[New readers: the Freethinker Sermonette is a weekly feature here. If atheism bothers you, you can skip it. But please don't complain it has nothing to do with science. In our view, it has everything to do with science. The rest of you, enjoy.]
PZ over at Pharyngula has the most appropriate post for this week's Freethinker Sermonette (plus it provides a nice link to scibling Nick Anthis's terrific post on the mechanism of a kind of antiviral resistance exhibited by the swine flu virus). I'll just settle for Bill Maher's little diatribe. The swine flu part starts at about 1:45 minutes:
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Here we go again. The 2009 recipient of the Richard Dawkins Award, anti-vaccine wingnut and lover of cancer quackery Bill Maher, decided to use the occasion of the season finale of Real Time with Bill Maher to answer some of the criticisms that have been leveled against him. All I can say is this:…
The endgame is in sight. At the end of this post is a list of questions for Bill Maher tomorrow (if the opportunity presents itself), the vast majority of which you, my readers, thought of.
Let's backtrack a minute.
A couple of months ago, I learned that an award named after Richard Dawkins…
I hadn't planned on writing much, if anything more, about the whole Bill Maher debacle, but PZ has shown up in my comments and graciously tried to explain what's going on at the AAI convention regarding the truly awful choice of Bill Maher for the Richard Dawkins Award:
Look, I don't know what else…
I promised last week in a post in which I described Bill Maher's latest pro-quackery remarks (this time, supporting cancer quackery), today is the day that I'm going to ask you, my readers, for some help. As I complained a while back, Bill Maher, who is anything but a rationalist or a booster of…
I really like Bill. Makes me think of people who go through cancer treatment and when they get better, they thank god. Just slap the doctor in the face.
bc, you know a lot of doctors think they're god. Maybe that's why.
Dear Revere(s), when you get a chance, can you comment on the race to develop a new technology for vaccine production. Our local paper just reported on how this is being done http://www.mercurynews.com/swine-flu/ci_12282721 I would have thought that growing it in non-egg culture would result in a safer vaccine. What can go wrong with vaccine production to cause those nasty side effects? Thanks
Carolyn: Big question, but if you look in our past posts you'll get some idea. They all had the "Vaccines" category tag.
Thanks for the shout-out, and keep up the good work!
Totally off topic, but as a break from flu, do you have any comments on the Hydroxycut recall?
The short answer, I think, to Carolyn's question about side-effects is that a small percentage of humans are allergic to egg albumen and so giving them flu vaccine with proteins from egg will do more harm than good.
I think the point of Carolyn's question is that the vaccine she's talking about isn't cultured in eggs.