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Better late than never: The Dunning-Kruger effect meets an incompetent anti-vaccine "analysis"

It never ceases to amaze me just how ignorant of very basic principles of science anti-vaccine activists often are. I mean, seriously. Every time they try to post something, whether they know it or not, they end up making themselves look so very, very stupid--or at least ignorant. The Dunning-Kruger effect takes over, and people who may actually be very successful--intelligent, even--in other fields of knowledge make newbie mistakes and draw egregiously misinterpreted conclusions from existing data. Worse, they have no clue that they don't know what they're doing. In the arrogance of…

Anti-vaccine activist Mark Blaxill pleads for a "sense of civil discourse" about vaccines. My irony meter explodes again.

Over the weekend, I saw a rather fascinating post by Sullivan entitled A Sense of Civil Discourse. The reason I found it so fascinating is because what was quoted in it utterly destroyed my irony meter yet again, leaving it nothing but a molten, gooey mess still bubbling and hissing in my office. Apparently last week, Mark Blaxill and Dan Olmsted, authors of the distillation of all the craziness that is the blog Age of Autism into book form under the same title, The Age of Autism: Mercury, Medicine, and a Man-Made Epidemic, did a radio interview on the Leonard Lopate Show. During the…

Thanks for the measles yet again, Andy: Antivax vultures swoop in to spread misinformation among the Minnesota Somali immigrant community

Earlier this week, I took note of an ongoing measles outbreak in Minnesota. This outbreak affects the large Somali immigrant community there, and the reason for the outbreak is simple. Over the last decade, uptake of the MMR vaccine has plunged dramatically in the American-born children of the Somali community, from 92% to 42%, far below the level necessary for herd immunity. The reason for the drop is that antivaccine fear mongering has taken hold in the community, thanks to American antivaxers who targeted the community and Andrew Wakefield himself, who's visited the community at least…

More anti-vaccine nonsense coming to media near you this fall

Oh, goody. It looks as though the fall is going to be a repeat of the spring as far as anti-vaccine lunacy goes. This spring, we had the release of a book by the now disgraced granddaddy of the most recent incarnation of the anti-vaccine movement, Andrew Wakefield. The book, entitled Callous Disregard: Autism and Vaccines--The Truth Behind a Tragedy, was released to great fanfare by the antivaccine movement and then promptly tanked. This is not surprising, given how bad it apparently was. Only the die hards would want a copy, and it's currently languishing around number 23,576 on the Amazon…

Get out the popcorn! This internecine war among antivaccinationists is getting interesting (part 6)

I don't know why I'm interested in this, to the point where I'm on my sixth post about it since February. I sometimes even ask myself that very question, because taking an admittedly somewhat perverse interest in the internecine feuds among antivaccinationists. Maybe it's a bit of schadenfreude. Maybe it's just me. Whatever the reason, the ongoing feud between Jake "Boy Wonder" Crosby and his former mentors and allies in the antivaccine movement keeps bringing me back for more, as it did last week after a couple of months away. Maybe it's because when the antivaccine movement is fighting…

How not to achieve respectability

Sometimes I can't figure anti-vaccine loons out. No, I'm not talking about the pure pseudoscience they lay down on a daily basis. I can sort of get how some of them might cling against all scientific evidence to the idea that somehow vaccines "damaged" their child, along with the blandishments of the army of quacks known as DAN! doctors promising them that, if you just use this diet, this new supplement, this new nostrum, this hyperbaric oxygen, you can have a normal child again. What I can't get is how individuals who, however misguided they are about science, even to the point of laying…

Quoth Mark Blaxill: "Science is funny" when it comes to mercury in vaccines and autism

I must admit that, after having taken it easy over the last few days, when the time came to sit down and get back into the swing of things, I had a bit of a hard time. No, it's not just blogging. That's actually a rather minor component of the whole malaise that descended upon me like a shroud. Rather, it's the simple fact that the Labor Day weekend in the U.S. represents the unofficial end of the summer season. After that, it's all back to school, back to work, back to the grind. Back to real life after summer. This reluctance, not surprisingly, seeped out of real life and started to permeat…

