oracknows | May 26, 2010I love it when cranks write petitions.
They're hilarious. Usually, they're oh-so-serious and ominous, sprinkled with unintentionally, un-self-aware bits of pure comic gold. For example, check out this "petition" being circulated by the anti-vaccine activists, called The Chicago Principles on Vaccination Choice:
We, the people who affirm our belief in personal rights, in order to promote the general health and welfare for ourselves and our children and to establish justice, advocate the following principles:
1. Vaccination choice based on complete and accurate information is a fundamental…
oracknows | May 26, 2010As I've pointed out numerous times this week, anti-vaccine loons, led by Generation Rescue and a "health freedom" group, have organized an anti-vaccine rally in Grant Park in Chicago from 3 PM to 5 PM CDT. Anti-vaccine martyr Andrew Wakefield himself will be the keynote speaker, and there will even be very bad music promoting the anti-vaccine message. The rally, with its wonderfully Orwellian title, The American Rally for Personal Rights, will be pure crankery on display.
Those supporting science-based medicine plan, led by Skepchick Elyse Anders, to be there to promote science over the…
oracknows | May 26, 2010I've had a lot of fun thus far this week expressing more than a bit of schadenfreude over Andrew Wakefield's being ignominiously stripped of his medical license in the U.K. by the General Medical Council, not to mention pointing out the quackfest that is Autism One, I feel the need for a brief break from the anti-vaccine craziness. This is as good a time as any to take care of some leftover business from last week that I had planned on writing about but gotten distracted by all the deliciously bad news for the anti-vaccine movement. Besides, what will be going on in Grant Park in Chicago this…
oracknows | May 25, 2010It figures.
I've written a couple of times about a rally to be held tomorrow in Grant Park that would be hilarious were it not an indication of the threat to public health that the anti-vaccine movement represents. Actually, it is to some extent hilarious, mainly due to the anti-vaccine Poe-worthy "music" that will be the featured entertainment.
It was bad enough that the fair city of Chicago would be blighted with this nonsense--and Andrew Wakefield, too--but now the "American Rally for Personal Rights" (a.k.a. the Autism One anti-vaccine rally featuring disgraced and unethical British…
oracknows | May 24, 2010Regular readers know that I have a tendency every so often to whine about when writing about the antics of the anti-vaccine movement seems to engulf this blog. Yes, it's true. Every so often I get really, really tired of the bad science, pseudoscience, magical thinking, misinformation, and even outright lies that emanate from various anti-vaccine websites and blogs. This week, I promised myself I would try not to do it. There are times when duty calls, and this is one of those times. For better or for worse, as hard as I still find it to believe, somehow I've become one of the top bloggers…
oracknows | May 24, 2010In the wake of Matt Lauer's interview with Andrew Wakefield, there's a new poll up at the TODAYMoms website:
Do you think vaccines are related to autism?
Andrew Wakefield, who touched off an international controversy by claiming a possible link between the MMR (measles, mumps, rubella) vaccine and autism, has lost his medical license, but says he will continue to fight to prove his case. Do you think vaccines are related to autism?
Yes. So many more cases, so many more vaccinations - it can't just be coincidence.
No. There is no scientific evidence the two things are related.
I'm not sure.…
oracknows | May 24, 2010It's been a long time comin'
It's goin' to be a Long Time Gone.
And it appears to be a long,
appears to be a long,
appears to be a long
time, yes, a long, long, long ,long time before the dawn.
- from "Long Time Gone" by Crosby, Stills & Nash
Oh, happy day!
It's finally happened, more than six years after investigative reporter Brian Deer first reported Wakefield's massive conflicts of interest and dubious activities related to his "research" suggesting a link between the measles strain in the MMR vaccine and inflammation of the gut in autistic children, nearly three years after the…
oracknows | May 23, 2010
An old Chinese combined proverb and curse is said to be, "May you live in interesting times." Certainly, with respect to vaccines, the last few years have been "interesting times." Unfortunately, this week times are about to get a lot more "interesting" as the Autism One quackfest descends upon Chicago beginning today. Featuring prominently in this quackfest will be an anti-vaccine rally in Grant Park on Wednesday featuring some really bad, anti-vaccine fundamentalist Poe-worthy "music" and a keynote speech by Andrew Wakefield himself. If you want evidence that Andrew Wakefield is being…
oracknows | May 23, 2010Andrew Wakefield's back, and he's sure trying to come back big.
