vaccines
Respectful Insolence
Tag archives for vaccines
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.…
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…
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,…
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…
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…
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…
Dr. Google and Mr. Jim
Posted by Orac on July 6, 2012 What would we do without the Internet? It’s become so necessary, so pervasive, so utterly all-enveloping that it’s hard to imagine a world without it. Given how much it pervades everything these days, it’s easy to forget that it wasn’t that long ago that the Internet was primarily the domain of universities and large research…
WTF? No more WTF…but that’s OK
Posted by Orac on July 6, 2012 A couple of years ago, I gave a talk to a bunch of Chicago skeptics that was co-sponsored by the Chicago Skeptics and the Women Thinking Free Foundation. At the time, I had no idea that the organization was that new, but I did know that I was very impressed by the turnout to my…
Rob Schneider on California Bill AB 2109: The latest celebrity antivaccinationist to make a fool of himself
Posted by Orac on June 29, 2012 
Remember California Bill AB 2109? I’ve written about it at least a couple of times before. In fact, for some reason, the comment section of this post on AB 2109 suddenly come alive again a couple of days ago, with antivaccinationists infiltrating it, much to the annoyance of my regular commenters. It turns out that…
A misguided “chalkboard talk”
Posted by Orac on June 8, 2012 Sometimes I feel like Dug, the talking dog in the movie Up, in that when it comes to blogging I’m often easily distracted. The reason I say this is because there’s been a “viral” (if you can call it that) video floating around the antivaccine quackery blogosphere that antivaccinationists are passing around as though it’s…
Quoth Vox Day: Vaccines are killing babies! Retorts Orac: Vox’s arguments are killing neurons!
Posted by Orac on June 6, 2012 Remember Vox Day? Newer converts to the glory that is Orac (or at least to the ego that is Orac) might not know who Vox is because it’s been a while since I’ve discussed his antiscience attitudes. By and large, this is probably a good thing, given that Vox denies evolution, has been antivaccine from…
A homeopath and Dr. Jay will teach you about vaccines—and, no doubt, autism
Posted by Orac on May 31, 2012 Remember Dr. Jay? Regular readers know about whom I speak. I’m talking about Dr. Jay Gordon, pediatrician to the stars’ children. Dr. Jay has been a fixture on this blog on and off for seven years, first having popped in as a commenter way back on Respectful Insolence, Mark 1, when I first noted him…
The lowest of the low: Trying to bleach autism away
Posted by Orac on May 25, 2012 It’s that time of year again. What am I talking about? Regular readers know. They know that sometime around the Memorial Day weekend every year, usually beginning a couple of days before the extended weekend and into the weekend itself, there lands in the Chicago area a quackfest of such unrelenting quackitude that it has…
The resident anti-vaccine reporter at CBS News strikes again
Posted by Orac on April 5, 2011 I’m not infrequently asked why the myth that vaccines cause autism and other anti-vaccine myths are so stubbornly resistant to the science that time and time again fails to support them. Certainly useful celebrity idiots like Jenny McCarthy are one reason. So, too, are anti-vaccine propaganda websites and blogs such as Age of Autism and…
Mothering: A bastion of woo targeted at young mothers
Posted by Orac on January 21, 2011 Over the last three weeks, the British Medical Journal (BMJ) has been publishing a multipart expose by investigative journalist Brian Deer that enumerated in detail the specifics of how a British gastroenterologist turned hero of the anti-vaccine movement had committed scientific fraud by falsifying key aspects of case reports that he used as the basis…
Misdirected criticism by someone from whom I would never have expected it
Posted by Orac on January 13, 2011 It is with some trepidation and more than a little regret that I begin writing this piece. The reason for my hesitation is that, by doing so, no matter what I say I’ll be inserting myself into what appears to be a disagreement among people all of whom I admire very much. I don’t really…
Homeopathy in Cuba?
Posted by Orac on November 30, 2010 Homeopathy is among the most ridiculous of so-called “complementary and alternative medicine therapies.” I realize that I’ve made this point over and over and over again, but it bears repeating because, no matter how often homeopathy is shown to be utter and complete woo, homeopaths always seem to bounce right back, Gish galloping between the…
The anti-vaccine movement versus the truth
Posted by Orac on October 21, 2010 My alma mater has let me down. As many of you know, I went to the University of Michigan for both my undergraduate degree and for medical school. I still have a fairly strong attachment to the school, which is why I can still be disappointed when its faculty let me down. Unfortunately, it’s happened,…