Antivaccine nonsense
oracknows | August 26, 2011Here we go again.
Having been in the blogging biz for nearly seven years and developed a special interest in the anti-vaccine movement, I think I've been at this long enough to make some observations with at least a little authority. One thing that I've noticed is a very consistent pattern in which, every time a new study or report released that either fails to find evidence that vaccines cause autism or significant harm or that even concludes that vaccines do not cause autism, the anti-vaccine movement is right there, ready to attack it with pseudoscience, misinformation, and exaggerations…
oracknows | August 21, 2011Sadly, a crank has silenced another skeptic.
Many of you may know EpiRen, which is the Twitter and blog handle (and sometimes commenting handle here) of René Najera. René is an epidemiologist employed by the state public health department of health of an East Coast state and has been a force for reality- and science-based discussions of medicine, in particular vaccines. In fact, he's come out as a strong defender of vaccines against anti-vaccine lies.
Unfortunately, EpiRen is no more, at least online; that is, if he wants to keep his job.
As related to my by Liz Ditz, A Public Servant,…
oracknows | August 18, 2011It's always frightening when lawyers delve into the realm of medicine. It's even worse when pre-law students and political science majors do the same.
Such was the thought running through my mind when I came across the most recent issue of the Yale Journal of Medicine & Law. The result is what I would most accurately characterize as--shall we say?--uneven. Even though the authors try to don the mantle of skepticism, for the most part they fail. Perhaps the best example of this failure is this particular article entitled Chiropractic Medicine: "Quackery's" Struggle for Fair Practice.…
oracknows | August 17, 2011It 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…
oracknows | August 10, 2011Well, well, well, well...
I always wondered about this.
As I pointed out the other day, former NIH director Bernadine Healy died of a recurrent brain tumor. As regular readers know, over the last three or four years, she had become a convert to the vaccine/autism cause, as evidenced by her having been named Age of Autism's "Person of the Year" in 2008. Over the last few years, it puzzled me why she had abandoned science in this area. I also suspected, but couldn't prove, that she had been receiving her lines of nonsense that she had started promoting from the anti-vaccine movement. As a…
oracknows | August 10, 2011Here we go again.
Starting sometime in 2007, back when the idea that mercury in vaccines was the cause of the "autism epidemic" of the late 1990s and into the new century, I started referring to the "mercury/autism" hypothesis as being dead, dead, dead, as in pining for the fjords dead. Then, depending on what kind of mood I was in, I'd start liberally quoting more from Monty Python's famous Dead Parrot Sketch, including pointing out that the mercury/autism hypothesis passed on! This hypothesis is no more! It has ceased to be! It's expired and gone to meet its maker! It's a stiff! Bereft of…
oracknows | August 9, 2011It came as a shock to me to find out yesterday that former director of the American Red Cross and former director of the NIH Bernadine Healy died. Chalk it up to my simply being ignorant of the fact, but I didn't know, or had forgotten, that she had brain cancer. Interestingly, she had had this glioma and survived 13 years. Compare that to David Servan-Schreiber, who survived his brain tumor for 20 years and attributed much of it not just to medical science, but to all the woo he came to believe in and practice.
For purposes of this blog, the reason her death is even worth noting briefly is…
oracknows | August 8, 2011Over the years that I've been following the anti-vaccine movement, I've become familiar with typical narratives that reporters use when reporting on the vaccine fears stirred up by anti-vaccine activists. One narrative is the "brave maverick doctor" narrative, in which an iconoclastic quack (such as Mark Geier or Andrew Wakefield, for example) is portrayed fighting a lonely battle against the scientific orthodoxy. This particular narrative is extremely popular because it feeds into the story of the "underdog," coupled with a healthy disrespect of the powers that be, particularly the…
oracknows | August 5, 2011I admire Brian Deer. I really do. He's put up with incredible amounts of abuse and gone to amazing lengths to unmask the vaccine quack Andrew Wakefield, the man whose fraudulent case series published in The Lancet thirteen years ago launched a thousand quack autism remedies and, worst of all, contributed to a scare over the MMR vaccine that is only now beginning to abate. Yes, Andrew Wakefield produced a paper that implied (although Wakefield was very careful not to say explicitly) that the MMR vaccine caused an entity that later became known as "autistic enterocolitis" and later implied that…
oracknows | August 3, 2011...the results aren't pretty.
