Antivaccine nonsense
oracknows | December 11, 2010Has it really been six years?
Six years ago today, on a dim and dreary Saturday in December, almost on a whim I sat down, went to Blogspot, and started up the first version of Respectful Insolence with an introductory post with the cliched title, Please allow me to introduce myself. Here it is, six years later. On this cold December Saturday, I still find it difficult to his blog is considered one of the "top" medical blogs by one measure, and some actually--shockingly--consider me somewhat of a "famous" skeptic. I know, I know, I still can't wrap my head around the concept myself. At least,…
oracknows | December 5, 2010Remember Elyse? She's one of the Skepchicks, and a couple of weeks ago she did a most excellent skeptical thing. She organized a campaign to complain to the theaters that had, according to the anti-vaccine propaganda group SafeMinds and the anti-vaccine propaganda blog Age of Autism, accepted the advertisements, which SafeMinds were "framing" to be public service announcements. Her campaign met with considerable success. AMC Theaters, in particular, put the kibosh on the anti-vaccine "PSA." This is not the only time Elyse has been a thorn in the side of the anti-vaccine movement. Back in May…
oracknows | December 3, 2010As a part of a longer post where I was, for the most part, serious albeit sarcastic, I asked one question that I considered a bit of a throwaway joke. Oddly enough, the more I think about it, the more I think that it wasn't such a joke. Here was my question:
Perhaps we could have a contest: Which cranks are most persistent, tobacco/smoking denialists, AGW denialists, anti-vaccine loons, or anti-fluoridation activists?
To which jre responded in the comments:
Fairness requires that we try to round out Orac's list. At a minimum, this must include:
Tobacky / 2nd-hand smoke denialists
Climate…
oracknows | November 29, 2010Part 1 is here.
Part 2 is here.
Part 3 begins right here, in the comments of (where else?) the anti-vaccine crank blog Age of Autism, courtesy of commenter Kathy Blanco:
Jeff, believe it or not riply, I think taking mercury out of vaccines, doesn't magically make them safer. It is proven that vaccines can cause the immune system to "trip" into autoimmnity against your own tissues if you have predispositions such as complement pathway problems, glutathione block, methylation quirks, autoimmunity in mothers or infections like XMRV/Lyme etc etc. Case in point, numerous vet manuals which warn of…
oracknows | November 25, 2010It's Thanksgiving Day here in the U.S., and, despite the crappy economy, there are still things to be thankful for. For instance, skeptical activism can still be effective. Remember how on Sunday Skepchick Elyse put out the call to Skepchic readers to complain to movie theaters that were reportedly going to be airing a public service announcement from the anti-vaccine group SafeMinds? (Actually, "public service announcement" is a misnomer; it should be called a public disservice announcement.) This was a truly disgusting and deceptive bit of misinformation that I discussed as part of the anti…
oracknows | November 24, 2010This just in...
One of my regular readers pointed me to a most excellent comment that appeared on everybody's favorite anti-vaccine propaganda crank blog Age of Autism. After a post discussing a testimonial that allegedly demonstrates that the Gardasil vaccine is dangerous, A commenter named Sarah wrote:
I just want to add another major event that got sidelined last year (I think due to a volcano eruption in Iceland) during the H1N1 fiasco. The airplane crash in Poland that killed the President of Poland, his wife and the entire governing body. The crash was the 70th anniversary of the…
oracknows | November 22, 2010It figures.
I'm gone for a couple of days, paying little attention to the blogosphere or the Internet, and something big has to happen.
Remember a couple of weeks ago, when in the context of asking how we should respond to the anti-vaccine movement I discussed a recent campaign by the anti-vaccine group SafeMinds to infiltrate theaters with its deceptive anti-vaccine public service announcement (PSA) over the Thanksgiving holiday weekend? Well, it turns out that two of the three biggest American anti-vaccine groups, SafeMinds and Generation Rescue, teamed up to try to raise money to get these…
oracknows | November 19, 2010The other day I had a bit of fun deconstructing a shockingly bad post by a blogger at the anti-vaccine crank blog Age of Autism named Dan Olmsted. In his post, he criticized the progressive movement for not "getting" autism. It was one of the silliest bits of whining I had ever seen, in essence a crybaby crying because "his people" weren't paying attention to his book.
Shockingly, yesterday Olmsted was able to find a post from a "progressive" who was willing to drink deeply of the anti-vax Kool Aid without realizing that he's doing so and agree with him. For instance, let's take a look at…
oracknows | November 16, 2010I hadn't planned on beating on that wretched hive of anti-vaccine scum and quackery, Age of Autism, again today so soon after having done so not just once but twice yesterday. I really hadn't. After all, AoA is the crank gift that keeps on giving (and has kept on giving for three years now), and there is such a thing as going to the well too many times; i.e., too much of a "good" thing. I say this even though I had been planning on posting a blog post "rerun" today because last night I went out to dinner with a job candidate for our institution and didn't get back until late. By the time I…
oracknows | November 15, 2010Earlier today, I had a bit of fun deconstructing Dan Olmsted's whiny complaint about how "progressives don't 'get' autism," his definition of "getting" autism being, of course, buying into the scientifically discredited notion that vaccines cause autism and the quackery known as "autism biomed" that anti-vaccine loons like Olmsted advocate to "recover" autistic children. Of course, I wrote my little bit of not-so-Respectful Insolence last night; so I didn't get to see a rather amusing additional bit of information showing Olmsted to be clueless that happened to pop up today. First, let's look…
oracknows | November 15, 2010Every so often on this blog I get in the mood to take on a post on the anti-vaccine propaganda blog Age of Autism. Over the three years of its existence, I've seen some truly bizarre posts, ranging from one blogger blithely discussing how he took his daughter to Costa Rica for stem cell quackery to treat her autism to rants against journalists who have the temerity to point out that the scientific evidence out there does not support the idea that vaccines cause autism to attacks on perceived enemies of the anti-vaccine movement in which these enemies have their heads crudely Photoshopped into…
oracknows | November 11, 2010Check out the latest Andrew Wakefield tweet. Yep, that's him Tweeting out a link to the infamously intellectually dishonest post by Dr. Raymond Obomsawin entitled Proof That Vaccines Didn't Save Us, just as Australian anti-vaccine loon Meryl Dorey posted the same link on her blog about a month ago and Obomsawin himself is continuing to promote the same intellectually dishonest, graphs of cherry-picked data. To me, that puts Wakefield in the same low league as Dorey herself.
