autism
oracknows | September 14, 2010Yesterday, I had a bit of fun while taking on a serious topic, namely yet another study that failed to find a link between mercury in vaccines and autism. Fortunately, though, I wasn't the only one. Oh, no, not by any means.
Liz Ditz has done what she does best and provided a comprehensive linkfest of reaction to the study.
A few of my favorites from the list:
They DID a study! (Photon in the Darkness)
More evidence that mercury in vaccines doesn't cause autism (Science-Based Pharmacy)
The Long Awaited CDC Trial on Thimerosal and Autism (NeuroLogica Blog)
New thimerosal/autism paper - signal…
oracknows | September 12, 2010THE PAST IS PROLOGUE
Location: Central New Jersey, deep within the brick and steel of a secret pharma base.
Year: 1999.
A shadowy figure dressed in gray, bald, and stroking a white cat enters a nondescript room in the middle of which sits a massive conference table. More than a dozen men and women leap to their feet at attention and wait until the man pauses at the head of the table and then very deliberately sits in high-backed leather chair.
Shadowy figure: Have they arrived?
Lackey #1: Yes, Leader.
Shadowy figure: Let them wait a few minutes. First, we have pressing business. You have…
oracknows | September 12, 2010Fresh from the comments last night:
I just want to say that JM nor Wakefield had anything to do with my decision not to vax. My doc in fact doesn't recommend it. I have plenty of studies from CDC's site that did the convincing for me. Maybe ya'll should read it too, you may be surprised at what you actually find. I'd love to see the groups seperate if that's what it has to come down to. If you vaxed folks start saying things like "Ew you're not vaccinated, gross." Then hey- you and your toxic children-- who are shedding the viruses and causing new outbreaks--can go and live together in a…
oracknows | September 9, 2010It's been a while since we've heard from CBS News' resident anti-vaccine propagandist Sharyl Attkisson. When last we saw her, she was sucking up to the man whose discredited pseudoscience started the modern anti-vaccine movement, Andrew Wakefield, a man who went on to have his medical license ignominiously taken away. Prior to that, she had tried to out-crank the mercury militia's most famous anti-vaccine kook, Robert F. Kennedy, Jr.; laid down some seriously incompetent and biased "journalism" promoting the myth that vaccines cause autism; and may even have been feeding information to…
oracknows | September 8, 2010I must admit that, after having taken it easy over the last few days, when the time came to sit down and get back into the swing of things, I had a bit of a hard time. No, it's not just blogging. That's actually a rather minor component of the whole malaise that descended upon me like a shroud. Rather, it's the simple fact that the Labor Day weekend in the U.S. represents the unofficial end of the summer season. After that, it's all back to school, back to work, back to the grind.
Back to real life after summer.
This reluctance, not surprisingly, seeped out of real life and started to permeat…
oracknows | September 1, 2010The comment thread for my post last week about how philosophical vaccine exemptions in California are endangering herd immunity is rapidly approaching 500 comments as I write this and may well surpass that number by the time this post "goes live" in the morning. I mention this because buried in the comment thread are a number of comments by our old "friend," that anti-vaccine-sympathetic pediatrician to the stars, Dr. Jay Gordon doing what Dr. Jay does best and basically making a fool of himself on matters of vaccine science through his preference for anecdote over sound epidemiology and…
oracknows | August 29, 2010A friend of mine sent me a link to one of my hometown news stations because he saw something that irritated him. On the front page, there is a poll of such epic burning stupid that it requires an immediate crash. I may not be P.Z., but I have in some instances overcome my previous dislike of poll crashing, especially when it's a poll this stupid:
Do you think immunizations are safe?
Yes
No
As if an Internet poll has any bearing whatsoever on whether vaccines are safe or even on whether people believe vaccines are safe.
The poll is located on the webpage of the Detroit FOX affiliate in the…
oracknows | August 27, 2010Having followed the anti-vaccine movement continuously for nearly six years now, I had come to think that I had seen it all as far as deceptive strategies for frightening parents about vaccines. Obviously, becoming too complacent is foolish, because, as misguided and scientifically ignorant as they are, many of the leaders of the anti-vaccine movement (Jenny McCarthy excepted) are not stupid. In fact, some of them are damned clever; otherwise, they wouldn't be so successful at demonizing vaccines and promoting the scientifically discredited myth that vaccines cause autism. Every so often, the…
oracknows | August 26, 2010I don't know if it's confirmation bias, faulty memory, or if my individual impression is correct, but it seems to me that over the years I've been blogging that stories like this one seem to be becoming depressingly more common:
Getting inoculated for diseases such as whooping cough and measles used to be a childhood rite of passage that few questioned. Now with shifting parental attitudes about vaccine safety, a growing number of California children are entering kindergarten without shots.
The trend worries public health officials because of the link between immunization rates and infectious…
oracknows | August 20, 2010Here we go again.
Apparently, trying to bounce back from the humiliation of having had its plan to do a music and comedy fundraiser with Jill Sobule as one of the headliners shot down when Sobule found out that Generation Rescue is an "autism organization" that supports anti-vaccine pseudoscience like that of Andrew Wakefield and Mark and David Geier and quite correctly decided to withdraw, Generation Rescue is at it again with an event it's calling Comedy for Kids with Autism.
