The impetus for the creation of this blog, lo these 12+ years ago, was growing alarm at the rising tide of pseudoscience then, such as quackery, antivaccine misinformation, creationism, Holocaust denial, and many other forms of attacks on science, history, and reality itself. I had cut my teeth on deconstructing such antiscience and pseudoscience on Usenet, that vast, unfiltered, poorly organized mass of discussion forums that had been big in the 1990s but were dying by 12 years ago, having turned into a mass of spam, trolls, and incoherence. So I wanted to do my little part (and I'm under no…

I've never been a huge fan of the We The People (WTP) website, which was set up during the Obama administration to allow people to petition the White House and, if they receive a sufficient number of signatures on their petition, receive an official response from the White House. While I applauded the sentiment of wanting to provide people an online means of petitioning the administration and like that a petition receiving 100,000 signatures in 30 days would receive a response, I was disappointed by the results. For one thing, although 321 of the 323 petitions that reached the threshold have…

That the Cleveland Clinic has become one of the leading institutions, if not the leading institution, in embracing quackademic medicine is now indisputable. Indeed, 2017 greeted me with a reminder of just how low the Clinic has gone when the director of its Wellness Institute published a blatantly antivaccine article for a local publication, which led to a firestorm of publicity in the medical blogosphere, social media, and conventional media to the point where the Cleveland Clinic's CEO Dr. Toby Cosgrove had to respond. Dr. Cosgrove was—shall we say?—not particularly convincing. Indeed, even…

Way back in the early days of my blogging career, I remember coming across a "challenge" by a man named Jock Doubleday. I didn't know it at the time, but Doubleday had achieved some notoriety before his "vaccine challenge" as the director or Natural Woman, Natural Man, Inc. and the author of such amazing works as The Burning Time (Stories of the Modern-day Persecution of Midwives) and Lolita Shrugged (THE MYTH OF AGE-SPECIFIC MATURITY). His "challenge" was in the same vein as his previous work, only more so and full-on antivaccine. The reason I'm bringing up Doubleday again after all these…

There are a thousand crappy studies out there carried out with the explicit (although often unspoken) goal of demonizing vaccines by "proving" that they cause autism. Indeed, over the last 12+ years that I've been blogging here, I've deconstructed more such studies than I can remember—or would care to remember if I could. Unfortunately, if there's one thing I've learned about some of these studies, it's that they're like the killers in 1980s slasher flicks. You remember them? Killing machines like Jason Voorhees or Michael Myers, who mowed through teens misbehaving (often by having sex) for…

Regular readers here are probably familiar with Mike Adams and his website NaturalNews.com. Forget the antivaccine crank blog Age of Autism, when it comes to wretched hives of scum and quackery on the Internet, NaturalNews is the wretchedest, scummiest, and quackiest. Not surprisingly, Adams got his start in wingnuttery selling Y2K scams nearly 18 years ago. Now, besides presiding over a scammy online publishing empire that racks in considerable green by publishing articles laced with quackery, antivaccine pseudoscience, character assassination, and thuggery, both legal and getting a bit too…

Back in December, I took note of the vaccine situation in Texas. First, I pointed out how a new article by Peter Hotez, MD, a pediatrician at Baylor University, had sounded the alarm that the number of schoolchildren with nonmedical exemptions to the Texas school vaccine mandate had skyrocketed by 19-fold over the last 13 or 14 years. As if that weren't alarming enough, I discussed the resident antivaccine groups in Texas, who had become quite active. I thought that that was probably all I would write about Texas for a while. Silly me. Texas is fast turning into a series of its own, much as I…

One of the most frequent talking points used by the antivaccine movement is that its members are "not anti-vaccine," but rather "pro-safe vaccine" or "vaccine safety activists." I first encountered that talking point over ten years ago, when I first heard Jenny McCarthy say it. Since then, I've heard any number of antivaccine activists use variations on the talking point over many years and in many circumstances. It's understandable in a way. Antivaxers know that society frowns on antivaccine views—and quite rightly so, given the danger such views pose to public health; so they have to…

]As hard as it is to believe, I've been dealing with the antivaccine movement since at least the early 2000s. Back then, I didn't have a blog, either this one or my not-so-super-secret other blog, and most of my online activities were restricted to Usenet. For those of you who don't remember Usenet, which has largely become the province of trolls and spam these days, it is a massive set of online discussion boards on literally thousands of topics. Indeed, I first encountered antivaccine advocates on Usenet and started to learn the sorts of pseudoscientific arguments they make, so that when I…

I like to refer to homeopathy as The One Quackery To Rule Them All, so much so that I almost always call it that within the first two paragraphs of any post I write about some tasty bit of homeopathy pseudoscience. It's also a wonderful tool for teaching critical thinking because it's easy to explain and people grasp intuitively why homeopathy is pseudoscience when it's explained properly to them. Basically, it's because of homeopathy's two laws. The first is the Law Similars, which states that, relieve a symptom, you must use something that causes the symptom. It's nonsense. There's no…