If there's one thing about anti-vaccine loons that I've come to learn over the last decade or so, it's that when they think they're being clever, they're really not. Exhibit A for this case follows:
Yes, courtesy of a particularly brain dead anti-vaccine website (and, compared to Age of Autism, that's saying something), all we have in the video above is a rewarmed "toxins gambit." How to find toxins in 5 seconds or less? It's more like how to find toxic ignorance in five seconds or less. The guy who came up with is video is probably terrified of salt because it…
oracknows | July 31, 2011As hard as it is to believe, I've been blogging about anti-vaccine nonsense and autism quackery since early 2005. Before that, I had been a regular on the misc.health.alternative newsgroup, where I had also encountered anti-vaccine pseudoscience, but the topic had not been a top priority for me. In fact, when I started this blog back in late 2004, I did not imagine at that time that I would somehow end up becoming one of the "go-to" bloggers for taking on anti-vaccine nonsense. Yet somehow I did, and dealing with the misinformation, lies, and pseudoscience of the anti-vaccine movement has…
oracknows | July 26, 2011Yesterday, I wrote about how two anti-vaccine activists, Barbara Loe Fisher and Joe Mercola, were unhappy that bloggers targeted their advertisement that they put on the CBS Times Square JumboTron for a letter-writing campaign to try to persuade CBS Outdoors to do the right thing and stop selling ad time to groups who promote a philosophy that is a threat to public health. Thats why I have to love it when by coincidence a paper is released that provides yet one more example of the benefits of vaccination. In this case, it even deals with one of the "lesser" vaccines. Well, it's not really a "…
oracknows | July 25, 2011Sadly, this isn't too far from the truth when it comes to some of these anti-vaccine doctors:
Actually, it's too generous. My only criticism of this video is that the mother with the child with suspected pertussis wasted more time with this idiot than was wise.
oracknows | July 24, 2011I must admit, I'm surprised that it took so long for this to happen.
Remember back in April? Three months ago, uber-quack (in my opinion) Joe Mercola teamed up with the grand dame of the anti-vaccine movement Barbara Loe Fisher of the misnamed National Vaccine Information Center (NVIC) to run a "public service announcement" on the CBS JumboTron in Times Square. Here is the ad:
To recap, yes, I know that the ad itself appears relatively innocuous. Certainly that's what Joe Mercola and Barbara Loe Fisher argue, because all it says is "Vaccines: Know the Risks" followed by "Vaccination: Your…
oracknows | July 21, 2011Oh, geez.
You might have noticed that I haven't written much about Jenny McCarthy in a while. The reason is fairly obvious. She seems to have faded into the background as far as her previous promotion of a vaccine-autism link. Three years ago, she was leading marches on Washington in which anti-vaccine activists claiming not to be anti-vaccine but "pro-safe vaccine." Today, even though she remains nominally head of anti-vaccine crank organization, Generation Rescue, she's clearly been making an effort to be seen as "respectable" and to downplay that anti-vaccine message that she used to…
oracknows | July 20, 2011It appears that while TAM9 was dominating all my extracurricular, non-job-related attention, with my having to get ready to give a talk, I failed to notice another thing besides the placebo/asthma paper published in the New England Journal of Medicine last Thursday. But fear not. If it's important (to me, at least, and hopefully to you too), I'll eventually see it, allowing me to toss off a jaunty, "Better late than never!" and then launch into a topic, even if I'm a week late. So it is this time around, except that the topic is so big that it might require more than one post, perhaps spread…
oracknows | July 12, 2011I'm on my way to The Amaz!ng Meeting today; so I'm not sure I have time for the usual bit of Orac-ian logorrheic blogging that I somehow manage to churn out almost every day. In fact, I had thought of just running another rerun so that I don't have to worry about it. But worry I did, at least a little bit, particularly after I saw something that really worried me a bit, and I'm not kidding.
Remember Kent Heckenlively? He's a regular blogger at the anti-vaccine crank blog Age of Autism whom I've taken to task from time to time for subjecting of his autistic daughter to what I consider to be…
oracknows | July 11, 2011There's a website out there that calls itself Opposing Views. I haven't visited it in a while, but its very reason for existence and philosophy seems to be built on the "tell both sides" fallacy that so irritates me. In other words, Opposing Views appears to be built from the ground up to provide "balance" in all things. Sometimes, as in areas of politics, balance is not a bad thing. When it comes to science, not so much. The reason is that the "balance" in science shown by Opposing views is the sort that thinks there are two equally valid views in manufactroversies like the "debate" over…
oracknows | July 10, 2011Remember Helen Ratajczak?
A few months ago, CBS News' resident anti-vaccine reporter Sharyl Attkisson was promoting Ratajczak's incompetent "analysis" of evidence that she views as implicating vaccines in the pathogenesis of autism entitled Theoretical aspects of autism: causes--A Review (which is available in all its misinforming glory here). I applied some not-so-Respectful Insolence to the idiocy contained within Ratajczak's article. One aspect of the article that I mentioned was how Ratajczak claimed that DNA from "aborted fetal tissue" in vaccines correlated with the rise of autism. The…
oracknows | June 21, 2011Regular readers know that I lived in Chicago for three years in the late 1990s. Indeed, Chicago is probably my favorite city in the world, and my years there count as three of the happiest years of my life. I lived in a cool neighborhood near DePaul in Lincoln Park; never again in my life am I ever likely to live in a place with such a fine mixture of residential houses, businesses, restaurants, bars, and parks. Moreover, I still have family there, which, combined with my knowledge of the city, leads me to continue to feel a connection to the city. It's that connection that guarantees that I…