autism
oracknows | December 29, 2011The other day, I pointed out that one of the characteristics of antivaccine cranks is how, no matter how much you press them, they will never, ever get specific about which vaccines they find acceptable. they'll go on ad nauseam about vaccines they despise and why, but will never admit that there are beneficial vaccines. When pressed about which vaccines should be included in the pediatric vaccination schedule, they'll spin and contort enough to bend the fabric of space-time rather than commit to admitting that a vaccine is safe and effective.
Experienced antivaxers, of course, have a series…
oracknows | December 29, 2011In the process of laying down a little of the ol' not-so-Respectful Insolence on the National Vaccine Information Center (NVIC), Barbara Loe Fisher, and Jenny McCarthy yesterday, I briefly discussed what the term "antivaccine" means. It's a topic I've discussed at length before and that Steve Novella recently wrote about. The long version is in the links, but the short version is that, unlike the "pharma shill gambit" favored by antivaccine activists and others who aren't too fond of science-based medicine (SBM), it's not just a convenient label for supporters of SBM like me to use to…
oracknows | December 20, 2011After yesterday's video and the video from the day before demonstrating just what "antivaccine" means, I thought you'd all need a little something to cleanse the palate after having swallowed so much crazy. Fortunately, Paul Offit provides just the thing, a lecture at the NIH in which he discusses on vaccines and how to educate the public about vaccine science can be found here:
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Dr. Offit hits all the high points, including the false "balance" in journalism, how to deal with scientific uncertainty, and when not to let oneself be sucked into "debates" with the…
oracknows | December 19, 2011Yesterday, I discussed the meaning of the word "antivaccine," using the example of Dr. Suzanne Humphries, an MD-turned-homeopath, as an example of why I refer to people like Humphries as "antivaccine." She really laid down the crazy, too, repeatedly calling vaccines the injection of "disease matter" and "unnatural," while piling conspiracy theory on top of conspiracy theory about big pharma. After seeing that, I didn't think I'd soon find another example of someone as antivaccine as Humphries.
I was wrong.
I was actually debating whether to subject you to this video a mere day after having…
oracknows | December 7, 2011In my eagerness to pivot back to an area of my interest after having had a little fun with anti-vaccine cranks, I ignored a paper to which several of my readers referred me over the last few days. Many of them had first become aware of it when everybody's favorite smugly condescending anti-vaccine crank, Ginger Taylor, started pimping it on her blog. Before that, it apparently popped up on the only anti-vaccine site almost as loony as Age of Autism, namely SaneVax, and it wasn't long before this paper started making the rounds of the anti-vaccine crankosphere, showing up at Gaia Health, and…
oracknows | December 5, 2011After the lengthy post from yesterday, I must admit, I'm a bit tired; so I think it's time to slum a bit for a day. No, that doesn't mean I'm going to throw up a video and call it a day. That's not how Orac rolls (well, usually, at least). I just need a bit of something that doesn't take a lot of mental firepower to take on, unlike the discussion of "personalized gene-targeted cancer therapy" yesterday and why what Dr. Stanislaw Burzynski doesn't qualify as anything other than a parody of "personalized" therapy. It didn't take me long to find just the place to find what I was looking for.…
oracknows | December 2, 2011A while back I wrote a brief, snarky post about a bizarre hypothesis that I considered so risible as not to be worth applying my usual 1,500 to 3,000 words of not-so-Respectful Insolence to. My original post was in response to a press release announcing a book by Michael J. Dochniak and Denise H. Dunn entitled Vaccine Delivery and Autism (The Latex Connection). Basically, the book posits a ridiculous hypothesis that the Latex in some vaccine delivery systems is a cause of autism. Not long after I posted it, Mr. Dochniak himself showed up in my comments, and hilarity ensued. Boy, did it ever!…
oracknows | November 22, 2011I've spent nearly seven years and an enormous amount of verbiage writing about the difference between pseudoscience and science, between cranks and skeptics, between denialists and scientists. Along the way, I've identified a number of factors common to cranks and denialists. For example, two of the most prominent characteristics are a tendency to cherry pick studies and evidence and--shall we say?--a major "inconsistency" in how they deal with data. If a study appears to support their viewpoint, it doesn't matter how small it is, how preliminary it is, how poorly designed it is, or how weak…
oracknows | November 21, 2011One of the greatest gifts anyone can give is to donate his body to science after death. Such anatomic gifts contribute to the training of medical students, residents, and other medical professionals as well as being used for research that can contribute to the advancement of medical science. One of the things that makes an anatomic gift such a profound gift is that the donor usually has little control over what their body or body parts will be used for. There is, thus, more than a little trust in medical science involved in these gifts. When the deceased is a child, the donation of a child's…
oracknows | November 18, 2011I've heard it said (actually, I've said it myself) that if you don't have the science and evidence to back up your point of view, in order to persuade someone, make a movie. At least, this seems to be the philosophy of a number of cranks who have produced movies promoting pseudoscience over the last five years or so. The first one of these movies that really caught my attention was an anti-evolution, pro-"intelligent design" creationism documentary narrated by Ben Stein and released in 2008, Expelled: No Intelligence Allowed. The movie was pure creationist propaganda, complete with Ben Stein…
oracknows | November 17, 2011When it rains it pours, as they say.
