autism
oracknows | March 13, 2012There are quite a few reasons why I blog. After all, to crank out between 500 and 3,000 words a day, with an average of somewhere around 1,500 by my reckoning) takes quite a commitment. One of the main reasons that I do this is to combat the irrationality that permeates the world, and, since I know medicine, I tend to concentrate mostly on medicine, although I certainly do not limit myself to medicine. Still, over the last seven years I've noticed myself writing less and less about other topics and more and more about medicine. It's been quite a while, for instance, since I've written about…
oracknows | March 12, 2012I don't know what it is about the beginning of a year. I don't know if it's confirmation bias or real, but it sure seems that something big happens early every year in the antivaccine world. Consider. As I pointed out back in February 2009, in rapid succession Brian Deer reported that Andrew Wakefield had not only had undisclosed conflicts of interest regarding the research that he did for his now infamous 1998 Lancet paper but that he had falsified data. Of course, in response Keith Olbermann was totally played by the antivaccine movement, resulting in some truly mind-numbingly dumb…
oracknows | March 9, 2012Thanks to the partying and backslapping going on in the antivaccine movement over the reversal of the decision of the British General Medical Council to strike Professor John Walker-Smith off of the medical record, after a brief absence vaccines are back on the agenda of this blog. Antivaccine cranks view the decision as a vindication and exoneration of antivaccine guru Andrew Wakefield even though it is nothing of the sort and is in fact a decision based on questionable (at best) scientific reasoning. Actually, as some of my commenters have pointed out, Justice Mitting applied legal…
oracknows | March 7, 2012I sense a disturbance in the antivaccine crankosphere.
Actually, maybe "disturbance" is the wrong word. Unabashed whooping it up is closer to correct. High-fiving is perhaps a better term. Or maybe partying like it's 2005. The question, of course, is what is the inciting event was that sparked such widespread rejoicing in the antivaccine world. I'll give you a hint. It has to do with the hero of the antivaccine movement, the man who arguably more than anyone else is responsible for the MMR scare that drove down MMR vaccine uptake in the UK to the point where measles, once vanquished, came…
oracknows | March 5, 2012Remember Gayle DeLong?
Last summer, DeLong published a paper in the Journal of Toxicology and Environmental Health, entitled A Positive Association found between Autism Prevalence and Childhood Vaccination uptake across the U.S. Population. As I pointed out at the time, it showed nothing of the sort. Besides botching the introduction by citing a panoply of studies by luminaries of the antivaccine movement, such as Mark Blaxill, Mark and David Geier, Russell Blaylock, and Laura Hewitson, DeLong performed a simplistic analysis that had "ecological fallacy" written all over it in such big…
oracknows | February 28, 2012If there's one thing I've learned over the last seven years, it's that there are a handful of people in the "natural health" movement (a.k.a., quackery movement) who can reliably counted upon to bring home the crazy in spades. There is, of course the granddaddy of all conspiracy sites, Whale.to, and its creator John Scudamore, for whom no quackery is too quacky, no pseudoscience too ridiculous, and no conspiracy theory too outlandish. Truly, that is a high bar of crazy to surpass, but there are certainly people out there trying to do it. Perhaps the one I encounter the most is Mike Adams,…
oracknows | February 23, 2012Any regular reader of this blog knows who Andrew Wakefield is. He's the British gastroenterologist who almost singlehandedly ignited a panic about the MMR vaccine (well, not quite single-handedly; the sensationalistic British press helped a lot) with his shoddy, fraudulent research linking the MMR vaccine to "autistic enterocolitis" and then later to autism itself. Ultimately, his support for non-science-based speculation (not to mention his unethical behavior) caught up with him, and he was "struck off," which is a lovely bit of British verbiage describing his having his license to practice…
oracknows | February 23, 2012There's something about the prefix "anti" that provokes all too many people, even some who consider themselves "skeptics," to clutch at their pearls and feel faint. Antivaccine? Oh, no, you can't say that! They're not "antivaccine"? Who could be so nutty as to be "antivaccine"? Even members of the antivaccine movement don't like the term because even they realize that to be antivaccine is akin to being "anti" Mom, apple pie, and America. So they come up with the defense that they are not "antivaccine" but rather "pro-safe vaccine." They'll come up with silly analogies about how being for…
oracknows | February 21, 2012If there's one thing I've learned during the last seven years about the antivaccine crowd invested in the idea that vaccines cause autism, it's that it reacts with extreme hostility to any sort of studies that cast doubt upon their pet idea that vaccines cause autism. That's somewhat understandable, given how much of their identity so many members of the antivaccine movement have invested in their idea, but not all studies that fail to support the central dogma of the antivaccine movement (i.e., that vaccines cause autism and are in general evil) are created equal, at least not with respect…
denialism | February 15, 2012WSJ has an article about the increasing number of pediatricians who fire their patients who refuse to vaccinate:
Pediatricians fed up with parents who refuse to vaccinate their children out of concern it can cause autism or other problems increasingly are "firing" such families from their practices, raising questions about a doctor's responsibility to these patients.
Medical associations don't recommend such patient bans, but the practice appears to be growing, according to vaccine researchers.