The antivaccine movement and its quest for legitimacy thwarted

If there's one thing that the antivaccine fringe wants above all else, it's legitimacy. They crave it almost above all else. They want to be taken seriously from a scientific standpoint. Unfortunately, what they fail to realize is that to be taken seriously from a scientific standpoint you really need to demonstrate that you actually understand science. At the very least you can't be spouting pseudoscience, but that's what antivaccinationists do constantly. Virtually every argument they make trying to demonstrate that vaccines are the root of all evil (or at least cause autism, autoimmune…

The mummer's farce that was the Congressional autism hearing last week

Last Wednesday, I took note of an "old friend" and (thankfully) soon-to-be ex-Representative from Indiana's 5th Congressional District, organized quackery's best friend in the U.S. House of Representatives, Dan Burton. Specifically, I noted that Rep. Burton appeared to be having his one last antivaccine hurrah in the form of a hearing about the "autism epidemic" in which it was clear that vaccines were going to feature prominently. Fortunately, this quackfest took place a mere five weeks before his long and dismal tenure in Congress. I also noted how antivaccine groups, in particular the…

An antivaccine Frankenstein's monster turns on his creator

Almost everyone knows the story of Victor Frankenstein and his monster. It's such a classic tale that has been around so long and told so many times in so many ways that it's almost impossible for someone living in this country not to have encountered it growing up. Frankenstein's monster is also a tale that strikes me as an excellent metaphor for something that I witnessed that puzzled the hell out of me the other day, because, as everyone knows, during the tale the monster ultimately turns on its master, wreaking its revenge by killing people Victor loves and, depending on the telling,…

Ad hominem and harassment: How antivaccine activists work

For some reason, I was really beat last night, and, given that this weekend is a holiday for a large proportion of the country (if, perhaps, not for a large proportion of my readership), I don't feel too bad about slacking off a bit by mentioning a couple of short bits that I wanted to blog about but didn't get around to. And what better topic to blog about on Good Friday than the exact opposite of what this Easter season is supposed to be about, namely the behavior of antivaccinationists? I realize it's an easy target, but, hey, I'm tired. Besides, it amuses me, and, as I've said so many…

Get out the popcorn! This internecine war among antivaccinationists is getting interesting (part 4)

I'm running out of popcorn again. I know I've been writing a lot about the latest internecine war among cranks. It's a battle royale whose first shot occurred when everybody's favorite Boy Wonder "reporter" betrayed his mentors with a missive published on a hive of scum and quackery even more wretched that the hive of scum and quackery at the antivaccine crank blog Age of Autism, namely The Bolen Report. He even went so far as to publish private e-mails of prominent members of the antivaccine group SafeMinds. It didn't take long for SafeMinds to unleash a counterattack, joined by Dan Olmsted…

Blaming failure to promote anti-vaccine views on "progressivism," briefly revisited

Earlier today, I had a bit of fun deconstructing Dan Olmsted's whiny complaint about how "progressives don't 'get' autism," his definition of "getting" autism being, of course, buying into the scientifically discredited notion that vaccines cause autism and the quackery known as "autism biomed" that anti-vaccine loons like Olmsted advocate to "recover" autistic children. Of course, I wrote my little bit of not-so-Respectful Insolence last night; so I didn't get to see a rather amusing additional bit of information showing Olmsted to be clueless that happened to pop up today. First, let's look…

It appears Mr. Stone doesn't even know what a corresponding author is

Remember my post about the genetics of autism last week? Remember how I predicted that the knives would come out from anti-vaccine loons? My original prediction was that Mark "Not a Doctor Not a Scientist" Blaxill would pull one of his usual brain dead attacks on genetic studies, such as his " immaculate mutations" gambit. I guessed wrong, apparently. It wasn't Mark Blaxill who went on the attack first. Although Blaxill hadn't tried his hand at a pseudoscientific deconstruction of this study as of Sunday afternoon, John Stone over at the anti-vaccine propaganda blog Age of Autism has already…