Yes, sometimes there's so much going on that I can't possibly blog about it all, particularly now that I've cut back a bit. This week seems to be turning into one of those weeks. Yesterday, I couldn't resist having a bit of fun with the grande dame of the anti-vaccine movement, Barbara Loe Fisher when she released a seriously hypocritical and silly press release whining about how mistreated she thinks her organization, the Orwellian-named National Vaccine Information Center (NVIC) has been because the American Academy of Pediatrics (AAP) had the audacity…
gregladen | November 13, 2011The British Medical Journal has published an editorial calling for a Parliamentary investigation realted to Andrew Wakefield's dishonesty:
It is now more than 18 months since the UK's General Medical Council found Andrew Wakefield guilty of dishonesty and other serious professional misconduct; and it is nearly a year since the BMJ concluded that his now retracted Lancet paper linking the measles, mumps, and rubella (MMR) vaccine with autism and bowel disease was an "elaborate fraud." At that time, January 2011, we called on Wakefield's former employer, University College London (UCL), to…
oracknows | November 11, 2011I had been wondering why the anti-vaccine crank blog Age of Autism had been gearing up the slime machine against Brian Deer lately. For example, former UPI reporter turned vaccine/autism cran Dan Olmsted has been attacking the BMJ. As you recall, the BMGpublished Brian Deer's latest revelations earlier this year when he quite pithily and correctly referred to the now infamous (not to mention fraudulent and consequently retracted) 1998 Lancet case series published by vaccine/autism quack and crank Andrew Wakefield "Piltdown medicine." Particularly curious are the more recent articles, which…
oracknows | November 7, 2011Believe it or not, sometimes I rather miss Jenny McCarthy and Jim Carrey. Although McCarthy is still nominally the head of the anti-vaccine group Generation Rescue, she's really faded to a rather low profile over the last year or so. Indeed, the last time I even remember her spouting off about vaccines was way back in January when she defended Andrew Wakefield and, even more amazingly, during Autism Awareness Month (April) this year I don't recall seeing her on the major media anywhere. It used to be an annual thing that she'd show up on Larry King Live! or some other TV show. True, it's…
sa smith | November 3, 2011The very first red flag that something was very, very wrong with the 'XMRV=CFS' paper went up before the actual paper was published.
On the woo-rag Huffington Post, the anti-vaxer David Kirby posted a very, very odd comment from the lead researcher on the paper, Judy Mikovits:
And then Dr. Mikovits dropped a bombshell that is sure to spark controversy.
"On that note, if I might speculate a little bit," she said, "This might even explain why vaccines would lead to autism in some children, because these viruses live and divide and grow in lymphocytes -- the immune response cells, the B and the…
oracknows | October 20, 2011Yesterday, I congratulated that bane of anti-vaccine movement and great vaccine scientist, Dr. Paul Offit, for having been accepted into the Institute of Medicine. It's a huge honor, and one well-deserved. At the time, I contrasted Dr. Offit, who has ascended to the highest heights of his profession through good science, with Dr. Andrew Wakefield, architect (or at least the most important architect) of the anti-MMR hysteria that gripped the U.K. in the late 1990s that's only now starting to abate, who is reduced to speaking in front of crank physician groups, being feted at anti-vaccine…
oracknows | October 18, 2011Normally, these days I greet the month of October with a mixture of anticipation and dread. The anticipation stems from October's position as Breast Cancer Awareness Month. Now that somehow I've managed to have a variety of responsibilities with respect to how breast cancer is managed at our cancer institute, suddenly I find that I'm sometimes called upon to do media appearances, and Breast Cancer Awareness Month is one time we can use to get our message out about breast health and breast cancer detection and treatment, not to mention to highlight for the local media some of the cool research…
gregladen | October 6, 2011A study incorporating over 12,000 prior peer reviewed publications, addressing the question of vaccine safety, is due for release by the National Academies of Science. The study attempts to understand adverse effects of vaccines and to assign causality to supposed negative outcomes. The 667 page study covers a large number of vaccines. And yes, it addresses autism.
The study cataloged about 60 distinct adverse effects across 8 categories of vaccine treatments, two of which contain multiple vaccines, for a total of 12 distinct vaccines, as well as more general injection-related events (…
oracknows | September 28, 2011People wonder why scientists involved in controversial areas are reluctant to address the public. Courtesy of our favorite band of anti-vaccine bloggers at the anti-vaccine propaganda blog Age of Autism, we see yet another reason why. Yes, AoA's resident attack poodle Jake Crosby decided to disrupt the Q&A session of a public talk (videocast here) by the editor-in-chief of BMJ, Fiona Godlee:
Throughout the question and answer session, I patiently waited my turn, until finally called on by Dr. Glass (you can view the exchange on the 54:00 of the NIH Videocast):
"Yeah? Introduce yourself…
oracknows | September 27, 2011I concluded last week with the dismantling one of the more bizarre stories I've seen spun by the merry band of anti-vaccine propagandists over at Age of Autism. As you might recall, Mark "Not a Doctor, Not a Scientist" Blaxill had teamed with Dan "Where are the Autistic Amish?" Olmsted (or, as I call them, B&O) to produce what was at that time a five part "epic" of pseudoscientifically and enthusiastically confusing correlation with causation. I'm referring to what they called "The Age of Polio," a title that made me wonder if B&O are terminally without imagination in that they seem…