I knew when I last wrote about his utter humiliation and disrepute that he wouldn't stay away for long. In fact, he stayed away longer than I thought--a whole three months. Unfortunately, though, he appears to be on a full media blitz to try to rehabilitate his image in the wake of his having been found to have committed research misconduct, leading to The Lancet retracting his article that started the anti=vaccine MMR scare back in 1998, which further led to NeuroToxicology withdrawing his execrably bad "monkey business" study…
oracknows | May 21, 2010Yesterday's post made me sad. It always makes me sad to contemplate a 14 year old boy facing the loss of his father to an aggressive form of leukemia, as Danny Hauser is. The kid just can't catch a break. First he himself develops Hodgkin's lymphoma. Because he happens to live in a family that has taken up a faux "Native American" religion that claims its "natural healing" is better than chemotherapy, he resists undergoing treatment, and his family supports him. After a judge orders him to undergo chemotherapy, Danny and his mom then take off on the lam from the law, heading for Mexico and…
oracknows | May 20, 2010Around this time last year, the major topic of this blog was the case of a young teen named Daniel Hauser. In fact, right around this time last year, this particular case was approaching its climax. Hauser, as you may recall, was the 13-year-old Minnesota boy diagnosed with Hodgkin's lymphoma who refused chemotherapy. His stated reason was his religion, namely Nemenhah, a fake American Indian religion that his parents joined 18 years ago. However, I had my doubts that religion was the main reason why Hauser was refusing chemotherapy and his mother was supporting his decision to pursue "…
oracknows | May 19, 2010I've blogged a lot about anti-vaccine hero Andrew Wakefield over the years. The story has become long and convoluted, and to tell it takes a lot of verbiage, even by Orac standards. However, I've found a good resource that tells the tale of Andrew Wakefield and his misdeeds in a highly accessible form:
The question at the very end of the story is about as appropriate as it gets. Unfortunately, the answer to the question is: Yes.
Speaking of Wakefield, it looks as though he's starting to resurface. Apparently The Statesman will publish an interview with him tomorrow. Keep an eye out. I'm…
oracknows | May 19, 2010Here we go again.
I've written a few times before about the controversy over whether cell phones (a.k.a. mobile phones in most of the rest of the world) cause brain cancer, concluding on more than one occasion that the evidence does not support a link. For example, there has not been a large increase in brain cancer or other cancers claimed to be due to cell phone radiation in the 15 to 20 years since the use of cell phones took off back in the 1990s, nor has any study shown a convincing correlation between cell phone use and brain cancer.
Of course, one would not expect a priori, based on…
oracknows | May 18, 2010Over the last week or so, I've been a bit--shall we say?--dismissive of claims by anti-vaccinationists when they insist that, really, truly, honestly, they aren't "anti-vaccine," usually with a wounded, indignant, self-righteous tone. Either that, or they make like the Black Knight in Monty Python and The Holy Grail by demanding the surrender of the public health community, even as limb after limb of their claims have been lopped off by the sword of science, all the while not even realizing how risible it is to demand respect for their views after they have been totally discredited…
oracknows | May 18, 2010As a followup to my rather "epic post" on dichloroacetate, I thought I'd just post a brief follow up. A reader sent me this video of Evangelos Michelakis, the investigator who has been testing DCA in the clinic and who did the study testing DCA against gliblastoma, describing his results:
It's always interesting to hear research results "straigh from the horse's mouth, so to speak."
oracknows | May 17, 2010Last week, I did three posts about the anti-vaccine movement. (What? Only three? Well, last week was slower than usual on the anti-vaccine craziness front. It happens.) Two of them were variations on a theme, namely how the anti-vaccine movement vehemently, desperately does not want to be seen as "anti-vaccine, even though that's what many of them are. First, I pointed out how the "health freedom" movement is teaming up with the anti-vaccine movement next week in Chicago to hold an anti-vaccine rally in Grant Park as part of its annual autism quackfest known as AutismOne. My second post asked…
oracknows | May 17, 2010Yesterday was a sad day indeed, as a blogger that I've been following almost since I myself started blogging has decided to close up shop:
It's been a long time coming but the time has come. Effect Measure is closing up shop, after 5 and a half years, 3 million visits and 5.1 million page views of some 3500. You commented on them some 37,000 times. It's been a grand ride but to all things there is a season. It's time to simplify my life and while my family has had me all along, at times science got short shrift. Now my time is getting short and I want to turn my attention to my research, the…
oracknows | May 16, 2010Late last week, a crank I hadn't heard from in a while showed up in my comments. I'm referring to DaveScot, who normally was known for promoting anti-evolution rhetoric in the service of the pseudoscience known as "intelligent design" creationism. This is what he said:
Hi Orac,
terrasig suggested you do a followup article on dichloroacetate (DCA) given the paper just published on the phase 1 trial in Edmonton.
Three years have passed and countless cancer patients were denied this drug. Now at the end of its first phase one trial we know exactly what we did from the reports of people self-…
oracknows | May 15, 2010Every so often, I hear the complaint from some readers, usually in the context of complaining about my posting style on issues I care a lot about, such as countering the anti-vaccine movement or pseudoscientific alt-med modalities, that I'm just "preaching to the converted" and not changing any minds. While there may be some element of that, it's not true that I don't change minds. In the context of the subject of yesterday's post, however, I realize that changing people's minds is very hard, because we humans have numerous defense mechanisms to deflect such efforts.
When I hear such charges…
oracknows | May 14, 2010
"I don't want knowledge. I want certainty!"
--David Bowie, from Law (Earthlings on Fire)
If there's one universal trait among humans, it seems to be an unquenchable thirst for certainty. This should come as no surprise to those committed to science and rational thinking because there is a profound conflict between our human desire for certainty and the uncertainty of scientific knowledge. The reason is that the conclusions of science are always provisional. They are always subject to change based on new evidence. Although by no means the only reason, clearly this craving for certainty the…