According to the mass e-mail I received:
Join us Saturday, September 11th at the Third Annual "Comedy for Kids with…
oracknows | August 18, 2010There's so much horrible reporting on vaccines and the whole manufactroversy that promulgates the myth that vaccines somehow cause autism through a combination of confusing correlation with causation, bad science, quackery, and misrepresenting autism that it's gotten harder for me to be sufficiently irritated to write about it. When I see yet another another example of credulous reporting, it has to be either truly egregious to the point of catching my attention above the baseline noise of stories presenting anti-vaccine pseudoscience as though there were any truth to it or somehow illustrate…
oracknows | August 12, 2010It was nearly a month ago when I first marveled at how nonsense could be so well-organized. My marvel was expressed at the awesomeness that was the Periodic Table of Irrational Nonsense (which, by the way, is now available in "sanitized" versions, as well as versions in other languages). It turns out that Crispan's effort has inspired one of my readers to try his hand at this whole organizating nonsense thing. This blog being what it is and all and his proclivities being what they are, he decided to create...drumroll, please...The Periodic Table of Vaccine Rejectionism, which he's given me…
oracknows | August 12, 2010It's finally here! The long expected episode of Penn & Teller: Bullshit!, in which the boys take on the anti-vaccine movement in their usual inimitable fashion, will premiere tonight on Showtime at 10 PM. It's even the eighth season finale, which is appropriate. If there's a form of "bullshit" other than the irrationality that is the anti-vaccine movment that represents a threat to public health more profound, I have a hard time thinking of it, and it's hard to believe that Penn and Teller did nearly eight seasons of their show without taking it on.
Here's a preview:
Unfortunately,…
oracknows | August 4, 2010I haven't really taken much note of Andrew Wakefield in a while, and in general that's a very good thing indeed. However, I found out recently that somehow I missed this gem from around the time of Autism One:
That's right. I thought it was pretty bad that Andy Wakefield had appeared on Coast to Coast AM with George Noory, that all night conspiracy/UFO/paranormal radio show that's been so popular here in the U.S. for many years. It turns out that I missed an even worse one: Wakefield showing up on Alex Jones' even more looney conspiracy show, PrisonPlanet.tv. This is the same guy who…
oracknows | August 4, 2010Of all the bizarre forms of antivaccine autism quackery, one of the strangest has to be Mark and David Geier's "Lupron protocol." I've written about it many times, dating back to 2006 and, more recently, when the Chicago Tribune provided the first coverage I'm aware of of the Geiers' quackery in a major newspaper, thanks to Trine Tsouderos. If you want the details, feel free to click on the links, but I'll boil it down for purposes of this post.
Basically, the father-and-son team of autism woo-meisters who operate out of the basement of the father's Silver Spring, MD house, Mark and David…
oracknows | July 28, 2010Nancy Snyderman isn't helping. At least, she wasn't helping yesterday.
Don't get me wrong. I like the fact that NBC's Chief Medical Editor Dr. Nancy Snyderman is a staunch defender of vaccination. She's one of the rare talking head doctors on TV who pulls no punches when going after the anti-vaccine movement, so much so that the big macher of the anti-vaccine movement and head of the anti-vaccine crank blog Age of Autism J.B. Handley has referred to her as a "NBC's pharma-whore in residence." Let's just put it this way: Anyone whom J.B. detests and labels with a term like that can't be all…
oracknows | July 26, 2010On Friday, I noted an e-mail circulating around the Internet in which disgraced University of Kentucky chemist and card-carrying general in the mercury militia, Boyd Haley, announced that he was suspending sales of his industrial chelator turned "antioxidant dietary supplement" OSR#1. Now, true to form, Trine Tsouderos at the Chicago Tribune has noticed and published a story on Haley's decision, Controversial supplement to come off shelves:
Pharmacies are halting sales of OSR#1, a compound marketed as a dietary supplement to parents of children with autism, six weeks after the U.S. Food and…
oracknows | July 22, 2010As you may have heard, the strike is over. That doesn't mean the crisis is over, nor does it necessarily mean that I will be staying with ScienceBlogs, but I view management's response as a positive move that may be enough to keep me here. Now management needs to lose the Google ads for quackery, and then we have something to talk about. It seems that every time our benevolent overlords kill one set of quack ads, they disappear for a short while, only to reappear in a different guise. I think they understand that. At least I hope so.
In the meantime, I will speak no further of these issues,…
oracknows | July 21, 2010While the drama continues and interesting developments occur, I've found that I actually don't mind taking a couple of days off. Don't worry. Blogging's a bug that's gotten into me and, like PZ, I'll probably start twitching and seizing if I go too long without producing one of my patented logorrheic screeds of pure insolence, be it here, at my super not-so-secret other blog, or on some other blogging platform. At least 4,000 words would be best. Still, I should take a couple of days off more often and not under circumstances like the current upheaval.
Upheaval or no upheaval, strike or no…
oracknows | July 19, 2010"I know you are, but what am I?"
That's basically the child's version of a familiar logical fallacy known as the tu quoque, which basically means, "You, too!" It's a very simple and simplistic logical fallacy that tries to argue that, if one's trait shares one or more of the same bad traits of the people he is criticizing, then his arguments can be dismissed. It's sometimes very effective in that implied within the fallacy is a charge of hypocrisy. As a diversionary tactic, it can be very effective.
Not too surprisingly, I've found a doozy of an example of just this fallacy over at the other…