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The annals of “I’m not antivaccine,” part 22: The Godwin of "We didn't know"

This post is a bit later than usual, but there’s a good reason for it. Last night, I was in full food coma, having consumed the traditional Thanksgiving feast, along with a fair amount of wine. Besides, even a sometimes arrogant bloviator like myself, who uses a pseudonym based on a fictional, near-all-knowing supercomputer from a 35-year-old British cult science fiction series needs a break now and then. So today I’ll be, for the most part, slumming a bit today as I recover. What better place to look for material when you’re not interested in exerting yourself too hard than the antivaccine…

Antivaxers lobbying Rep. Jason Chaffetz to investigate the CDC fawn over parents who let their child with bacterial meningitis die of medical neglect

Yesterday, I took note of a meeting of advocates and lawyers with Rep. Jason Chaffetz (R-UT), the chair of the House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform (OGR), which makes him a very powerful Congressman. The group that met with him included Del Bigtree, the producer of Andrew Wakefield’s antivaccine propagandafest of a “documentary” VAXXED: From Cover-up to Catastrophe; Levi Quackenboss, the pseudonymous blogger best known recently for getting into a fight over vaccine evidence with a 12-year-old and losing badly, leading her to try to dox the child and look even worse as a result;…

Massachusetts takes a big step towards licensing naturopathic quackery

Living and practicing surgery in Michigan, it’s not surprising that I am very concerned about a bill being considered in the Michigan House of Representatives. The bill, HB 4531, would license naturopaths as health care providers. In fact, it would give them a very broad scope of practice, defined by a newly created board of naturopathic medicine. Basically, HB 4531 would give naturopaths a scope of practice almost as broad as that of primary care providers, like internists, family practitioners, and pediatricians. The only difference, if HB 4531 passes, would be that naturopaths would not be…

What are oncogenes?

I'm trying to raise money for the The Leukemia &amp Lymphoma Society, and I promised to do a few things if we reached certain goals. I said I'd write a post explaining what oncogenes are, while wearing a pirate hat, if we raised $2500. So here you go, arrr. If you want more, go to my Light the Night fundraising page and throw money at it. I'll write the next part when we hit $5000. Note that we're also getting matching funds from the Todd Stiefel Foundation, so join in, it's a good deal. Cancer is not a creative, original disease; it has not been honed by ages of evolution to craft…

Work-Life Balance 2: On Stepping Up To The Plate

First post in this series can be found here. The third and final post in this series can be found here. ScientistMother really wants DrugMonkey to step up to the plate already. She says that DM laid out his own responsibility to deal, on-blog, with work-life balance issues and to share the details of how it goes down at his own home. Find the full quote in the comments at her post or here in Doc Free-Ride's post. As is generally the case, I have a few things to say about this. For starters, I do not agree with ScientistMother's interpretation of that quote. I have no idea what…

The Panglossian Paradigm, or as science moves forward, creationists move back

Reposted from the old TfK because it's fun. In KU's introductory biology lab about evolution, the students are asked (not my phrasing): In the vertebrate animal clade, jaws have evolved from cartilage-like rods associated with gills. In jawless ancestral vertebrates, as well as extant jawless species such as hagfish and lampreys, the function of these skeletal rods was/is to support the gills. Jaws function to grasp and chew, their success is notable, as jaws are still present in most extant vertebrates. If an engineer were put to the task of designing "jaws," would the outcome be the same…

Scientists' views on the relationship between science and religion

Elaine Howard Ecklund has a new paper out, building on her survey of scientists' views on religion, research she reported in a book last year, and in a series of papers over the last few years. In this paper (press release for those of you who haven't got access to the journal), she looks specifically at how scientists perceive the relationship between science and religion. As she reported in the book, 15% of scientists she and her colleagues interviewed reported seeing an inherent conflict between science and religion. Another 15% saw no conflict at all, while the remaining 70% saw some…

A History of Iran: Empire of the Mind

They say that to understand the present you need to understand the past. This seems likely to be true, but when it comes to understanding human affairs in their historical and sociological detail I have to admit that I'm skeptical of much genuine positive insight. That being said, I do believe that one can constrain the blind choices and flights of intuition one has through an exploration of the sample space of data which might allow for falsification of a subset of the myriad models. In short, to call bullshit you have to know shit. A concrete example of this are the events leading up to…

