Antivaccine nonsense
oracknows | May 4, 2009Ugh.
Double ugh.
Sitting in my e-mail in box this morning were lots of your e-mails warning me about a bit of news that shows definitively that Oprah Winfrey is beyond redemption, at least when it comes to any sort of medicine or science (not nice, given that I hadn't even had my morning coffee yet).
The reason? Jenny McCarthy has inked a deal with Winfrey's Harpo Studios to develop a syndicated talk show and other media projects, including a blog, which has already started dishing out the stupid, albeit (thus far) not about vaccines and autism. Apparently sensing that her advocacy of the…
oracknows | May 1, 2009I've been complaining about the antivaccine lunacy at The Huffington Post for a very long time--since a mere two or three weeks after The Huffington Post first came into existence, when it had already become apparent that, in terms of health coverage, HuffPo was nothing more than Arianna's Happy Home for Loony Antivaccinationists. Lately, I've become even more disturbed by the appearance of outright quackery, such as recommending colon cleanses and "detox" to fight infectious diseases and the boosting of homeopathy and the quackery that is the Beck Protocol as treatments for swine flu and…
oracknows | April 22, 2009
After writing about a new low of pseudoscience published in that repository of all things antivaccine and quackery, The Huffington Post (do you even have to ask?), on Tuesday, I had hoped--really hoped--that I could ignore HuffPo for a while. After all, there's only so much stupid that even Orac can tolerate before his logic circuits start shorting out and he has to shut down a while so that his self-repair circuits can undo the damage. Besides, I sometimes think that the twit who created HuffPo, Arianna Huffington, likes the attention that pseudoscience turds dropped onto her blog by…
oracknows | April 22, 2009I'm sure it's obvious that I'm often puzzled (and, I daresay, many other skeptics and boosters of science- and evidence-based medicine are puzzled too) over why various forms of quackery and woo that have either about as close to zero prior probability as one can imagine and/or (more frequently "and") have failed to show evidence of any therapeutic effect greater than that of placebo in clinical trials manage to retain so much traction among the public. Examples abound, for instance homeopathy and reiki, the former of which is nothing more than sympathetic magic prettied up with science-y…
oracknows | April 20, 2009About a week and a half ago, something happened that makes me realize that the Jenny and Jim antivaccine propaganda tour that I mentioned a couple of weeks ago was clearly only phase I of Generation Rescue's April public relations offensive. About ten days ago, courtesy of J.B. Handley, the founder of Generation Rescue, who in order to have a couple of famous faces fronting his organization has allowed himself to be displaced, so that Generation Rescue has now been "reborn" as Jenny McCarthy and Jim Carrey's Autism Organization (the better to capitalize on her D-list celebrity yoked to Jim…
oracknows | April 16, 2009One of the stereotypes of anti-vaccine loons is that they are predominantly left wing New Agey ex-hippie types, usually well-educated and affluent. Certainly recent stories out of California indicating that Marin and Sonoma counties are ground zero for declining vaccine rates would seem to back up that stereotype. However, there is a right wing religious variety of antivaccinationist, and it's hard not to point out that Representative Dan Burton (R-IN) is arguably the best friend the mercury militia has in Washington. But if you want to get a true flavor of right wing paranoid whackaloon,…
oracknows | April 15, 2009There's an old saying, so old that it's devolved into cliché: Be careful what you wish for; you just might get it. I'm sure the vast majority of my readers, if not every last one of them, have heard this saying before. Certainly, it has a lot of truth to it. Sometimes it even applies to blogging. The most recent example that comes to mind occurred yesterday, when a commenter named David M. taunted me (or so he thought):
I know you all like to pick on actresses, college students and parents with sick kids, but how about taking a look at the column by Dr. Bernadine Healy on U.S. News. She used…
oracknows | April 14, 2009Remember the Jenny McCarthy Body Count website that I mentioned last month? Basically, it's a website that uses CDC reports and other sources of information to estimate the number of cases of and deaths from vaccine-preventable diseases in the U.S. since Jenny McCarthy started her antivaccine crusade back in late summer 2007. The site points out that it is not blaming Jenny McCarthy for all this disease and death but that she should bear at least part of the blame for them because she has become the public face of the radical antivaccine movement. That's something I've been saying for a while…
oracknows | April 11, 2009Readers may have noticed that we've had a minor antivaccine troll infestation in a couple of previous posts. It's no big deal of course, hardly worth my attention--except for one thing. That one thing is that a certain member of the antivaccine propaganda blog Age of Autism, for which no evidence that vaccines are not associated with autism is strong enough to penetrate its collective Borg-like hivemind and no study suggesting that vaccines are associated with autism is too execrable not to trumpet to the high heavens as "vindication" that the antivaccine cult is correct, arrived to tell us…
oracknows | April 9, 2009Whatever you think of President Obama's economic stimulus package, there's one thing that I, at least, am happy to learn about it:
Vice President Joe Biden announced today that the Obama Administration will make $2.3 billion available for crucial health and human services programs that help to provide care for children and prevent disease. States will receive $2 billion in Recovery Act funding to support child care for working families. The administration also plans to make $300 million in vaccines and grants available to ensure more underserved Americans receive the vaccines they need…
oracknows | April 6, 2009
Embedded video from CNN Video
Over the weekend, a lot of readers sent me links to Jenny McCarthy and Jim Carrey's appearance on Larry King Live. (If you can't stand watching the embedded video of the segment, the transcript is here.) Fortunately for me (and, I hope, you), a "friend" of mine has written a comprehensive takedown of not just the nonsense spewed by Jenny and Jim, but of a new "study" released by Generation Rescue purporting to show that nations with low numbers of mandatory vaccines have low levels of autism. Of course, it shows nothing of the sort.
