antivaccine
oracknows | September 18, 2013If there's one thing I've learned about antivaccinationists, it's that they're all about the double standards. For instance, to them if Paul Offit makes money off of his rotavirus vaccine, he's a pharma shill, a hopelessly compromised "biostitute" (as Robert F. Kennedy Jr. called him) or "Dr. Proffit", and therefore to be dismissed on that basis alone regardless of his knowledge of science. If I happen to get a small grant from a pharmaceutical company, even though it isn't even enough to pay the full salary of a postdoctoral fellow, or receive a small amount of money for my blogging from a…
oracknows | September 17, 2013I love this video. There's really little else to say other than the tagline: "Vaccines: And now my kids don't die." Vaccines truly are a wonder drug. You know it's good if Orac can't construct a 3,000 word post around it and decides just to let the video speak for itself:
oracknows | September 11, 2013My goodness, when it rains, it pours, to use a cliche. (And I'm not about anything if not throwing in the odd cliche in my writing from time to time.)
Just yesterday, I discussed the resurrection of an antivaccine zombie meme, namely the claim that Maurice Hilleman admitted that the polio vaccine that was contaminated with SV40 in the early years of the polio vaccine causes human cancer and that the polio vaccine also brought AIDS into the US. That came hot on the heels of another antivaccine zombie meme three weeks ago, specifically the claim that Diane Harper, one of the main clinical…
oracknows | September 4, 2013Antivaccinationists, quacks, and apologists for antivaccinationists and quacks (but I repeat myself) seem to have an illusion that I'm just swimming in pharma lucre, that I sit in my underwear grinding out magnum opus-worthy after magnum opus-worthy blog posts, all so that I can rake in the cash hand over fist, lead a life of pure luxury, and enjoy ruthlessly crushing any hint of dissent regarding science-based medicine. Even if that assessment were completely true, as Lord Draconis Zeneca tells us that it is, it's not all easy being a prolific, logorrheic pharma shill servilely doing the…
Sharyl Attkisson and CBS News: Lying by omission about the murder of autistic teen Alex Spourdalakis
oracknows | September 1, 2013The damaged done by the antivaccine movement is primarily in how it frightens parents out of vaccinating using classic denialist tactics of spreading fear, uncertainty and doubt (FUD). Indeed, as has been pointed out many times before, antivaccinationists are often proud of their success in discouraging parents from vaccinating, with one leader of the antivaccine movement even going to far as to characterize his antivaccine "community, held together with duct tape and bailing wire," as being in the "early to middle stages of bringing the U.S. vaccine program to its knees." Meanwhile, just…
oracknows | August 26, 2013About ten or twelve years ago, back when I was in essence, a newly minted skeptic and public supporter of science-based medicine, I was so naive. There I was, having just discovered the Usenet newsgroup misc.health.alternative and confronting the original wretched hive of scum, quackery, and pseudoscience, and I thought I had seen everything. Yes, I realize these days that, even a decade on I haven't seen everything and will never see everything, but back then I couldn't believe that, having learned for the first time about coffee enemas, various forms of cancer quackery, each seemingly more…
oracknows | August 21, 2013Chiropractic is supposed to be the "respectable" face of "complementary and alternative medicine" (CAM). At least, that's what chiropractors want you to think. After all, chiropractors are licensed in all 50 states and thus their specialty has the imprimatur of the state to make it appear legitimate. Unfortunately, chiropractors are, as I have said so many times before, physical therapists with delusions of grandeur—and poorly trained as physical therapists at that. They just can't restrict themselves to the musculoskeletal system and can't resist pontificating about and treating systemic…
oracknows | August 20, 2013Recently, I got an e-mail from someone who had just discovered my blog that made me think a bit, which is usually a good thing. At least, in this case it was. Basically, this reader asked me a question I hadn't been asked in a very long time and hadn't thought about in a very long time, specifically: If I had to pick just one and only one, what is the single most characteristic difference between alternative medicine quackery and science-based medicine? True, there are several key differences, and I'm sure many of you could tick off a list of five to ten characteristic differences without…
oracknows | August 15, 2013Yet another zombie antivaccine meme rises from the grave to join its fellows
Oh, no, not again!
It was just two days ago that I decided to take on a zombie antivaccine meme that just keeps rising from the dead over and over and over again. I'm referring to the claim that Andrew Wakefield has been exonerated by legal rulings compensating children for alleged MMR-induced vaccine injury. As I pointed out, this particular claim is a steaming, stinking turd with no science (or even facts) behind it. As I further explained, even if a court rules that vaccines cause autism, that is not scientific…
oracknows | August 13, 2013No mas! No mas!