Resources on Open Access in Canada

For various reasons, I've been collecting some resources around open access, open data and scientific and technological innovation in Canada. Since they might be more broadly useful that to just me, I thought I'd share them. Of course, this list is incomplete. I've most likely left out whole swaths of stuff out there, both in terms of organizations and relevant posts and articles as well as institutional OA mandates and author funds I may have missed. Please feel free to suggest items in the comments. One thing in particular I would like to add in a future iteration is a list of library/…

My Equestrian Past

This post from May 07, 2005, was one of the rare personal posts I have ever written. Under the fold.... It is Derby Weekend! Exciting, isn't it? I had to watch the re-run tonight, but I saw it. Giacomo! Who's that!? I love when underdogs win! I practically grew up on the Belgrade Racecourse. Horse sports being really small in Yugoslavia, it is an unusual place. The mile-long dirt track is on the outside. Inside is a 1000m long hard track for trotting races. And in the very center, there is a large show-jumping ring. The Sunday racing program would usually start with a jumping class (and you…

The Science Of Driving And Traffic - the importance of breaking the rules

Let me state up front that this is not a topic I know anything about, but I have always had a curiosity for it, so let me just throw some thoughts out into the Internets and see if commenters or other bloggers can enlighten me or point me to the most informative sources on the topic. This is really a smorgarsbord of seemingly disparate topics that I always felt had more in common with each other than just the fact that they have something or other to do with traffic. I am trying to put those things together and I hope you can help me (under the fold). 1. Models of Traffic Flow There are two…

Randomized trial versus observational study challenge, III: metaphysics

Let me start with an apology. This post is again fairly long (for a blog post). Blog readers don't like long posts (at least I don't). But once I started writing about this I was unable to stop at some intermediary point, although I might have made it more concise and less conversational. I haven't done either. Even worse, I didn't quite finish with the single point I wanted to make, so it will be continued in the next post. Hence the apology. Now to recap a bit and then get down to business. My "challenge" from 10 days ago has drawn quite a response: over 40 quite substantive comments on the…

When nerve-damaging glue is disabling workers, what can OSHA do?

The only job 45-year-old Sheri Farley can hold is one where she doesn't have to sit or stand for more than 20 minutes at a time. She's racked by shooting pain in her legs and spine; doctors trace her neurological problems to five years of breathing glue fumes at the North Carolina furniture plant where she worked. New York Times reporter Ian Urbina tells the story of Farley and her co-workers in the in-depth piece "As OSHA Emphasizes Safety, Long-Term Health Risks Fester." Here's how he explains the problem with the chemical and the regulatory system that's poorly equipped to address such…

Sorting Out Possible Scenarios for the Future

Aaron Newton and I are starting out our first-ever Advanced Adapting-in-Place class, for people who have taken our previous course or who have been on the adaptation journey for a while. If you'd like to join us there are still spots available and world enough and time to join, so please email me at jewishfarmer@gmail.com. In the meantime, the first step in sorting out what you need to do to get ready for a shifting future is to have some sense of what that future looks like - or the range of possible ways the future could look. There are a lot of possible ways to imagine the future.…

Chore Time

Note: I wrote this piece in 2009, when my boys were younger. By now they chop food for dinner, Isaiah can indeed use the hatchet and Simon and Isaiah have their own flocks of birds, and the sale of any eggs they raise. The general principles are still the same. We still don't give allowances per se, but allow the children to do extra labor to earn money, over and above the chores they do simply because they live here. I found myself thinking about this book in the context of the discussion around the "Tiger Mother" book that advocates all of children's attention be focused on purely…

So You Want To Be An Astrophysicist? Part 2.0 - GRE at

So you want to be an astrophysicist? You've suffered through 3-4 years of undergrad, and you're ready for more. You picked the places to apply to (or have you...?), and you're ready for the paperwork. Another lightly retouched blast from the past... So what do you do? First you apply to the departments. There are 35 astronomy departments in the US with a PhD program, and some sub-departments within physics departments. As a rule, go directly to the department web site you are applying to and read carefully (ie do not go to the Graduate School at the University, until/if the department…

How Do you Want to Die?

