Antivaccine nonsense
oracknows | November 4, 2009The other day, I wrote about an unfortunate young woman named Desiree Jennings, who claimed to have had a rare neurological disorder known as dystonia as a complication of being vaccinated for seasonal flu, when it appears that her condition is likely to have at least a strong psychogenic component and is unlikely to be due to the vaccine. Despicably, the anti-vaccine group Generation Rescue tripped over itself to exploit Jennings' case and use it as "proof" that vaccines are dangerous and, by extension, that their fantastical claims that vaccines cause autism are plausible. Even after…
oracknows | November 4, 2009Oh, hell. I actually used to like Smashing Pumpkins back in the 1990s. Unfortunately, its leader, Billy Corgan, has just revealed himself to be as medically ignorant as Jenny McCarthy in a recent blog post:
If you follow some of the links I have been supplying as of late, you'll notice many are focused on the propaganda build up to our day of reckoning with the Swine Flu virus. I say 'propaganda' because, in my heart, there is something mighty suspicious about declaring an emergency for something that has yet to show itself to be a grand pandemic. merican President Obama has declared a…
oracknows | November 2, 2009...Isis shows us why by calling out the anti-vaccine movement in general and J.B. Handley in particular, for sexist attacks on Amy Wallace, who wrote the excellent article for WIRED about how the anti-vaccine movement endangers public health.
True, I did e-mail her for advice in letting feminist bloggers know about this nastiness, being interested in how so many women in the movement could tolerate such behavior from its male members, but Isis took it from there. (Warning, part of the post may be NSFW.)
Also calling out J.B. Handley and other members of the anti-vaccine movement for their…
oracknows | November 2, 2009Several of my readers have been writing in with links and stories about the case of Desiree Jennings, a 28-year-old cheerleader who was apparently healthy until sometime in August, when she received the seasonal flu vaccine. A typical news story on Jennings can be seen here:
I'm not a neurologist, which made me reluctant to take this on, but right from the beginning something didn't seem right. I had never heard of a case of dystonia that looked anything like the above, particularly the part where walking backwards reversed (if you'll excuse my word choice) her jerky motions or where she…
oracknows | October 30, 2009The little matter of finding out that the actor who played Data on Star Trek: The Next Generation appears to have anti-vaccine proclivities sidetracked me from something that I had actually wanted to blog about yesterday. Specifically, it's something that my blog bud Abel Pharmboy has been hitting hard over the last couple of days. It may also, sadly, because I've become a bit jaded at the nastiness that anti-vaccine groups such as Generation Rescue (i.e., "Jenny McCarthy and Jim Carrey's Autism Organization"--at least days) and its erstwile founder J.B. Handley can lay down. I'm referring,…
oracknows | October 28, 2009
Unfortunately, Brent Spiner is not living up to Commander Data's portrayal of Sherlock Holmes.
Say it ain't so, Data! Say it ain't so!Last night, I decided for the heck of it to check my Twitter account, something I only tend to do sporadically, although I do keep a constant stream of links to the latest Insolence flowing, to the gratitude and awe of my followers, when I saw this Tweet directed at me from someone with the 'nym Zombie President:
@BrentSpiner I prefer @oracknows over Dr jay gordon any day.
Huh? I wondered what was going on. One thing you should know before I continue is that…
oracknows | October 26, 2009I had meant to address this topic last week, but the whole Suzanne Somers thing bubbled up and overwhelmed my blogging attention. Regular readers of this blog probably realize that I tend to live and die as a blogger by the maxim that if some is good more must be better. So I clobbered the topic with three posts in rapid succession. Now that that's out of the way, I can address topics that readers have been bugging me about sending to me.
At or near the top of the list has to be a biased and poorly framed article that appeared in The Atlantic this month. I tell ya, I've been a subscriber to…
oracknows | October 24, 2009I'd like to thank revere right now publicly. He's taught me a new word:
Methodolatry: The profane worship of the randomized clinical trial as the only valid method of investigation.
Many of my readers have e-mailed me about a recent article in The Atlantic by Shannon Brownlee and Jeanne Lenzer, two reporters whose particular bias is that we as a nation are "over treated." That may be true, although not to the extent that Brownlee, at least, seems to think, and her article on swine flu was truly execrable. Moreover, "methodalatry" perfectly describes one of my complaints about the "evidence-…
oracknows | October 20, 2009Somehow I missed this when it first aired last week, but...take that, Bill Maher:
The Daily Show With Jon Stewart
Mon - Thurs 11p / 10c
Doubt Break '09
www.thedailyshow.com
Daily Show Full Episodes
Political Humor
Ron Paul Interview
oracknows | October 20, 2009...be sure to check out Dr. John Snyder's article on vaccines on the official blog of the NYC Skeptics. As a pediatrician practicing in areas with high levels of resistance to vaccines, he's on the front lines.
oracknows | October 19, 2009Many have been the times over the last five years that I've called out bad journalism about medicine in general and vaccines in particular, especially the coverage of the discredited notion that vaccines or mercury in vaccines somehow was responsible for the "autism epidemic." That's why I feel a special responsibility to highlight good reporting on the issue. Indeed, reporting on this issue is so uniformly awful that when I see something this good, I want to do everything in my power to hawk the hell out of it. So, I want you to read this article in the November issue of WIRED Magazine…
oracknows | October 17, 2009Here we go again. The 2009 recipient of the Richard Dawkins Award, anti-vaccine wingnut and lover of cancer quackery Bill Maher, decided to use the occasion of the season finale of Real Time with Bill Maher to answer some of the criticisms that have been leveled against him. All I can say is this: I'm incredibly grateful that this is the season finale of Maher's show. I don't think I can take much more of his moronic anti-science stances being proudly trumpeted.