Find out why at Science-…
oracknows | April 6, 2009It just never ends.
Four years ago, I was one of the very first bloggers to notice that the then-new liberal blog The Huffington Post was from its very inception a hotbed of antivaccine lunacy. David Kirby, Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., Dr. Jay Gordon, Deirde Imus, all the luminaries of the antivaccine movement were there right from the very beginning, aided and abetted by Special Projects Editor Rachel Sklar. But HuffPo didn't limit itself to just antivaccine lunacy. Oh, no. It wasn't long before Woo-meister Supreme Deepak Chopra joined the woo crew there. About a week and a half ago, I noticed…
oracknows | April 2, 2009Yesterday was long and rough, with the day spent desperately trying to finish a grant application and the evening spent in obedience training with our new dog Bailey, who, let's face it, needs more than a bit of doggie discipline. By the time I got home, had dinner, and was checking e-mail, it was pretty late and--gasp!--I didn't really feel like blogging. Yes I'm aware of that study that claims to link vinyl floors to autism that everyone's been sending me; perhaps I'll get to it tomorrow. Last night it was just too late and I was too tired to try to tackle reading a research paper and…
oracknows | April 1, 2009...but sadly, it's not. Jenny McCarthy has struck again.
Yesterday, given the release of Jenny McCarthy's new book espousing antivaccinationism and autism quackery and the attendant media blitz the antivaccine movement has organized to promote it, I predicted that a wave of stupid is about to fall upon our great nation.
Well, the stupid has landed. And how. An interview with Jenny has just been published on the TIME Magazine website in which she "surpasses" herself. In fact, so dense is the stupid emanating from what passes for a "brain" in that empty head of hers that words fail me.…
oracknows | March 31, 2009
Get ready for some serious stupid, folks, stupid that threatens to engulf all reason, as a black hole engulfs all nearby matter that falls into its gravitational field.
Although I knew that Jenny McCarthy was soon to release another book promoting autism quackery, I had thought it wasn't coming out for a month or two. The book is entitled Healing and Preventing Autism: A Complete Guide, written by Jenny and her partner in autism quackery Dr. Jerry Kartzinel. Dr. Kartzinel, some may recall, wrote the foreword to Jenny McCarthy's very first paean to autism quackery back in 2007 and was…
oracknows | March 31, 2009I may have been deluding myself when I talked about 2009 shaping up to be a bad year for antivaccinationists. It turns out that the antivaccine movement is succeeding.
That's right, a cadre of upper middle class, scientifically illiterate parents, either full of the arrogance of ignorance or frightened by leaders of the antivaccine movement, such as J.B. Handley, Barbara Loe Fisher, Jenny McCarthy, or the rest of the crew at the antivaccine propaganda blog Age of Autism, are succeeding in endangering your children. Although the U.K. got a head start in bringing back the measles and mumps,…
oracknows | March 30, 2009Anyone who's read this blog for more than a month knows my dismal opinion of Indigo woo girl, ex-Playboy Playmate, and gross-out comedienne Jenny McCarthy, who since having a child diagnosed with an autism spectrum disorder has transformed herself from D-list celebrity to A-list, where the "A" stands for "antivaccine." Her combination of obnoxiousness, the arrogance of ignorance, and a dogged determination to stoke the embers of the discredited idea that vaccines somehow cause autism have endangered public health in this country in the year and a half since she published her first autism book…
oracknows | March 20, 2009Oh, goody! Vox Day wants to play.
You remember Vox "Hey, it worked for Hitler" Day," don't you? It's been a long time. In fact, I had to do a search to find the last time I had a run-in with him, and it appears that it's been about a year since I last noted him mindlessly parroting antivaccinationist myths and spouting his usual misogyny. Alas, Vox has been a regular irritant to this blog since very early on, when he didn't like my likening his views towards women to the Taliban for his arguing that women shouldn't be allowed to vote because they are "fascists at heart." Since then, every so…
oracknows | March 18, 2009Two days ago, I deconstructed Andrew Wakefield's clumsy attack on Brian Deer, the investigative journalist whose investigations uncovered Wakefield's massive conflicts of interest and, most recently, his scientific fraud. Now, right here in the very comments of this blog, Brian Deer has responded:
Obviously, because Our Andy's statement purports to be a complaint to the UK Press Complaints Commission, I can't yet comment on the substance (although I have mentioned just a couple of generic Wakefield claims right up at the top, here: http://briandeer.com/solved/wakefield-veracity.htm).
But, in…
oracknows | March 17, 2009Yet another reason why I love The Onion:
Because giant, highly intelligent, acid-spitting crabs pose no danger to society.
Of course, certain antivaccine advocates seem to think that this parody has something to do with vaccines, which just goes to show how far down the rabbit hole they've gone when they think that a parody like this speaks to the truth of their cause. It also reveals a bit of their mentality in that they so easily liken life-saving vaccines to giant, acid-spitting, highly intelligent crabs.