Via Zite I found the article How Doctors Die by Ken Murray and was surprised to find it one of the best I've read on the issue of end-of-life care. The context is that of how Doctors typically forgo extreme measures in the face of terminal diagnoses, and often reject the type of care we routinely provide to our patients as "not for us". While the article lacks hard data on the prevalence of these attitudes or behaviors, I have to say this viewpoint is consistent my experience of learning my colleague's beliefs and how I now personally feel about ICU care . And I'm someone who is interested…

The zombies will sup on Karen Armstrong with a straw

Karen Armstrong has once again published a pile of meaningless twaddle in defense of religion. In this mess, she takes a series of statements about god that she says need rethinking…but as always, her "rethinking" is merely a reworking of apologetics for maintaining the status quo. It's almost as if she thinks it is a new and brilliant idea to just keep going to church and accepting Jesus into your heart. It's not. Here's her little list of truisms that she aims to puncture. "God Is Dead." Armstrong says this isn't true, and points to fundamentalist upheavals as evidence that "God has proven…

Foot soldiers who lack vision

The NCSE is an excellent organization, and I've frequently urged people at my talks to join it. However, it's also a limited organization, and this post by Richard Hoppe at the Panda's Thumb exposes their flaws. It's blind. It's locked in to one strategy. It's response to people who try to branch out in new directions is to discourage them, often in a rather patronizing way. This is not a good approach to take when we've been deadlocked for years and they offer no prospects for future victory. I've been making the argument for some time that the NCSE is our defensive line, and they are great…

My Equestrian Past

This post from May 07, 2005, was one of the rare personal posts I have ever written. Under the fold.... It is Derby Weekend! Exciting, isn't it? I had to watch the re-run tonight, but I saw it. Giacomo! Who's that!? I love when underdogs win! I practically grew up on the Belgrade Racecourse. Horse sports being really small in Yugoslavia, it is an unusual place. The mile-long dirt track is on the outside. Inside is a 1000m long hard track for trotting races. And in the very center, there is a large show-jumping ring. The Sunday racing program would usually start with a jumping class (and you…

Hunger games: Congress targets food assistance for the most vulnerable, despite the nation's growing food insecurity problem

by Kim Krisberg Hunger in America can be hard to see. It doesn't look like the image of hunger we usually see on our TVs: the wrenching impoverishment and emaciation. Talking about American hunger is hard because, well, there's food all around us. Everywhere you look, there's food — people eating food, people selling food, people advertising food, people wasting food, people dying of eating too much food. The obesity epidemic alone is getting so big that it's slowly swallowing the health care system in billions of dollars of care. We have a food problem. But food cost money. So for some…

The UK should not bomb Syria

In fact I'm not quite as certain of the Right Thing as my headline suggests; but if I'm going to nail my colours to the mast in advance of the UK's parliament's probable vote next week, I may as well be definite. It puts me with Jeremy Corbyn and against most of the UK pols. I don't feel involved enough to go and protest2, though, as I did before the Iraq war. More that two years ago I wrote words that could be interpreted as support for military intervention. But that was more than two years ago; things have changed since. Most of what has changed has changed for the worse; the country is…

Nierenberg, concluded: Oreskes is wrong

Really, why are you reading this? Read something of substance instead. Last time I said I ought to read Oresekes again carefully. I have.Summary: nothing has changed. She is still wrong. Note: in all the following, I abbreviate the authors of Chicken Itza as "Oreskes". Well, she is the lead author and the only famous one, so gets to take the rap. Oreskes central thesis is: Nierenberg was the lead author of the first major report on climate science issued by the National Academy of Sciences that challenged the emerging consensus view on global warming. It did so not by focusing on the…

Modeling metazoan cell lineages

A while back, I criticized this poorly implemented idea from Paul Nelson of the Discovery Institute, a thing that he claimed was a measure of organismal complexity called Ontogenetic Depth. I was not impressed. The short summary of my complaints: Unworkable idea: There was no explanation about how we could implement and test the idea, and despite promises at the time, Nelson still hasn't produced his methods. False assertions and confusing examples: He claims that all changes in early lineages are destructive, for instance, which is false. Bad metaphors: He uses a terribly flawed metaphor…

We stand awed at the heights our people have achieved

When the Buddhas of Bamyan were dynamited, it wasn't an atheist who lit the fuse. These modern atheists that have stirred up so much resentment among the apologists for religion are not destroyers who seek to demolish the past or who want to advance a destructive ideology — they aren't philistines who reject literature and art and music, and they aren't monsters who will exterminate people to achieve their ends. We aren't out to eradicate the world of ideas or obliterate the vestiges of our religious history in art and architecture, although we have been accused of such nefarious plans; such…