It was painful to watch and showed very much that Bill Maher still doesn't get it. In fact, if anything, he escalated his quack…
From one skeptic to the 2009 recipient of the Richard Dawkins Award: Stop being an anti-vaccine loon
oracknows | October 16, 2009Well, here's something refreshing. In fact, it's so refreshing that I just had to link to it. Michael Shermer, renowned skeptic and the publisher of Skeptic, has decided to school the Atheist Alliance International 2009 recipient of the Richard Dawkins Award, anti-vaccine kook Bill Maher, over the nonsense about alternative medicine, vaccines, and conspiracy theories about big pharma that Maher regularly likes to lay down.
Even better, he did it on what is normally a repository of anti-vaccine pseudoscience, The Huffington Post, in the form of An Open Letter to Bill Maher on Vaccinations.…
oracknows | October 16, 2009I'm back.
If there's one thing I've noticed in the nearly five years that I've been doing this blog thing, it's that getting started again after taking even a few days off is hard. There's a bit of paralysis that sets in. I get used to not having to think about what I want to write, and often there are a number of things that I almost certainly would have written about. Fortunately, for at least one of them, PalMD took care of it it for me. Otherwise, the blogger whose post he deconstructed would have tasted a bit of the ol' not-so-Respectful Insolence for in essence laying down a load of po-…
oracknows | October 15, 2009As I mentioned on Friday, I'm in Chicago right now attending the American College of Surgeons annual meeting, where I was until last evening. Unfortunately, I got back too late and was too tired to lay down some fresh Insolence, Respectful or otherwise. Fear not, though. I'll get to it. In the meantime, here's a blast from the past from the past. This post first reared its ugly head almost exactly three years ago; so if you haven't been reading at least three years, it's new to you.
By the way, even though this post is three years old, the problem described in it has only gotten worse in the…
oracknows | October 12, 2009No mà s! No mà s! I surrender!
I give up!
I tried. I really, really did try. I tried really, really hard not to look at the flaming idiocy of Bill Maher again, much less comment on it again. Here I am, in Chicago at the American College of Surgeons annual meeting, taking in all sorts of surgical goodness, trying to take a break from blogging. It's not so much to ask, is it? I didn't think so, anyway.
Then, exactly a week after he accepted the Richard Dawkins Award, Bill Maher couldn't help it but let his freak flag fly! In fact, he started out an interview with Bill Frist by asking:
"…
oracknows | October 11, 2009You know, whenever I'm at a meeting or on vacation, I still sometimes feel the tug of the blog. Yet, I tell myself, I need a break. Usually, I handle the problem by setting up several old posts from at least a couple of years a go to repeat, you know, to see how well or badly they've aged. Sometimes, however, material is given to me. For example, this e-mail from someone named John who happens to have a .au (Australia) e-mail address:
WHY ARE YOU SO AFRAID...
To put your real name to this Blog---
its probably because you are not a Real person and don't actually exist--
I have seen Direct…
oracknows | October 10, 2009...Mark Crislip versus Doug Bremner.
Dr. Crislip calmly explains the evidence regarding flu vaccination and why it's safe and effective. Perhaps the most important point there is this:
So it's a suboptimal vaccine. And that's a problem. One, because it will make it more difficult to prove efficacy in clinical studies and two, there is a sub group of anti vaccine goofs who seem to require that vaccines either be perfect, with 100% efficacy and 100% safe, or they are not worth taking.
The influenza vaccine is not 100% efficacious in preventing disease, but it is as close to 100% safe, and much…
oracknows | October 8, 2009Orac's anti-stupidity circuits just took a serious beating. It's kind of like Star Trek, when the Enterprise is being battered by multiple Klingon warships. After multiple phaser and photon torpedo hits, its shields are down to 10% and in danger of failing.
Orac is feeling sort of like that right now, except that it was a single massive photon torpedo of stupid that hit his logic circuits, courtesy of someone named Jeffrey, who commented:
Orac forgot to mention, in his attempt to character assassinate Dawn, to compensate for body weight compensation for, lets say a 6 lb baby.
A baby gets the…
oracknows | October 7, 2009
Watch CBS News Videos Online
A number of you sent me this link. It's to a video (above) of Sharyl Attkisson, CBS News' resident anti-vaccine propagandist, putting on a nauseating display of sucking up to Andrew Wakefield over his recent monkey study, the one that I deconstructed yesterday to show it for the lousy science that it is. Attkisson is a true believer. She's done this sort of thing before, occasionally to unintentionally hilarious effect; she's especially enamored of writing hit pieces on Paul Offit. Even worse, Attkisson is in bed with Generation Rescue and Age of Autism,…