting around watching the…
The Wakefield verdict: A one trick pony does his one trick again
Posted by Orac on August 6, 2012 Ah, vacation. It’s time to relax and unwind. Of course, blogging is one way that I relax and unwind; so my being on vacation this week doesn’t necessarily mean that I’ll stop my usual blogging, but it does mean I’ll wind down. One way that I’ll slow down is that I’ll try to keep my…
Andrew Wakefield’s libel suit against Brian Deer: Dismissed!
Posted by Orac on August 4, 2012 I tell ya, sometimes I think you guys think I’m a journalist or a 24 hour news source. I’m not, of course. I’m just a humble blogger, and I do what I can within the constraints of my every day “real life.” What? I have a real life? You mean I’m not really a supercomputer…
Joe Mercola: 15 years of promoting quackery
Posted by Orac on August 3, 2012 Let’s travel back in time fifteen years. It’s a time that, for me, at times seems as though it were just yesterday while at other times it seems like truly ancient history. Back then, certainly, I wasn’t the blogging powerhouse that I am today. I didn’t even know what blogging was because it was so…
Quoth an antivaccinationist: “Help, help, I’m being repressed!”
Posted by Orac on August 1, 2012 I must admit. No matter how long I’ve been dealing with the antivaccine movement, in particular the pseudoscience, misinformation, and sometimes outright lies they use to demonize vaccines, I can never quite understand the profound persecution complex that so many of them have. After all, they lash out with so much vehemence and outright nastiness…
Joe Mercola attacks vaccinations again. Film at 11.
Posted by Orac on July 31, 2012 Joe Mercola is antivaccine, through and through, and, unfortunately, his website is one of the largest repositories of antivaccine quackery on the Internet. While it’s true that, unlike the antivaccine crank blog Age of Autism, Mercola doesn’t limit his advocacy of quackery to just antivaccine quackery, he has recently teamed up with Barbara Loe Fisher,…
Depopulation by vaccines?
Posted by Orac on July 23, 2012 After all the years that I’ve been writing about vaccines, the science behind vaccines, and how antivaccinationists twist that science to turn what are arguably the greatest medical achievement of medicine and have saved arguably more lives than any other medical intervention devised by human minds into toxic cesspits of horrific chemical corruption that cause…
Battling antivaccinationists at FreedomFest, part 2 (Dr. Whitaker responds)
Posted by Orac on July 19, 2012 During this year’s TAM, I had the distinct pleasure of accompanying Steve Novella and Michael Shermer to debate an antivaccinationist at FreedomFest, a conservative/libertarian confab that was going on in Las Vegas at the same time as TAM. That antivaccinationist turned out to be Dr. Julian Whitaker, a man who champions Dr. Stanislaw Burzynski and…
Battling antivaccinationists at FreedomFest
Posted by Orac on July 16, 2012 Like so many other skeptics, I just returned from TAM, which, despite all the conflict and drama surrounding it this year, actually turned out to be a highly enjoyable experience for myself and most people I talked to. As I’ve been doing the last few years, I joined up with Steve Novella and other proponents…
School vaccine mandates are against the Nuremberg Code?
Posted by Orac on July 10, 2012 
About a week and a half ago, I took note of a rather unhinged rant by comedian Rob Schneider about vaccines in which he trotted out an antivaccine movement’s greatest hits compendium of pseudoscience, misinformation, and logical fallacies, all in the service of opposing California Bill AB 2109. Antivaccine activists hate this piece of legislation…