How To Avoid Future WannaCry Style Ransomware Attacks

This is very simple, and it has more to do with the philosophy and marketing of operating systems than the technology of the operating systems themselves, though the technology does matter a great deal as well. First, lets have a look at how this ransomware attack was allowed to happen to begin with. The vast majority of affected systems in this latest world wide cyber attack were Windows based computers that were not updated with recently available and easily deployed patch. The attack did not affect other operating systems, and Windows systems that had a recently released security patch…

#Occupy #Politics Visibly with #Indivisible

Indivisible is a lot like #Occupy but instead of being in tents, we are intense in other ways. I have been at a few Indivisible meetings over the last few weeks. One of the questions I have about the movement is this: How many people in Indivisible now had voted for Trump, or in my case, our local Republican house representative, Erik Paulsen, or the like, elsewhere? Also, how many people in Indivisible had not voted at all in the last election, or at least, were not reliable voters? And, how many people in Indivisible had voted, and generally voted Democratic/Progressive/Whatever but had…

Mark Steyn's Latest Trick

UPSATE. The motion has been denied. Rather hilariously, bt the way. Professor Michael Mann vs. Shock Jock Mark Steyn You all know about the libel suit filed by Professor Michael Mann against Canadian right wing radio shock jock Mark Steyn. Steyn made apparently libelous comments linking Mann, who is widely regarded as the worlds top non-retired climate scientist, to the Jerry Sandusky scandal. (I don’t know what Steyn was implying but the only link is that both work(ed) at Penn State University!) There are other aspects of the libel suit as well, beyond the scope of this post. The suit was…

Understanding Storms and Global Warming: A Quaint Parable

A quaint New England rocky creek Imagine standing next to Parable Creek, an imaginary rocky brook in New England. The water is rushing past you from left to right, around the rocks that emerge tall above the surface of the stream, mounding over the top of those that are lower down. The deepest parts of the steam are relatively flat but show ripples that belie the presence of other rocks and sunken branches that are well below the water line. While you are observing a young boy of about 11 years old comes along, carrying his fishing pole. “Hey mister, how’s it going?” he says, as he steps…

The argument that different races have genetically determined differences in intelligence

The presumption being examined here is that humans are divisible into different groups (races would be one term for those groups) that are genetically distinct from one another in a way that causes those groups to have group level differences in average intelligence, as measured by IQ. More exactly, this post is about the sequence of arguments that are usually made when people try to make this assertion. The argument usually starts out noting that there are dozens of papers that document group differences in IQ. I'll point out right now that most of those papers are published in journals with…

Linux Journal Readers' Choice Awards: Ubuntu Weak, Unity Shunned

The Linux Journal Readers' Choice Awards are out with the current issue. Let's talk about some of them. The number one distribution was, as usual Ubuntu. But, Ubuntu only got 16 percent, with Debian coming in second at 14.1 percent. So, one could say that Debian is strong since Ubuntu is based on Debian. One could also say that Ubuntu is surprisingly weak. One would think it would be higher. One possibility is that Linux Journal readers are pretty hard core, and might often eschew Ubuntu for other distributions that cause more pain. Face it. Real Linux users like to wear hair shirts. I…

Falwell and Robertson: Frauds?

Dru Stevenson, an associate professor at the South Texas School of Law in Houston, has linked to my post on the ACLU defending the rights of Christians. He also left a comment in response to the post that preceeded that one, which was about John Scalzi's attempt to find Christian lawyers who did work for the ACLU. First, I want to thank Mr. Stevenson for the link and for the kind words about the post. But I also want to take issue with one thing he said while linking to it. He writes: Disclaimer: I don't care for the overheated tone of this site. I also think its personal attacks on Pat…

Basic Concepts: Fields

In the initial "Basic Concepts" post, I discussed the concept of Force in physics. This time out, I'll be talking about fields, which is a much dicier proposition. Not only are fields considerably more abstract than forces, but I've never lectured on fields in general (specific instances of fields, yes, but not fields as abstract objects). For that matter, I've never taken a real field theory class. The chances of my saying something stupid about fields are exponentially greater than the chances of my saying something stupid about forces. In a certain sense, though, "Fields" is a good topic…