I must admit, Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., environmentalist and, unfortunately, antivaccine crank of the thimerosal fear mongering variety, has been rather busy lately. After having gone mostly silent on vaccine issues compared to his original flurry of misinformation and conspiracy mongering back that began back in 2005, several years past with almost nary a word from the lesser scion of a great American family on vaccines. This was a very good thing. Then, in 2014, he decided to reappear, co-authoring an antivaccine book with functional medicine quack Mark Hyman, a book with mouthful of a title…

It's hard to believe that it's been nearly seven years since I started a recurring series that I like to refer to as The annals of "I'm not antivaccine." Indeed, this will be the 23rd entry in this particular series, whose purpose is to analyze why you shouldn't take it seriously when certain antivaccine activists deny that they are antivaccine. Not surprisingly, examples of reasons why we should not take the denials of these people seriously include their tendency towards the most histrionically exaggerated analogies and metaphors, such as saying there is "no such thing as a safe vaccine,"…

One of the overarching themes of this blog, if not the overarching theme, is to expose and combat the infiltration of quackery into medicine. What I'm referring to, of course, is the phenomenon that's risen over the last 25 years or so in which various pseudoscientific alternative medicine therapies (but I repeat myself) have found increasing acceptance, thanks largely to a major lack of critical thinking skills among both patients and, worse, the physicians who have embraced modalities such as acupuncture, naturopathy, chiropractic, and the like. In fairness, it's not just a lack of critical…

There is a belief that is very prevalent among policymakers right now, particularly Republican policymakers, that the key impediment to drug development is the Food and Drug Administration. According to this narrative, the FDA is an overly strict, overly bureaucratic, and rigid organization that is the main barrier keeping fantastic cures to all sorts of deadly and debilitating diseases from flowing to the people at a reasonable price. The basic idea, as I've discussed many times, is that, if only the FDA would get out of the way, universities and pharma would be free to open the floodgates…

It always amuses me how antivaccine activists have such a love-hate relationship with academia, particularly the higher echelons of academia. On the one hand, they routinely denigrate academics because inevitably well-designed, well-executed epidemiological studies testing the hypothesis that vaccines are correlated with the risk of autism always come up empty. That's because vaccines don't cause autism. I used to hedge a bit when I said that, but over the 12 years I've been doing this, I've covered more studies than I can remember testing this very hypothesis, and a clear pattern has emerged…

Last night was a bit weird. I think too many days of only getting a few hours of sleep finally caught up to me, and I crashed by around 9:30 PM. So, contrary to usually happens, when I say this post will be briefer than usual, I actually mean it; I have even less time this morning than usual to pump out a quickie post. However, this is the perfect time to look at one thing that probably doesn't rate a full heapin' helpin' of not-so-Respectful Insolence but that I'd like to take note of anyway. It's a bit of fake news that's been making the rounds similar to the fake news a couple of weeks ago…

They're here, they're there, they're everywhere! Sorry. I couldn't resist. I also couldn't resist revisiting the topic of nanoparticles one last time. You remember nanoparticles? They're the contaminant that poisons everything, at least if you believe two Italians, Antonietta Gatti and Stefano Montanari, who published a paper that purported to show that vaccines were hopelessly contaminated with heavy metal nanoparticles. (Hey, that would make a great name for a band.) Unfortunately for them, the study was a hopeless botch that lacked anything resembling proper controls, experimental design,…

I wasn't planning on revisiting this topic, but sometimes a blogger's gotta do what a blogger's gotta do. You'll see what I mean in a minute. But before you do, I'll just provide a bit of background. Last week, I came across one of those truly awful antivaccine studies that gets the old Insolence flowing, this time a mix of the Respectful and not-so-Respectful. I'm referring, of course, to a paper that I came across as I was spending some time delving into the deeper darker parts of antivaccine social media. It was a study by Antonietta Gatti and Stefano Montanari in the International Journal…

"You need to detox." How many times have you heard or read this? Maybe a friend of yours suggested it for the New Year. Maybe you saw it on a website, in a magazine, or as part of an ad. I like to say sometimes, "Toujours les toxines," because in many branches of alternative medicine the overarching idea behind the interventions used is that vague, unnamed "toxins" are somehow poisoning you and that the only way to fix what's wrong with you is to "detoxify." These "detox" interventions can take many forms, ranging from the relatively (but not completely) benign, such as "juice cleanses," to…

Being as involved as I have been refuting antivaccine pseudoscience as I've been over the last 12 years, I frequently forget that antivaccine views are not the mainstream. It's an easy thing to do. If you were to immerse yourself in the antivaccine echo chamber as much as I do, you too would start to think that enormous swaths of the country, if not an outright majority, think that vaccines cause autism, sudden infant death syndrome, asthma, a wide variety of neurological disorders, and basically every autoimmune disease under the sun. I know that that's not true, but often it doesn't feel…