Blaming failure to promote anti-vaccine views on "progressivism"

Every so often on this blog I get in the mood to take on a post on the anti-vaccine propaganda blog Age of Autism. Over the three years of its existence, I've seen some truly bizarre posts, ranging from one blogger blithely discussing how he took his daughter to Costa Rica for stem cell quackery to treat her autism to rants against journalists who have the temerity to point out that the scientific evidence out there does not support the idea that vaccines cause autism to attacks on perceived enemies of the anti-vaccine movement in which these enemies have their heads crudely Photoshopped into…

Sometimes good things happen: The antivaccine fringe suffers a setback in Congress

Well, it's done. The server migration should be finished. I was out and about last night giving a talk; so I'll only have time for a relatively brief post (for me, at least). Once again, things happen while I'm otherwise...indisposed. This time around, it's something that warms the cockles of what antivaccinationists perceive to be my pharma shill heart. Normally, it's considered bad form to openly express schadenfreude, but I do make at least one exception, and that's when bad things happen to antivaccinationist plans, particularly after they've been crowing about them for weeks. You might…

Get out the popcorn! This internecine war among antivaccinationists is getting interesting

Alright, I give up. I'm getting out the popcorn. It's a Friday night, and it's on, baby! It's so on that I'm breaking one of my blogging rules and writing up a blog post on Friday night, which is when I usually try to relax. I suppose that it helps that I'm working tonight anyway, with a grant deadline coming, something I usually don't do on a Friday night either if I can help it, and could use a brief entertainment break. Besides, right now I'm watching my favorite guilty pleasure Spartacus:War of the Damned, and wasn't going to be working while I watched anyway. So off we go! The reason is…

Age of Autism and Gardasil: What's that again about not being "anti-vaccine"?

I've frequently referred to Age of Autism as the "anti-vaccine" crank propaganda blog and Generation Rescue, the organization that primarily runs it, a an anti-vaccine propaganda organization. Although longtime readers know exactly why I say such things, newbies might not. That's why I consider it instructive to take note of this observation by reader Todd W.: You know, I always wondered why Age of Autism, the "Daily Web Newspaper of the Autism Epidemic" has articles on Gardasil. They have absolutely no connection to autism. There have been no studies linking Gardasil to autism. There aren't…

The mercury militia parties like it's 2005

Way, way back in the deepest darkest depths of history, before I entered the Knowledge Room and sold my soul to big pharma to become a pharma blogger (in other words, way back in 2005), my inauguration as a skeptical blogger taking on anti-vaccine misinformation, pseudoscience, and lies occurred in a big way when I referred to Robert F. Kennedy, Jr.'s infamous article Deadly Immunity as flushing Salon.com's credibility down the toilet. That was when I discovered the mercury militia, that subset of the anti-vaccine movement that believes that mercury in the thimerosal preservative that used to…

Quoth Mark "not a doctor, not a scientist" Blaxill: "Help, help, Andy Wakefield's being repressed!"

Help! Help! I'm being repressed. Somehow, that is the image I have gotten in the three weeks since the very last shred of Andrew Wakefield's facade of scientific respectability tumbled. As you may recall, at the end of January, the British General Medical Council found Andrew Wakefield, the man whose trial lawyer-funded, breathtakingly incompetent, and quite possibly fraudulent study in 1998 launched the most recent iteration of the anti-vaccine movement, not to mention a thousand (actually, many more) autism quacks, guilty of gross research misconduct, characterizing him as "irresponsible…

Another zombie antivaccine study rises from the grave

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…

Get out the popcorn! This internecine war among antivaccinationists is getting interesting (part 3)

