Antivaccine nonsense
oracknows | May 21, 2014Well, it snuck up on me again, the way it has a tendency to do every year. Maybe it's because Memorial Day is so early this year. Maybe it's because there's just so much work to do this week given the multiple grant deadlines. Whatever the case, it just dawned on my last night that today is the first day of the yearly autism quackfest known as AutismOne (AO), which is being held at the Intercontinental O'Hare Hotel near Chicago. Of course, things are different this year. Given the schism between team Crosby and pretty much everyone else in the antivaccine movement, it's unclear what the deal…
oracknows | May 19, 2014May I just say something again? (Actually, it's my blog; so I'll say it if I want to regardless of whether you want me to or not.) You know that "hypothesis" that vaccines cause autism, the one that has been at the core of the modern antivaccine movement over the last 15 years or so? Well, it's not pining for the fjords, if you know what I mean. No it's not pinin'! It's passed on! This "hypothesis" is no more! It has ceased to be! It's expired and gone to meet it's maker! (Well, actually, since one of its makers, Andrew Wakefield, is still around, I'm not sure what in practice that actually…
oracknows | May 18, 2014I hadn't really planned on writing again about everyone's favorite conspiracy theorist and promoter of quackery, Mike Adams, at least not so soon after the last time I did it, which was only last week after Adams appeared on Dr. Oz's daytime television show to push his "laboratory." Adams, as you might recall, goes by the Internet moniker the "Health Ranger" (which would really more appropriately be "Health Danger") and is the man responsible for one of the quackiest sites on the Internet, NaturalNews.com, a repository for nearly every form of medical pseudoscience known to humans, mixed in…
oracknows | May 11, 2014Besides yesterday being Mothers' Day yesterday, I had a lot of grant stuff to do, which means that this one will be a quickie. On Saturday, a reader sent me a link to one of the most useful sites I've ever encountered. I realize that over the weekend it's spread around the skeptical blogosphere like the proverbial wildfire, which is unfortunate (for me) given that I've made it a personal rule that I don't post on the weekend any more, barring amazing developments. Still, this one tempted me. It's a website called Spurious Correlations, and it is exactly what it claims to be. Its usefulness…
oracknows | May 9, 2014
There's a certain category of posts that I like to call (to myself, anyway) "taking care of business" posts. Usually, it's a post about something that I missed the first time around but has, for some reason, reappeared on my radar screen or something that I wish I had written about when it first showed up but didn't to the point that I don't care that the material is over a week old, which, let's face it, might as well be a year old in blogging time. On the other hand, there's still no time like the present, so let's take care of some business. There is the added benefit that taking care…
oracknows | May 7, 2014If there's a story I neglected to mention last week that I should have, it's that Andrew Wakefield is being a bully again, trying to use legal intimidation to silence his critics, namely Forbes.com blogger Emily Willingham. Of course, Wakefield has done this so many times that the fact that he's done it once again is hardly newsworthy, but that never stopped me before, because it's important to document the pattern of legal harassment. The timing was bad. The antivaccine crank blog Age of Autism posted a copy of Wakefield's letter after I had already finished Friday's post, and by the time…
oracknows | May 4, 2014A week ago or so, I was perusing my Google Alerts, along with various blogs and news websites, looking for something to blog about, when I noticed a disturbance in the pseudoscience Force. It's a phenomenon I've noticed many times before from a wide variety of cranks and quacks, but it all boils down to how we as supporters of science-based medicine are viewed by those who are, in essence, victims of the quackery that we are trying to combat. I think it's a topic worth revisiting periodically; so here's the 2014 update.
A week ago, Sharon Hill published a post over at Doubtful News entitled…
oracknows | May 1, 2014Yesterday, the CDC held a Twitter party for National Infant Immunization Week, which is, conveniently enough, this week. Our old "friend" Ginger Taylor tried to call in her squadron of flying antivaccine monkeys to fling poo at what should have been a celebration of the success of vaccines; so I sent up the Bat Signal, the better to attract some voices of reason to the sliming of the #CDCvax hashtag used for the Twitter party to counter the antivaccine quacks. P.Z. Myers picked up the call too, and the rest is history. I almost felt sorry for Ginger and her fellow antivaccine loons, as they…
oracknows | April 30, 2014Bat Signal time!
Here's a quickie that I can't resist publicizing. Antivaccinationists appear to be planning on crashing the CDC's Twitter party for National Infant Immunization Week, which will take place at 1 PM EDT today. Here's our "friend" Ginger Taylor promoting the hashtag #CDCvax to her Twitter followers:
Learn About National Infant Immunization Week at the #CDCvax Twitter Party on Wed, Apr 30 @ 1pm. #CDCvax http://t.co/3ZBN1uYKxt
— Ginger Taylor (@GingerTaylor) April 30, 2014
The intent is clear. Ginger wants to flood the Twitter chat with antivaccine nonsense and conspiracy…
oracknows | April 28, 2014And now for something completely different (sort of).
