Antivaccine nonsense
oracknows | April 25, 2012A couple of months ago, I couldn't help but rejoice when I learned that Indiana Representative Dan Burton had finally, after twenty years in the U.S. House of Representatives, decided to retire after the end of this term. I thought that anyone in the U.S. who supports science-based medicine should rejoice, too, because I'm hard-pressed to think of someone in Congress who is more consistently antiscience, particularly anti-medical science, than Dan Burton. Worse, he put his politics where his beliefs were -- big time. Perhaps the most egregious example of Dan Burton's antiscience is his…
oracknows | April 22, 2012It'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,…
oracknows | April 20, 2012Thanks again, antivaccine activists. Thanks for the measles. Again:
Last year was the worst year for measles in the U.S. in 15 years, health officials said Thursday.
There were 222 cases of measles, a large jump from the 60 or so seen in a typical year. Most of the cases last year were imported -- either by foreign visitors or by U.S. residents who picked up the virus overseas.
U.S. children have been getting vaccinated against the measles for about 50 years. But low vaccination rates in Europe and other places resulted in large outbreaks overseas last year.
One notes that this appears to be…
oracknows | April 20, 2012It just occurred to me that, even though there was news about it, I never mentioned what's happened recently with respect to California bill AB2109. As you might recall, I wrote about this bill about four weeks ago. In brief, this bill, if passed into law, would require that California parents seeking a "personal belief" exemption for vaccines to meet with a physician and have a physician sign off on what is more or less an informed consent form stating that the parents had been informed of the risks and benefits of vaccines and, more importantly for purposes of the personal belief exemption…
oracknows | April 19, 2012Yesterday was a bit of a rough patch; so today there won't be the usual Orac magnum opus to which you've all become accustomed. Instead, maybe I'll do a briefer post with semi-random thoughts. Of course, even Orac's shorter posts are longer than the average blog post; so you're still getting your money's worth. Oh, wait. The blog is free. Never mind.
First up, as I've mentioned before, over the last couple of years, I've gotten into old time radio through Radio Classics. The other day, I happened to be listening to an episode of the 1950s science fiction radio show X Minus One. The specific…
oracknows | April 16, 2012Periodically, I like to make fun of homeopathy and homeopaths. I realize that to some that might seem like the proverbial shooting of fish in a barrel, but it is amusing and educational. However, it's not always amusing. For instance, I am not amused when I see The One Quackery To Rule Them All (my favored term for homeopathy these days) being used either in areas where a lack of treatment can result in great harm (and, given that homeopathy is nothing more than water shaken up a bit with a magic spell, that's what homeopathy is, a lack of treatment) or when I see homeopaths promising what…
oracknows | April 12, 2012Proof. You keep using that word. I do not think it means what you think it means.
That thought kept running through my mind as I perused an article appearing on an antivaccine website. Another thought that rant through my mind is that this was clearly not a scientist of any sort speaking. In science, in general, we don't speak of "proof." We speak of evidence and experimentation. Lawyers speak of proof, as in "proof beyond a reasonable doubt." Scientists speak of evidence in shades of gray, because most evidence is on a continuum. Besides, the article asked the question, "Has 'science based…
oracknows | April 4, 2012Remember The Refusers?
They're the antivaccine band with the recycled classic rock sound lacking a shred of originality or chops that flooded the blogosphere with their crazy in the form of Clash wanna be songs like Vaccine Gestapo, which inspired Surly Amy to make me a Vaccine Gestapo pendant to wear at TAM a couple of years ago. (I still wear it to various skeptical events from time to time.) Particularly amusing and pathetic was the antivaccine sing-along The Refusers ran a couple of years ago at the demonstration at Age of Autism in Chicago, complete with Andrew Wakefield gamely playing…
oracknows | April 3, 2012As I mentioned yesterday, I'm at the American Association for Cancer Research meeting imbibing the latest and greatest that science-based medicine has to offer against cancer. The AACR is mainly a basic science and translational meeting; so a lot of this stuff is seriously preclinical. That's what makes it interesting, though. In any case, my distraction aside, sometimes stuff happens that I still have to comment on and, better yet, sometimes it's the sort of stuff that I don't feel obligated to write an Orac-ian length screed about. In other words, it's perfect for keeping the blog active…
oracknows | March 30, 2012If there's one thing that I've learned that I can always--and I do mean always--rely on from the antivaccine movement, it's that its members will always be all over any new study regarding vaccines and/or autism in an effort to preemptively put their pseudoscientific spin on the results. It's much the same way that they frequently storm into discussion threads after stories and posts about vaccines and autism like the proverbial flying monkeys, dropping their antivaccine poo hither and yon all over science-based discussions. At the risk of sounding like a hopeless suck-up to my readers, I've…
oracknows | March 29, 2012Since when did Opposing Views become NaturalNews.com?
Anyone who's read this blog for a while knows that NaturalNews.com is one of the wretchedest hives of scum and quackery anywhere on the Internet, surpassing even The Huffington Post. Indeed, so full of misinformation, pseudoscience, quackery, and outright lies, all spiced up with a heapin' helpin' of pure New World Order, Alex Jones-style winguttery is NaturalNews.com that I'm hard-pressed to think of a website that is more of a black hole of utter nonsense. Whale.to, maybe.