My Speech To the Graduates

Graduation was this morning, and it just so happens that I was the speaker. That I am posting the speech below should tell you that I thought it went pretty well. I'll do a separate post describing some of the reactions, and commenting on a few of the other graduation-speech related stories that have been in the news lately, but this post is going to be long enough without that. As a teaser, I'll just mention that several people in the audience praised me afterwards for giving such a courageous speech. That made me nervous, actually, since I am not really very courageous. I do need to…

A Marine Biologist's Story

The air felt thick and heavy in my lungs. As I drove further down the narrow strip of beach, my throat closed and my eyes burned. It wasn't normal sea air - it was toxic. Red tide was hitting the area in full force, killing off thousands of marine animals and filling the air with the neurotoxic compounds the algae Karenia brevis is known for. As the waves crash on shore, they break open the delicate algal cells, aerosolizing the odorless but noxious brevatoxins. Many people have heard of red tide, but if you haven't experienced it, you should consider yourself lucky. A few years ago I was…

Basic concepts: Allopatry and sympatry

This is a repost of a piece I wrote for The Panda's Thumb in March 2004. I add it here to put it in the Basics series. It is, wrote the Roman poet Horace, fit and proper to die for one's homeland. The word he used for homeland was "patria" (dulce et decorum est pro patria mori), and the word has entered into biology as the suffix for exactly that. Unlike Horace's slogan, though, it applies more to living than dying. It would be nice if we humans could attempt to live for our homelands rather than die for them, but that's another rant for another time. There are a cluster of terms used…

Food Again

This post ties together a number of themes that I have been harping upon for the past few years.  First, from Greg Mankiw's blog: href="http://gregmankiw.blogspot.com/2008/11/whats-wrong-with-efficient-scale.html">What's wrong with the efficient scale? Reuters reports:     President-elect Barack Obama vowed on Tuesday to cut billions of dollars from wasteful government programs....An obvious example, Obama said, were reports of crop subsidies to farmers who make more than $2.5 million per year. Like President-elect Obama (but unlike candidate Obama), I am all for getting rid of…

What kind of deception of human subjects is acceptable?

One of the key requirements that researchers conducting studies with human subjects must meet is that they obtain the informed consent of the participating subjects (or of a parent or guardian, if the subject is not able to give informed consent himself or herself). However, there are particular instances where giving the subjects complete information about the study at the outset may change the outcome of the study -- namely, it may make it practically impossible to measure what the research is trying to measure. If these studies are not to be ruled out completely, doing them necessitates…

The consequences of a chilly climate in the academic workplace.

After my post yesterday suggesting that women scientists may still have a harder time being accepted in academic research settings than their male counterparts, Greensmile brought my attention to a story in today's Boston Globe. It seems that almost a dozen professors at MIT believe they lost a prospective hire due to intimidation of the job candidate by another professor who happens also to be a Nobel laureate. Possibly it matters that the professor alleged to have intimidated the job candidate is male, and that the job candidate and the 11 professors who have written the letter of…

Alternative medicine as religion, one more time

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, in retrospect, I suspect that I might have gone a little too far. Although the two share many aspects, alternative medicine is not in general a religion (with the possible exception of reiki, which, for all intents and purposes, is faith…

I know you are, but what am I?

Denialism. You keep using that word. I do not think it means what you think it means. The story might be apocryphal, and it might not even be true, but it's often used as a metaphor. I'm referring to the "boiling frog" story. Basically, the idea is supposedly based on an observation that a frog, when placed in a pot of hot water, will immediately jump out. However, or so the story goes, if the frog is placed in room temperature water and the water is heated gradually enough, the frog won't notice and will eventually boil to death without trying to escape. The metaphor, of course, is designed…

The annals of "I'm not anti-vaccine," part 10: Titanic, Oklahoma City, or the Holocaust?