Once again, Andrew Wakefield, meet Orac and his deconstruction of Obomsawin's tour de force of anti-vaccine misdirection…
oracknows | November 10, 2010I didn't feel much like blogging last night, but I felt as though I had to, even if it's brief.
Yesterday was one of those crappy days where there were a lot of problems that didn't relent, so much so that I was completely occupied and didn't check my e-mail until the evening. It was at that point that I wish I hadn't. What I found in my in box was a whole slew of e-mails informing me that a friend had died.
Mark was a friend I had never met.
One of the odd things about the Internet is that it is indeed quite possible to become virtual friends with someone, forging a friendship that lasts for…
oracknows | November 6, 2010As a final post on Vaccine Awareness Week, after having asked what it means to be anti-vaccine, before moving onI thought I'd post this video, a link to which Andrew Wakefield himself tweeted:
Who says Andrew Wakefield is not anti-vaccine? If he does, he's lying. But, then, Andrew Wakefield does lie a lot.
oracknows | November 5, 2010As Vaccine Awareness Week, originally proclaimed by Joe Mercola and Barbara Loe Fisher to spread pseudoscience about vaccines far and wide and then coopted by me and several other bloggers to counter that pseudoscience, draws to a close, I was wondering what to write about. After all, from my perspective, on the anti-vaccine side Vaccine Awareness Week had been a major fizzle. Joe Mercola had posted a series of nonsensical articles about vaccines, as expected, but Barbara Loe Fisher appeared to have sat this one out, having posted nothing. Well, not quite. More like almost nothing. I noticed…
oracknows | November 4, 2010I may have taken a break yesterday, but that doesn't mean I've abandoned my mission to make this Vaccine Awareness Week (or, more properly, the Anti-vaccine Movement Awareness Week, dedicated to countering the lies of the anti-vaccine movement). Even though it was good to take a day off, the anti-vaccine movement rarely takes a day off, and yesterday was no exception. Indeed, one of the most belligerent anti-vaccinationists of all, the meanest, ugliest, nastiest one, the meanest anti-vaccine bull of all, decided to show up for the first time in a long time yesterday on his organization's…
oracknows | November 2, 2010One of the great things about having declared Vaccine Awareness Week is that it gives me a convenient excuse to revisit topics and blog posts that I had meant to address but that somehow didn't make the cut the first time around. This is the sort of thing that happens fairly frequently in blogging, where there is far too much woo and idiocy for one blogger to have even a hope of ever addressing it all.
And that's just the anti-vaccine movement.
In any case, if there's one thing about the anti-vaccine movement that I've noticed, it's that its members have a very warped view of both science and…
oracknows | November 1, 2010"Anti-vaccine."
I regularly throw that word around -- and, most of the time, with good reason. Many skeptics and defenders of SBM also throw that word around, again with good reason most of the time. There really is a shocking amount of anti-vaccine sentiment out there. But what does "anti-vaccine" really mean? What is "anti-vaccine"? Who is "anti-vaccine"? Why? What makes them "anti-vaccine"?
Believe it or not, for all the vociferousness with which I routinely go after anti-vaccine loons, I'm actually a relative newcomer to the task of taking on the anti-vaccine movement. Ten years ago, I…
oracknows | October 31, 2010As brief as it will be, this is my first post for my self-declared Vaccine Awareness Week, proposed to counter Barbara Loe Fisher's National Vaccine Information Center's and Joe Mercola's proposal that November 1-6 be designated "Vaccine Awareness Week" for the purpose of promoting all sorts of pseudoscience, quackery, and misinformation about "vaccine injury" and how dangerous vaccines supposedly are. As you may recall, I decided to try to coopt the concept for the purpose of countering the pseudoscience promoted by the anti-vaccine movement and urging medical, science, and skeptical…
oracknows | October 27, 2010On Monday I took a blogger by the name of Dr. Marya Zilberberg to task for firing a series of profoundly anti-scientific broadsides against science-based medicine (SBM). Although I did not attack Dr. Zilberberg personally, I was quite harsh in my characterization of her attacks, because, well, they were quite bad, full of straw men, special pleading, and the claim that absence of evidence is not evidence of absence, all topped off with a particularly egregious mischaracterization of what SBM is. Steve Novella also piled on, which was appropriate because Dr. Zilberberg's attacks were mainly…