So why do I compare Opposing Views to NaturalNews.com? Is that…
oracknows | March 26, 2012It would appear that Dr. Bob Sears, author of The Vaccine Book, is in the news again. Specifically, he's brought himself back into the spotlight by publishing in that wretched hive of scum and quackery, The Huffington Post, a fallacy-filled attack on a bill in California, AB 2109, designed to tighten up the process for obtaining philosophical exemptions from vaccination requirements for school entry and improving the process of informed consent for parents seeking such exemptions. In this, Dr. Sears has solidly aligned himself with the worst elements of the antivaccine movement. Sadly, it is…
oracknows | March 23, 2012I've discussed the concept of "misinformed consent" multiple times before. Quacks in general, particularly the "health freedom" movement proclaim their dedication to "informed consent." "All we're asking for," they will say, "is informed consent." The antivaccine movement in particular demands "informed consent" about vaccines. Be it Barbara Loe Fisher, the bloggers at the antivaccine crank blog Age of Autism, or any of a number of antivaccine warriors, demanding "informed consent" seems to be every bit as much of the antivaccine arsenal as the "toxins gambit" or ranting about "fetal cells"…
oracknows | March 22, 2012I'll give the Canary Party credit for one thing, if credit you can consider it. It's persistent in its promotion of antivaccine pseudoscience.
Somehow, someone at Current TV decided that it would be a good idea to show an utterly unbalanced, utterly cranky, utterly propagandistic "documentary" (The Greater Good) that seeks to demonize vaccines as the cause of autism, neurodevelopmental disorders, autoimmune disease, and, apparently tooth decay, too. (I'm joking about the last one--but just barely.) I wrote about its misinformation, cherry picking, and relying on anecdotes rather than science…
oracknows | March 21, 2012San Ramon, we have a problem.
The other day, I laid some not-so-Respectful Insolence on a clueless school board president in San Ramon Valley, California, named Greg Marvel. What merited a heapin' helpin' of what Orac does so well was Marvel's use of school board stationery to endorse a stinking, steaming turd of a movie that is really nothing more than antivaccine propaganda wrapped in false "balance" about vaccines. The movie I'm referring to is The Greater Good, and it's going to be shown on Current TV this Saturday, followed by an online chat with the film's producers. Basically, the…
oracknows | March 19, 2012A science-based blogger's work is never done, apparently.
I'll show you what I mean in a minute. But first, I just have to make a simple observation. Pseudoscience, be it quackery, evolution denial, denial of anthropogenic global warming, antivaccine nonsense, or other forms of pseudoscience, apparently never dies. No matter how many times it's slapped down, no matter how often and how vigorously it's refuted, it always seems to rise again. In fact, I used to liken pseudoscience and quackery to zombies, but that's a bad analogy. After all, in most zombie lore (as told in books and movies) a…
oracknows | March 13, 2012There are quite a few reasons why I blog. After all, to crank out between 500 and 3,000 words a day, with an average of somewhere around 1,500 by my reckoning) takes quite a commitment. One of the main reasons that I do this is to combat the irrationality that permeates the world, and, since I know medicine, I tend to concentrate mostly on medicine, although I certainly do not limit myself to medicine. Still, over the last seven years I've noticed myself writing less and less about other topics and more and more about medicine. It's been quite a while, for instance, since I've written about…
oracknows | March 12, 2012I don't know what it is about the beginning of a year. I don't know if it's confirmation bias or real, but it sure seems that something big happens early every year in the antivaccine world. Consider. As I pointed out back in February 2009, in rapid succession Brian Deer reported that Andrew Wakefield had not only had undisclosed conflicts of interest regarding the research that he did for his now infamous 1998 Lancet paper but that he had falsified data. Of course, in response Keith Olbermann was totally played by the antivaccine movement, resulting in some truly mind-numbingly dumb…
oracknows | March 9, 2012Thanks to the partying and backslapping going on in the antivaccine movement over the reversal of the decision of the British General Medical Council to strike Professor John Walker-Smith off of the medical record, after a brief absence vaccines are back on the agenda of this blog. Antivaccine cranks view the decision as a vindication and exoneration of antivaccine guru Andrew Wakefield even though it is nothing of the sort and is in fact a decision based on questionable (at best) scientific reasoning. Actually, as some of my commenters have pointed out, Justice Mitting applied legal…
oracknows | March 7, 2012I sense a disturbance in the antivaccine crankosphere.
Actually, maybe "disturbance" is the wrong word. Unabashed whooping it up is closer to correct. High-fiving is perhaps a better term. Or maybe partying like it's 2005. The question, of course, is what is the inciting event was that sparked such widespread rejoicing in the antivaccine world. I'll give you a hint. It has to do with the hero of the antivaccine movement, the man who arguably more than anyone else is responsible for the MMR scare that drove down MMR vaccine uptake in the UK to the point where measles, once vanquished, came…