It's not infrequent that I come under fire from antivaccinationists for, ironically enough, calling them antivaccinationists. "Oh, no," they protest, "I'm not antivaccine. How dare you call me that? I'm actually a vaccine safety advocate." Of course, when you probe more closely and ask a few questions, almost inevitably you'll find that in reality they believe that no vaccine is safe, no way, no how, making the difference between their view of vaccine safety and being antivaccine a distinction without a real difference. Actually, it's more a delusion on the part of antivaccinationists,…

One last look at The Atlantic's pro-CAM propaganda

Well, I'm back. Grant frenzy is over (for now), and I have a couple of weeks before the next cycle begins again. Well, actually, it's more than that. The next big NIH grant deadlines are in October and November, but the Susan G. Komen Foundation grant notices just showed up in my e-mail the other day, and the deadlines for its preapplications are in early to mid-August. The fun never ends, and if the Army approves my preapplication for its Idea Award grant application I'll have a full application to write in August too. It's times like these when I ask myself why it is exactly that I do this…

If we're choosing teams now, I want to be with the shamelessly godless

That guy, Larry Moran…he seems to have been the final straw to tip a whole lot of people into twitterpated consternation. In particular, Ed Brayton, that sad panjandrum of the self-satisfied mean, medium, middle, moderate, and mediocre, has declared Moran (and all those who dare to profess their atheism without compromise) to be anathema, and John Lynch, Pat Hayes, and Nick Matzke have drawn up sides to put themselves clearly against wicked "evangelical atheists" like Dawkins and Moran and even PZ Maiieghrs. What could have prompted such vociferous contempt? What awful thing could Moran have…

Another swing for the fences and a miss by the anti-vaccine movement

Knowing what you are destined to blog about on a given night three days beforehand is a two-edged sword. On the plus side, I don't have to worry about writer's block or lack of suitable material to use as fodder for my Insolence, Respectful and not-so-Respectful, and that's usually a good thing. On the other hand, by the time the evening rolls around, my attention can easily stray to other things, and I might not be as enthusiastic about deconstructing the latest example of, for example, anti-vaccine idiocy as I was when I first learned of its impending arrival. Yet not blogging about it…

Antivaccinationists denying the cult of Andrew Wakefield and Jenny McCarthy

Two of the great "icons"—if you can call them "great" given that they're icons but hardly "great"—of the antivaccine movement are Andrew Wakefield and Jenny McCarthy. Over the last decade, they have arguably been the most influential people in the antivaccine movement. The reasons are simple. Let's look at Jenny McCarthy first. In 2007, when her child Evan was diagnosed with autism and she blamed MMR vaccine for it, McCarthy became virtually overnight the single most famous celebrity antivaccine advocate. With her then-boyfriend Jim Carrey, in 2008 she led an antivaccine march on Washington…

Why I despise Mike Adams: Blaming Beau Biden's cancer on chemotherapy and glyphosate

I've been following Mike Adams a long time, going back to 2007 and even before. It's difficult to find anyone who can pack more pseudoscience, conspiracy mongering, and outright hateful bile into an article when he has a mind to do so. I've documented this tendency many times, so many times that, each time I write about one of his rants, I tell myself it'll be the last time. But it never is, because Adams is so vile and I cannot abide the way he spits on the grave of people who died of cancer, people like Tony Snow, Patrick Swayze, Elizabeth Edwards, and Farrah Fawcett. Every time, his MO is…

Persistent ethnic differences in test performance may be entirely an artifact of the method used to 'adjust' the test

It is well established among those who carry out, analyze, and report pre-employment performance testing that slope-based bias in those tests is rare. Why is this important? Look at the following three graphs from a recent study by Aguinis, Culpepper and Pierce (2010): Figure 1. Illustration of the typical finding of no slope-based differences and intercept-based differences favoring the minority group (Panel A), and the possibility that there are slope-based differences (Panels B and C) together with no intercept-based differences (Panel B) and small intercept-based differences (Panel C…

SB 31 versus "health freedom" in North Carolina

After having been away for four days, it always takes me a little time to get back into the swing of things when it comes to blogging. Actually, it takes some time to get back into the swing of things at work, too. Sometimes it takes starting on something not too difficult and then working my way back up to the more difficult tasks. In terms of blogging, starting out with something not too difficult often means taking on a reliable source of utter nonsense. And what better source of utter nonsense exists in the world of pseudoscientific medicine? Certainly, it's hard to find a loonier,…

For the anti-vaccinationists out there: The results of a real "vaxed versus unvaxed" study

In many ways, the anti-vaccine movement is highly mutable. However, this mutability is firmly based around keeping one thing utterly constant, and that one thing is vaccines. No matter what the evidence, no matter what the science, no matter how much observational, scientific, and epidemiological evidence is arrayed against them, to the relentlessly self-confident members of the anti-vaccine movement, it's always about the vaccines. Always. Vaccines are always the root many human health problems, be they asthma, autoimmune diseases, autism, and chronic diseases of all types. Everything else…