The other day, I took note again of a rather amusing internecine war going on between various factions of antivaccine cranks. On the one side, spearheaded by everyone's favorite inept conspiracy theorist and bumbling epidemiologist wanna be, Jake Crosby, there are the true believers, who believe that the other side, the more "mainstream" antivaccine groups (such as SafeMinds) and elder statesmen (such as Dan Olmsted and Mark Blaxill) somehow shafted Jake's hero, the even more bumbling antivaccine "scientist" Brian Hooker out of a role testifying in front of Darryl Issa's last antivaccine…

Andrew Wakefield: Destined for even more disrepute

I must admit that I never saw it coming. At least, I never saw it coming this fast and this dramatically. After all, this is a saga that has been going on for twelve solid years now, and it's an investigation that has been going on at least since 2004. I'm referring, of course, to that (possibly former) hero of the anti-vaccine movement, the man who is arguably the most responsible for suffering and death due to the resurgence of measles in the U.K. because of his role in frightening parents about the MMR vaccine. I'm referring to the fall of Andrew Wakefield Wakefield has shown an incredible…

Mark Blaxill and Dan Olmsted: Merrily confusing correlation with causation for polio

I've been following the anti-vaccine movement for nearly a decade now, first as a regular on the Usenet newsgroup misc.health.alternative and then, beginning almost seven years ago, blogging away. Along the way, somehow I stumbled into the role of countering the pseudoscience, misinformation, and nonsense promoted by the anti-vaccine movement. It's dangerous misinformation, too. For instance, in the U.K., misinformation claiming that the MMR vaccine somehow contributes to autism, a lie based on the work of Andrew Wakefield, has led the MMR uptake rate there to plummet. As a result measles,…

The Hitler Zombie smells thimerosal

Vacation time! While Orac is gone recharging his circuits and contemplating the linguistic tricks of limericks and jokes or the glory of black holes, he's rerunning some old stuff from his original Blogspot blog. This particular post first appeared on July 6, 2005 and is the very first time ever that the Hitler Zombie appeared in a horror story form. As such, it was a landmark day in the annals of Respectful Insolence. Appropriately enough, it's over what had become a frequent blogging topic even back in those early days. Enjoy! Deep within a dark crypt, far beneath the ground, it slept. The…

What do polio, pesticides, and cell phone radiation have in common?

No matter how you slice it, I've been at this blogging thing a long time. it's been over seven years now. It's been even longer than that, though, because before that cold gray Saturday afternoon in September when I started farting around with Blogger and ended giving birth to the first iteration of Respectful Insolence, I had been sparring with quacks, cranks, and various other promoters of pseudoscience for at least five years before. Even after all that time, however, it's humbling and amazing to contemplate that I haven't seen it all, no matter how much at times I might feel that I have.…

How not to report science and medical news, vaccine edition

I realize I complain periodically about when I get into what seems to me to be a rut in which I'm writing pretty much only about anti-vaccine lunacy. This is just such a week, when the news on the vaccine front has been coming fast and furious, first with Andrew Wakefield's being found to have behaved unethically and dishonestly by the British General Medical Council, only to be followed up a few days later with the news that the editors of The Lancet had retracted his 1998 paper, the paper that started the MMR scare in the U.K. and launched a thousand autism quacks. Meanwhile, the cranks…

This should be good: Penn and Teller on the anti-vaccine movement

It's finally here! The long expected episode of Penn & Teller: Bullshit!, in which the boys take on the anti-vaccine movement in their usual inimitable fashion, will premiere tonight on Showtime at 10 PM. It's even the eighth season finale, which is appropriate. If there's a form of "bullshit" other than the irrationality that is the anti-vaccine movment that represents a threat to public health more profound, I have a hard time thinking of it, and it's hard to believe that Penn and Teller did nearly eight seasons of their show without taking it on. Here's a preview: Unfortunately,…

Prometheus on "armchair science"