Somehow, I totally forgot that the week of April 26 to May 3 is National Infant Immunization Week (NIIW), an annual observance to highlight the importance of protecting infants from vaccine-preventable diseases and celebrate the achievements of immunization programs and their partners in promoting healthy communities. In fact, it's the 20th anniversary of the NIIW. If any medical intervention in existence deserves such a week, it's vaccination. Unlike travesties such as Naturopathic Medicine Week (or, as I liked to call it, Quackery Week…
oracknows | April 22, 2014I sense a new disturbance in the antivaccine force.
I hadn't planned on blogging about the antivaccine movement again, but I felt that I needed to do a follow up to yesterday's (hopefully) amusing little takedown of the antivaccine stylings of new member of that group personification of the Dunning-Kruger effect and arrogance of ignorance, namely The Thinking Moms' Revolution (TMR). There was a point in there that I had noticed (and even briefly commented on) that requires more of an expansion, particularly since it would allow me to comment on a post that I saw last week and never got around…
oracknows | April 21, 2014There is a perception that strikes me as common enough to be considered "common wisdom" that antivaccine views are much more common on the "left" of the political spectrum than they are on the "right." I've discussed on multiple occasions how this perceived common wisdom is almost certainly wrong, or at least so incomplete as to be, for all intents and purposes, wrong. Frequently, the accusation that the left is antivaccine, usually coupled with the stereotype of the crunchy, affluent, liberal elite living on the coasts being antivaccine, is often thrown back by conservatives stung by…
oracknows | April 18, 2014For 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…
oracknows | April 13, 2014Never look a blogging gift horse in the mouth, I always say. Well, sort of. It just figures that I could only do two posts that weren't about vaccines before circling back around to the topic of the antivaccine movement. For that, I have Jenny McCarthy to thank. McCarthy, as anyone who pays attention to the antivaccine movement knows, is the most famous antivaccine activist in the United States, if not the world. She's a woman who's used her celebrity to promote the notion that vaccines cause autism, so much so that she willingly lent her name to a notorious antivaccine group (Generation…
oracknows | April 8, 2014As I hang out at the San Diego Convention Center, I can't resist one last note on the Chili's debacle that I wrote about yesterday.Remember how Wendy Fournier, president of the National Autism Association (NAA), the antivaccine group posing as an autism advocacy group, whined when Chili's backed out of its deal to donate 10% of its proceeds from yesterday's sales to the NAA that she isn't antivaccine? I'll refresh your memory, so that you don't have to click on the link above:
Wendy Fournier, president of NAA, said, “It was obvious that the comments [Chili's was] getting were a fight about…
oracknows | April 7, 2014Here I am, sitting on the balcony of my hotel room in sunny San Diego, as I get ready to head over to the 2014 meeting of the American Association for Cancer Research (AACR). The sun is rising over the mountains, and the only sound I hear is that of running water in the swimming pool below (well, that and traffic around the convention center, the odd siren, and the noise of air conditioner fans), and I need to produce something quick for the blog. Realizing that last week, I described myself as having fallen into a "rut," not because I thought my posts were substandard but rather because I…
oracknows | April 1, 2014Of all the cranks, quacks, antivaccinationists, and pseudoscientists that I've encountered (and applied a bit of not-so-Respectful Insolence to) over the years, there are a few who belong in the top tier—or, if you prefer, the bottom tier. They stick out in my memory for a variety of reasons, either through their sheer crankitude on a variety of subjects (such as Mike Adams), sheer persistence on one subject (such as Jake Crosby or any of the denizens of the antivaccine crank blogs Age of Autism or The Thinking Moms' Revolution), or fame for promoting quackery (Joe Mercola). One of these…
oracknows | March 30, 2014As I just mentioned a week ago, there used to be a time when I dreaded Autism Awareness Month, which begins tomorrow. The reason was simple. Several years ago to perhaps as recently as three years ago, I could always count on a flurry of stories about autism towards the end of March and the beginning of April about autism. That in and of itself isn't bad. Sometimes the stories were actually informative and useful. However, in variably there would be a flurry of truly aggravating stories in which the reporter, either through laziness, lack of ideas, or the desire to add some spice and…
oracknows | March 28, 2014Dr. Robert Sears has to be one of the most irresponsible pediatricians on the face of the earth, if not the most irresponsible. Many of you might recall that a little more than a week ago "Dr. Bob" posted a borderline unhinged rant on Facebook aimed at his own patients, who, quite reasonably, were calling him about the measles outbreak going on in southern California right now and asking him about the measles vaccine. It was entitled Measles Epidemic . . . NOT!, and his response boiled down to, in essence, "get the vaccine if you're worried, but there's no real reason to worry." He also…
oracknows | March 25, 2014After the last couple of days of depressing posts about the utter failure of the FDA to do its job protecting cancer patients from the likes of Stanislaw burzynski, it's time to move on. Unfortunately, the first thing that caught my eye as I sat down to blog last night not only fried my irony meter as though a radioactive flame had been aimed at it by Godzilla itself but it also stomped that sucker flat as though Godzilla had jumped up and down on it. It came from one of the only places where the bloggers are so utterly without a sense of self-awareness that they could achieve such a feat. No…