Antivaccine nonsense
oracknows | June 29, 2012Remember California Bill AB 2109? I've written about it at least a couple of times before. In fact, for some reason, the comment section of this post on AB 2109 suddenly come alive again a couple of days ago, with antivaccinationists infiltrating it, much to the annoyance of my regular commenters. It turns out that the reason was that a couple of days ago AB 2109 came up for discussion in the California Senate Health Committee (and passed to be sent out to the full Senate for a vote), after having passed the California House a couple of months ago. I also now know why antivaccinationists…
oracknows | June 27, 2012And now for something completely different.
Except that it isn't really. I say that it isn't really different because, although this post will seem to be about politics, in reality it will be about a common topic on this blog: Anti-science. And where is this anti-science? Sadly, it's in the platform of a major party of one of the largest states in the country. It also meshes with the anti-science inherent in a lot of so-called "complementary and alternative medicine" (CAM) and all comes together in one place: The proposed 2012 Platform of the Republican Party of Texas. It's all there, as you…
oracknows | June 26, 2012Remember Luc Montagnier? Sure, you do. He's the Nobel Laureate whose identification of the virus that causes AIDS garnered him plaudits, laurels, and, of course, the Nobel Prize in Medicine. Unfortunately, since winning the Nobel Prize, from a scientific standpoint, Montagnier's been on a downward spiral. Sadly, it didn't take long after his Nobel acceptance speech for disturbing signs of crankery and quackery to appear. For instance, Montagnier published a paper that implied that DNA could teleport, using this study, whose results were almost certainly the result of contaminants in…
oracknows | June 26, 2012No 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.…
oracknows | June 17, 2012Here we go again.
Remember how last week I said I wouldn't write about the Miracle Mineral Solution (abbreviated MMS) again for a while? I lied.
Well, actually, I didn't. At the time I wrote that, I really did mean to give it a rest for a while, and for a while at least I was a good boy. I even managed to ignore Todd Drezner's excellent post on—of all places!—what is normally a wretched hive of scum and quackery, The Huffington Post, entitled The Curious Case of Autism and MMS. Then came this post by an MMS apologist that we've met before, a man named Adam Mr. Abraham who goes by the handle…
oracknows | June 13, 2012Although I'm interested in skepticism in general, I have a tendency to gravitate towards one particular form of pseudoscience (alternative medicine) and, in particular, a certain kind of that particular form of pseudoscience, namely antivaccine quackery. However, as much as I keep returning to the antivaccine movement, I keep noticing just how much it shares with other forms of science denialism and pseudoscientific thinking. I was reminded of this when one of my readers e-mailed me a link to a Facebook group, Pro-Vax Quacks. I have no idea who's behind the group, but what I do know is that…
oracknows | June 12, 2012I know, I know, I've been writing about MMS a lot. Don't worry. Barring some unforeseen development, this will probably be the last one for a while. However, I just had to comment again because this is just too funny (not to mention that I didn't have a lot of time last night because, yes, I had to work on a grant application). Remember how I mentioned the pro-MMS petition in which Jim Humble, the man who had the revelation that you can bleach away whatever disease you're suffering from, demanded that Emily Willingham (who did a Change.org petition demanding that Kerri Rivera stop treating…
oracknows | June 10, 2012A couple of weeks ago, I was horrified to learn of a new "biomed" treatment that has been apparently gaining popularity in autism circles. Actually, it's not just autism circles in which this treatment is being promoted. Before the "autism biomed" movement discovered it, this particular variety of "miracle cure" has been touted as a treatment for cancer, AIDS, hepatitis A,B and C, malaria, herpes, TB, and who knows what else. I'm referring to something called MMS, which stands for "miracle mineral solution." As I pointed out when I discovered its promotion for various maladies and then later…
oracknows | June 8, 2012
Sometimes I feel like Dug, the talking dog in the movie Up, in that when it comes to blogging I'm often easily distracted. The reason I say this is because there's been a "viral" (if you can call it that) video floating around the antivaccine quackery blogosphere that antivaccinationists are passing around as though it's slam-dunk evidence that vaccines aren't safe. It's called the Chalkboard Campaign:
Basically, it's one long series of chalkboard images touting pseudoscience and antivaccine misinformation over and over again, all over a sappy pop music soundtrack, using the tag line from…
oracknows | June 5, 2012Remember Vox Day?
Newer converts to the glory that is Orac (or at least to the ego that is Orac) might not know who Vox is because it's been a while since I've discussed his antiscience attitudes. By and large, this is probably a good thing, given that Vox denies evolution, has been antivaccine from way back, and apparently thinks nothing of suggesting that the U.S. emulate Hitler's methods of ejecting Jews from Germany to take care of our illegal immigrant problem. Truly, Vox is an example of crank magnetism at work. Particularly amusing is the way that he trumpets his membership in Mensa…
oracknows | May 30, 2012Remember Dr. Jay?