A couple of weeks ago, I lambasted Mark and David Geier for their irresponsible proposal to treat autism by using Lupron to lower testosterone levels, in essence chemically castrating autistic children, because, they claimed, it would make the mercury that supposedly caused the autism in the first place "easier to excrete." Naturally, Prometheus couldn't resist piling on too in an article entitled Armchair Science vs. Real Science, which complements my previous analysis by looking at an infamous video the Geiers made, in which they explain the "revelation" that led them to the concept that…

The big pharma conspiracy once again crushes the idea that mercury in vaccines causes autism

THE PAST IS PROLOGUE Location: Central New Jersey, deep within the brick and steel of a secret pharma base. Year: 1999. A shadowy figure dressed in gray, bald, and stroking a white cat enters a nondescript room in the middle of which sits a massive conference table. More than a dozen men and women leap to their feet at attention and wait until the man pauses at the head of the table and then very deliberately sits in high-backed leather chair. Shadowy figure: Have they arrived? Lackey #1: Yes, Leader. Shadowy figure: Let them wait a few minutes. First, we have pressing business. You have…

More evidence for a genetic basis for autism

I wonder what the loons at Age of Autism will say about this. Actually, I know what they'll say. Whenever a scientific study like the one just published earlier this week the top tier journal Nature, which examines genetic variations (CNVs) associated with autism and autism spectrum disorders (ASDs), comes out, they have a standard reply. Even though, as of this writing, I haven't seen yet seen a reply on the anti-vaccine crank blog Age of Autism to the study I'm about to describe, I'm sure it's coming and I'm sure it will look something like this article from a year ago by Mark "Not A…

The conspiracy circle is complete: Brian Hooker claims "The Man" has gotten to the "CDC whistleblower"

There is a disturbance in the antivaccine Force. I can sense it. Actually, it doesn’t take any special talent to detect this. You don't have to be some sort of pro-science Jedi. The evidence is everywhere. The most prominent examples of posts in the antivaccine crankosphere that tipped me off are on—of course!—the antivaccine propaganda blog Age of Autism, which references another blog’s post with blaring capitalized headlines, BREAKING: CDC WHISTLEBLOWER "DR. THOMPSON HAS BEEN HANDLED" SAYS DR. HOOKER AT MANHATTAN VAXXED Q&A. Elsewhere, He Who Shall Not Be Named (and to whom I shall no…

Arthur Allen on conflicts of interest in the mercury militia movement

Those arguing the "conventional" view that sound science and epidemiological studies have failed to find a link between vaccines and autism are often tarred with the "pharma shill" brush. Meanwhile, researchers who have ever taken drug company money (particularly if it's from a drug company that makes vaccines) are castigated for having a serious conflict of interest, even to the point where conflicts of interest are invented or exaggerated beyond any reasonable recognition to tar the investigator with the dreaded "pharma shill" label. Don't get me wrong. Possible conflicts of interest should…

Get out the popcorn! This internecine war among antivaccinationists is getting interesting (part 5)

There's a general rule that whenever you see two enemies fighting with each other that you should generally just let them. Of course, some might argue, as Gandalf did about Saruman and Sauron, that the winner of the fight would emerge stronger and free of doubt, making him harder to conquer. Fortunately, I don't think this will be a problem in this case in the battle I'm about to discuss. There's also the saying that the enemy of my enemy is my friend, but unfortunately I don't think that that saying applies here either. In this case, it's a question of which of the two combatants I consider…

Quackery in my back yard!

Oh, great. Orac just has to tell me that the University of Minnesota is going to host an anti-vaccine conference on 24 January. First, let me say this, though: they get to do that. Presumably they've rented out (or possibly obtained student or faculty sponsorship) Cowles Auditorium at the Humphrey School of Public Affairs, and just about anyone can do that. They may be fraggin' morons, but they're part of the public, and it's a public university. Still, this is painfully stupid and a disservice to the public trust. It's a conference in which a train of pseudo-experts will lie, lie, lie in…

Yet another really bad day for antivaccinationists: This time there's no link between the MMR and autism