In a study of Connecticut pediatricians published last year, some 30% of 133 doctors said they had…
oracknows | February 8, 2012There are times when I want to fall down on my knees and give thanks for certain cranks. I mean, where would my blogging material come from, were it not for antivaccine loons, quacks, cranks, creationists, and animal rights terrorists providing me with an unending stream of blog fodder? Were they all to disappear, I'd be reduced to blogging about puppies or music or something, and, trust me, you wouldn't want that. Of course, my readership would flee me faster than a advocates of gay marriage flee the Republican Party; so I guess it wouldn't matter. I know which side my bread is buttered on;…
oracknows | January 23, 2012I've been an observer and student of the antivaccine movement for nearly a decade now, although my intensive education began almost seven years ago, in early 2005, not long after I started blogging. It was then that I first encountered several "luminaries" of the antivaccine movement both throughout the blogosphere and sometimes even commenting on my blog itself. I'm talking about "luminaries" such as J.B. Handley, who is the founder of Generation Rescue and was its leader and main spokesperson; that is, until he managed to recruit spokesmodel Jenny McCarthy to be its public face, and Dr. Jay…
oracknows | January 18, 2012Every so often, I come across a bit of antivaccine idiocy that's so amazingly idiotic, such a--shall we say?--target-rich environment that it's catnip to a cat. I just can't resist it, even when there are other topics and subjects out there that have backed up over the last few days and I want to cover. You'll see why in a minute. In this particular case the antivaccine lunacy comes in the form of a video that's been making the rounds amazingly quickly the anti-vaccine crankosphere since it was released yesterday. It comes to us courtesy of a nurse who calls herself "The Patriot Nurse," and…
oracknows | January 13, 2012It's funny, but it's only been one week since I expressed extreme skepticism that that wretched hive of scum and quackery, The Huffington Post, had reformed itself. The reason, of course, was that HuffPo had announced that it was starting a science section. Even though on the surface it seemed that HuffPo was making the right moves, recruiting real scientists to blog for it, even asking Seth Mnookin to write an pro-vaccine article that was the very antithesis of the antivaccine idiocy that has run rampant at HuffPo from the very beginning and, with only rare interruptions, continuing during…
oracknows | January 11, 2012When I wrote last week about the latest legal thuggery against an opponent of antivaccine pseudoscience, this time by hero of the antivaccine movement, who sued investigative reporter Brian Deer for defamation, there was one thing about the case that confused me, one aspect that didn't add up to me. Part of it was why Wakefield sued Brian Deer over an article he wrote for the BMJ a year ago, although in retrospect it's become apparent to me that it was almost certainly because the statute of limitations for a libel action in Texas is one year. More importantly, the silence of the antivaccine…
oracknows | January 6, 2012It's no secret that I've been highly critical of The Huffington Post, at least of its approach to science and medicine. In fact, it was a mere three weeks after Arianna Huffington launched her blog back in 2005 that I noticed something very distressing about it, namely that it had recruited someone who would later become and "old friend" (and punching bag) of the blog, Dr. Jay Gordon, as well as the mercury militia stalwart David Kirby, among others. As a result, antivaccination lunacy was running rampant on HuffPo, even in its infancy. Many, many, many more examples followed very quickly.…
oracknows | January 5, 2012I realize I've already written two posts about Andrew Wakefield suing investigative journalist Brian Deer, the first one pointing out how it's just another example of cranks trying to silence criticism not through producing good science to defend their views but rather through abusing legal process and starting frivolous libel suits, the second one pointing out a connection between Andrew Wakefield and Autism Trust USA that might indicate how Wakefield is getting cash to pay for this lawsuit. Through it all, I've asked one question: Why is Wakefield doing it?
Well, as part of the legal…
denialism | January 5, 2012Seth Mnookin has reasons to hope. It has been clear though for years that Huffpo was a clearinghouse for what I would describe as liberal crankery, which includes things like Jenny McCarthy's anti-vaccine crankery, or Bill Maher's anti-pharma paranoia.
But now they have a new site, Huffpo Science, and after my head stopped ringing from that particular oxymoron I went and checked it out.
A lead article on going to Mars by Buzz Aldrin was interesting. An article on Frankenmeat came out relatively clean without getting all paranoid about GMO foods or lab-grown nutrients being less pure…
oracknows | January 5, 2012The plot thickens.
Earlier, I discussed how disgraced, struck-off anti-vaccine physician Dr. Andrew Wakefield, deciding that being humiliated once by the courts in a libel action wasn't enough, has apparently decided to have another bite at the apple. Given that he was so thoroughly humiliated in the notoriously plaintiff-friendly (for libel cases, at least) British legal system, it beggars imagination that he or his attorneys would think that he has a prayer of prevailing in Texas, but sue Brian Deer Andrew Wakefield has done anyway. His legal complaint accuses investigative journalist Deer…
oracknows | January 4, 2012If there's one thing that a crank, quack, pseudoscientist, or anti-vaccine propagandist doesn't like, it's having the light of day shined upon his activities. In fact, so much do they hate it that they have a distressing tendency to respond to science-based criticism not with science-based rebuttals (mainly because they can't given that they don't have any science to support them) but rather with legal threats. Sometimes these legal threats progress beyond just threats and into legal action, usually libel suits designed not to be compensated for damage to reputation but rather to intimidate…