I surrender. Even though what I'm about to blog about is over a week old (ancient history in blog time), the combined force of you, my readers, sending this link to me and my seeing it on Twitter, Facebook, and elsewhere compels me. Oh, I resisted. I read it and thought it so dumb, just a variation on the antivaccine nonsense I've deconstructed more times than I care to remember, and not even a particularly interesting variant, that I didn't really want to blog about it. But sometimes duty calls, and I have to dive into a cesspit that I'd rather avoid. So here we go. If you're…
oracknows | August 8, 2013Whenever I take a day off from blogging, as I did yesterday because I was too busy going out with my wife on Wednesday night to celebrate my birthday, I not infrequently find an embarrassment of riches to blog about the next day. Sometimes it's downright difficult to decide what to write about. So it was as I sat down last night to do a bit of blogging. I briefly considered writing about Suzanne Somers leaping into the fray to defend Stanislaw Burzynski, and maybe I still will. On the other hand, it's standard boilerplate Burzynski apologetics, not even very interesting; so maybe I won't.…
oracknows | August 1, 2013After a brief foray yesterday into discussing atheism, tone deafness, and the Holocaust (how's that for an odd combination?), I'm ready to get back to more—shall we say?—conventional topics. One topic that's been popping up at that other wretched hive of scum and antivaccine quackery (one of the ones other than Age of Autism) reveals something about the antivaccine movement that I find educational. Specifically, it has to do with how, once a parent has drunk deeply of the antivaccine Kool Aid, she behaves in a rather cult-like manner. I'll show you what I mean, and the post that best…
oracknows | July 19, 2013I promised myself that I was done writing about Jenny McCarthy this week. Two posts, a lengthy one and a brief one, lamenting her being hired for a national daytime talk show was, in my view, enough. Unfortunately, something's happened that makes me want to make like Arnold Schwarzenegger in that famous scene from the 1980s action flick Commando, in which he had promised one villain that he would kill him last. Later in the film while holding this same villain over a cliff, Arnold says, "Remember when I promised I would kill you last? I lied."
Except that I wasn't lying at the time. I really…
oracknows | July 15, 2013Sometimes, as I sit down to write a blog post, I have no idea what I'm going to write about at first. Fortunately, it's rare that I truly have zero idea what I'm going to write about. Usually, there are options, and I don't know which one I'm going to pick. Sometimes, however, something happens that demands that I write about it. Either that, or it's something that I know my readers will want me to write about and will be disappointed if I do not. Unfortunately, in this case, the timing is such that there's been nearly a full day since the announcement of this particularly stupid decision (…
oracknows | July 10, 2013Like Steve, I'm off to The Amazing Meeting today. I don't know how much I'll be posting, but, as Han Solo so famously said, "Hey, it's me." I'm sure I won't be able to resist. In any case, I'll be taking part in the Science-Based Medicine workshop tomorrow, and, for the first time ever, I'll be giving a talk on the main stage on Saturday, as half of a tag team with Bob Blaskiewicz slicing and dicing our favorite cancer doctor Stanislaw Burzynski. That will be followed by a panel on—what else?—science-based medicine and how to take on the cranks, quacks, and dubious in medicine.
In any case,…
oracknows | July 8, 2013I don't know why I'm interested in this, to the point where I'm on my sixth post about it since February. I sometimes even ask myself that very question, because taking an admittedly somewhat perverse interest in the internecine feuds among antivaccinationists. Maybe it's a bit of schadenfreude. Maybe it's just me. Whatever the reason, the ongoing feud between Jake "Boy Wonder" Crosby and his former mentors and allies in the antivaccine movement keeps bringing me back for more, as it did last week after a couple of months away. Maybe it's because when the antivaccine movement is fighting…
oracknows | June 30, 2013There's a general rule that whenever you see two enemies fighting with each other that you should generally just let them. Of course, some might argue, as Gandalf did about Saruman and Sauron, that the winner of the fight would emerge stronger and free of doubt, making him harder to conquer. Fortunately, I don't think this will be a problem in this case in the battle I'm about to discuss. There's also the saying that the enemy of my enemy is my friend, but unfortunately I don't think that that saying applies here either. In this case, it's a question of which of the two combatants I consider…
oracknows | June 28, 2013A little more than a week ago, I took note of Dr. Paul Offit's new book, Do You Believe in Magic? The Sense and Nonsense of Alternative Medicine and a story in which he was featured in USA Today about the nonsense that is alternative medicine. The news story coincided with the release of Paul Offit's book, which of course led me to express my admiration for not only Offit's ability to write good books about topics that interest me but to garner the publicity of a major story in a national newspaper published the same day his book was released. No wonder he drives the antivaccine lunatic…
oracknows | June 25, 2013Once again, real life, mainly the eternal search (i.e., groveling) for grant money to keep my lab going, interferes with unreal life. Three grant applications due the same week will do that. Hopefully this will be the last time for a while, at least until unreal life might interfere with unreal life in a couple of weeks at TAM.
In the meantime, it occurs to me. With the recent reacquaintance of skeptical bloggers with the amazing antivaccine crankery that is Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. (specifically, when he decided to use Holocaust analogies for vaccines and autism), I thought it might be fun to…
oracknows | June 17, 2013It's been a while since I've written about MMS. You remember MMS, don't you? It's an abbreviation for "miracle mineral solution," a solution first promoted by a man who is inaptly named Jim Humble. Basically, as I've described in multiple blog posts, MMS is bleach, specifically chlorine dioxide (ClO2). I first became acutely aware of it a little more than a year ago, when I noticed that the antivaccine autism biomed quackfest known as Autism One featured a talk by a woman named Kerri Rivera, who advocated using MMS to "bleach autism away," as I put it at the time. Of course, Jim Humble doesn'…