I hadn't planned on blogging about vaccines again for a while. Really, I hadn't. Even I realize the risk of beating the proverbial dead horse just one time too often. Also, It seems that I've been writing about antivaccination loons a lot lately, even more than usual. However, aside from a prime time spot for antivaccinationist propganda, the news has been mostly good, with study after study poking holes below the waterline in the hull of the rickety rustbucket of a boat that is the whole antivaccinationist belief that vaccines cause autism. Here's another one. This time, in yet another in a…

Get out the popcorn! This internecine war among antivaccinationists is getting interesting (part 2)

It's been well over two weeks since I urged everyone to get out the popcorn and sit back to enjoy the internecine war going on over in the antivaccine movement. The reason for my chuckling was the way that everyone's favorite Boy Wonder Reporter Propagandist for the antivaccine crank blog Age of Autism, Jake Crosby, had apparently turned on his masters because he was ticked off at a perceived betrayal of purity in their antivaccine beliefs, so much so that he actually posted a screed against the other wretched hive of scum and quackery besides AoA or The Huffington Post, namely the…

I have failed

Now that 2009 is about to kick into gear, I have to look back at 2008 one last time to acknowledge one failure. As a backdrop to that failure, I note that the antivaccine propaganda site Age of Autism has posted a series of their People of the Year "awards" for 2008, including, antivaccine luminaries such as: Person of the Year: Dr. Bernardine Healy. Just because a hack political appointee known to tilt science to be in line with ideology hops on the "too many too soon" bandwagon, AoA thinks it has a legitimate argument from authority. It doesn't. Couple of the Year: Jenny McCarthy and Jim…

A young antivaccine propagandist plans to teach his mad skillz to other antivaccinationists

As hard as it might be to believe, one time over 20 years ago I actually took the Dale Carnegie course and, as part of that course, read his famous book How To Win Friends and Influence People. I know, I know. It's probably not obvious from my style of writing on this particular blog, but I did, and i tried to take the lessons to heart. The main reason I took the course, however, was because back then my public speaking truly sucked. I was nervous, hesitant, and tended to mumble a lot. That course was the first time I realized that I could be a halfway decent public speaker. Now, over 20…

Wakefield's "monkey business" hepatitis B vaccine study withdrawn?

Kim Wombles over at Countering Age of Autism pointed this out: Why, you ask, is this whole 13 monkeys, 14 monkeys irrelevant? Well, see, here's where it gets really interesting. If you want to read this study, you go here: the 14 studies site by Handley. Thoughtful House has a press release on how it was published online in Septermber 2009. I went to the journal itself, though, straight to Neurotoxicology to look for the article since it's getting all this attention from the anti-vaxers as proof that it is proof of mercury causing autism. Guess what? It isn't there! Don't believe me? It's…

Pity poor Peter Duesberg; even Medical Hypotheses has dissed him

Pity poor Peter Duesberg. Back in the 1980s, he was on the top of the world, scientifically speaking. A brilliant virologist with an impressive record of accomplishment, publication, and funding, he seemed to be on a short track to an eventual Nobel Prize. Then something happened. The AIDS epidemic happened. Something about the AIDS epidemic led this excellent scientist in the late 1980s to fall directly into pseudoscience and crankery by latching onto and promoting the idea that HIV does not cause AIDS. Of course, at the time scientists didn't yet know a lot about the virus and how it slowly…

Another very bad day for antivaccinationists: Yet another study fails to find a link between thimerosal and autism

A little more than three months ago there came to pass a very bad day for antivaccinationists. On that day, in the prestigious New England Journal of Medicine appeared a study that was powerful evidence that vaccines are not associated with adverse neuropsychiatric outcomes in children. Not surprisingly, the usual suspects in the mercury militia went on the attack immediately, not wanting to believe that yet another strong piece of evidence was attacking their hallowed belief that mercury in the thimerosal preservative previously used in vaccines is a major cause or contributer to the…