Regular readers know about whom I speak. I'm talking about Dr. Jay Gordon, pediatrician to the stars' children. Dr. Jay has been a fixture on this blog on and off for seven years, first having popped in as a commenter way back on Respectful Insolence, Mark 1, when I first noted him promoting antivaccine nonsense claiming against all science that vaccines cause austism on—where else?—that wretched hive of scum and quackery, The Huffington Post. Since then, Dr. Jay has assiduously denied that he is antivaccine, all the while spewing antivaccine canards hither, thither, and yon…
oracknows | May 29, 2012When I saw the latest screed from that very living embodiment of crank magnetism, Mike Adams, I chuckled. I sent it around to some fellow skeptics, including, for instance, the crew at The Skeptics' Guide to the Universe, as well as acquaintances and friends of mine because I couldn't believe it. Adams, as loony as he is, had topped himself. In the meantime, I couldn't decide whether or not to write about it, particularly after Steve Novella took a swipe at it. After all, there are things that are so loony, so out there, that one seriously has to worry about whether they are the result of…
oracknows | May 27, 2012I was thinking of taking Memorial Day off. There are several reasons. First, it's a holiday. Second, the blog still isn't functioning quite up to snuff after the transition to WordPress. In particular, we still have a major spam infestation that is unlikely to improve before Tuesday. It also doesn't help that I have a whole bunch of grant writing to do.
Then I saw this. I became aware of the post through a TrackBack, and that TrackBack came from the website of a rock group—yes a rock group, and a bad one, at that—made up of antivaccine loons. Those antivaccine loons call themselves The…
oracknows | May 25, 2012It's that time of year again.
What am I talking about? Regular readers know. They know that sometime around the Memorial Day weekend every year, usually beginning a couple of days before the extended weekend and into the weekend itself, there lands in the Chicago area a quackfest of such unrelenting quackitude that it has to be seen to be believed. Basically, it's the antivaccine and autism "biomed" movement Woodstock, except that it happens every year. Any and every quack and die-hard antivaccinationist who still believes believes against all evidence that vaccines cause autism is usually…
oracknows | May 18, 2012I'm sometimes asked why I do this. Why, people ask me, do I spend so much time generating post after post after post day after day after day? Obviously, one reason is that it interests me. Another reason is the passion that drives me to support science and science-based medicine and to detest the damage the pseudoscience, particularly pseudoscience in medicine, can do. There is, however, at least one more reason.
I'm referring, of course, to the adoration of my "fans."
Yes, the more I'm attacked, the more I know I've been effective against the forces of irrationality and pseudoscience. When…
oracknows | May 17, 2012About a week ago, I took note of what appears to be a new offshoot of the antivaccine movement known as the Thinking Moms' Revolution (TMR). At the time, I pointed out the toxic combination of hubris mixed with ignorance that resulted in a risible "declaration of independence" from "medical tyranny." In reality, it was one long antivaccine rant full of long refuted myths and pseudoscience combined with a demand for an unethical study of the current vaccine schedule verus placebo. In brief, to anyone with half a brain, it would have been embarrassing. Apparently the woman who wrote it lacks…
oracknows | May 6, 2012One of the most inaptly named groups I've ever seen is called Thinking Moms' Revolution (henceforth abbreviated as TMR). Given the reality of what TMR really is, the word "thinking" applied to TMR is, as they say, so wrong it's not even wrong. As for a "revolution," what TMR really represents is nothing revolutionary at all, unless you consider antivaccinationism, run-of-the-mill antiscience paranoia, and big pharma conspiracy theories to be "revolutionary." I don't know about you, but I do not. I've followed such activities for well over a decade now, and in light of that experience,…
oracknows | May 4, 2012Denialism. 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…
oracknows | May 2, 2012Oh, goody.
Remember last week, when I took note of how organized quackery's best friend in Congress, not to mention a shining example of crank magnetism, Representative Dan Burton of Indiana, was taking the opportunity of his having announced that he would not be running for reelection this year to write a typically brain dead post on his Congressional blog about the "autism epidemic"? In that post, Burton bought into the mythology of the "autism epidemic" and defended his previous efforts to root out that dreaded mercury in vaccines (and, of course, vaccines themselves) as the cause of this…
oracknows | April 30, 2012I realize I repeat this a lot, but it bears repeating a lot. Vaccines are, without a doubt, one of the greatest advances in health care devised by the human mind. Arguably, vaccination campaigns have saved more lives and prevented more suffering and death than pretty much any other medical preventative intervention ever invented. I realize that I tick off antivaccinationists when I say that, but I don't care. Actually, I do care. I kind of like ticking off antivaccinationists using science. You didn't think I've been blogging for seven years purely out of a sense of duty to humanity, science…