Elsevier to Medical Hypotheses editor Bruce Charlton: Enough is enough

These days, I'm having a love-hate relationship with Elsevier. On the one hand, there are lots of reasons to hate Elsevier. For example, Elsevier took payments from Merck, Sharp & Dohme in order to publish in essence a fake journal designed to promote its products, and then got caught doing it again. On the other hand, Elsevier owns both The Lancet and NeuroToxicology. The former recently retracted Andrew Wakefield's original 1998 Lancet paper that launched the latest iteration of the anti-vaccine movement in the U.K., as well as a thousand quacks, to be followed by the latter, which…

The martyrdom of St. Andy

Looks like I picked the wrong week to give up sniffing glue. Well, not really. Maybe it looks more like I picked the wrong NIH grant cycle to be submitting an R01. After all, the deadline for my getting my grant to my university's grant's office coincided very closely with the announcement of the General Medical Council's ruling in the Andrew Wakefield case on Thursday. As I pointed out in a brief post yesterday, the complete 143-page ruling can be found here (if you want to avoid AoA or Generation Rescue) or here (if you want to annoy J.B. Handley by showing traffic coming from this blog…

"Outing" anonymous bloggers: A favorite technique of antivaccine cranks

A reader of this blog was outed by a moron posting as "Mark" on the Age of Autism blog. I will not link to the outing, nor will I link to Age of Autism. I have, however, kept a nice screen shot of the page, just in case someone over there has an attack of conscience, and I will also comment on the observation that "outing" its enemies is a favorite technique of cranks in general. However, it seems to be a particular favorite of antivaccine cranks. So is hypocrisy, it would appear. After all, "Mark" did not post under his full name but only under his first name, while he thinks nothing of…

How antivaxers deceptively don the mantle of "vaccine safety activists"

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…

Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. on Poul Thorsen: The fine art of distraction from inconvenient facts

My first big splash in the blogosphere will have occurred five years ago in June, when I first discovered the utter wingnuttery that is Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. It was then that I wrote a little bit of that not-so-Respectful Insolence that you've come to know and love entitled Salon.com flushes its credibility down the toilet, a perfect description of an article by RFK, Jr. published in Salon.com and simultaneously in Rolling Stone entitled Deadly Immunity. As I look back, I realize that, as widely linked to and discussed as it was at the time, that post, arguably more than any other, was the…

Jenny McCarthy drives the stupidity to ever higher levels on--where else?--The Huffington Post

Way back on May 25, 2005, I first noticed something about a certain political group blog. It was something unsavory, something vile, something pseudoscientific. It was the fetid stench of quackery, but not just any quackery. It was anti-vaccine quackery, and the blog was Arianna Huffington's Huffington Post, where a mere 16 days after its being unleashed upon an unsuspecting world I characterized the situation as Antivaccination rhetoric running rampant on The Huffington Post. It was the start of a long running series that rapidly resulted in parts 2, 3, 4, 5, and 6 in the course of a mere…

On teaching the controversy in medicine

The other day, I wrote to express my disappointment with Dr. Kevin Pho, of KevinMD, for posting credulous crap about alternative medicine. I noted in an addendum that he responded with a comment that in essence said that he posts things he "doesn't necessarily agree with myself to promote discussion and debate": Orac, I appreciate the critique. As readers of this blog know, I often post pieces here I don't necessarily agree with myself to promote discussion and debate. Your concerns are certainly valid, and will be taken into consideration as I choose future pieces. Best, Kevin My initial…

Ben Swann returns, and this time he's got the CDC whistleblower documents

When it comes to blogging, sometime's it's feast or famine. Some days there are more topics and stories that I'd like to blog about than I could ever get to, given that I generally only do one post per weekday, while other days I seriously think about skipping a day because there's just nothing out there that interests me. This is one of the former kinds of days. Seriously, there was an embarrassment of riches last night, so much so that I had a hard time making up my mind what story to write about. The one that I ultimately chose only just edged out the second place choice, and then only at…