autism
mikethemadbiologist | April 1, 2009Actually, he didn't. He interviewed anti-vaccinationist Jenny McCarthy. Which is worse. Here's one small dose of stupidity:
Most people who blame autism on vaccines point to the mercury in the shots, yet mercury has been removed from most vaccines and autism rates continue to climb.
We don't believe it's only the mercury. Aluminum and other toxins also play a role. The viruses in the vaccines themselves can be causing it, too.
That part in italics is demonstrably false. No virus has ever been shown to cause autism (horrible effects, including brain damage and hearing loss, yes).
And it's…
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…
edyong | March 30, 2009For any animal, it pays to be able to spot other animals in order to find mates and companions and to avoid predators. Fortunately, many animals move in a distinct way, combining great flexibility with the constraints of a rigid skeleton - that sets them apart from inanimate objects like speeding trains or flying balls. The ability to detect this "biological motion" is incredibly important. Chicks have it. Cats have it. Even two-day-old babies have it. But autistic children do not.
Ami Klim from Yale has found that two-year-old children with autism lack normal preferences for natural…
bioephemera | March 29, 2009Continuing the current discussion of the questionable quality of popular science journalism, British researcher Simon Baron-Cohen weighs in at the New Scientist with his personal experiences of misrepresented research. Baron-Cohen complains that earlier this year, several articles on his work linking prenatal testosterone levels to autistic traits, including coverage in the Guardian, were titled and subtitled misleadingly:
It has left me wondering: who are the headline writers? Articles and columns in newspapers are bylined so there is some accountability when they get things wrong. In this…
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 16, 2009By way of badscience.net:
Speak it, brother Ben!
Oh, and don't be too hard on your hairstyle and clothing in that one. I could totally picture you as an incarnation of The Doctor in that getup. That sweater vest does look a bit Peter Davison-ish, although the curly locks do rather echo Tom Baker.
oracknows | March 16, 2009The antivaccine counterattack against Brian Deer continues.
As you recall, about a month ago British reporter Brian Deer published an exposé, a tour de force of investigative journalism that led him to discover that Andre Wakefield had not only had incredibly blatant undisclosed conflicts of interest (his having been in the pocket of trial lawyers suing vaccine manufacturers and his forgetting to mention the little fact that he had been developing a competing version of a measles vaccine that he had been hoping to market) when he published his infamous 1998 Lancet paper linking MMR to…
oracknows | March 14, 2009I love it when someone does something like this, namely pwning an antivaccine video like The Truth About Vaccines:
It's not perfect, but I love it. Now if only more people would do something similar on YouTube. I'm tired of seeing titles like VACCINES KILL INNOCENT CHILDREN! - Hundreds and More Likely Thousands of Children are Murdered Each Year by Vaccines. Vaccinations Are Part of A Hidden Crime Against Our Children. Vaccines Do NOT Prevent Disease - They Are The Disease.
Hmmm. Maybe Lu could take that one on next...
oracknows | March 11, 2009I know I've been hard on a lot of legislators, including woo-friendly clods such as Tom Harkin, Ron Paul, and Dan Burton. Occasionally, though, a legislator will show that he "gets it" (or at least hasn't drunk the Kool Aid). Forwarded to me was a letter sent from Representative John Linder (R-GA) in response to a letter from the Autism Action Network, apparently upset over the IACC's not being as excited about throwing good money after bad studying the scientifically discredited notion that vaccines cause autism. Here is Mr. Linder's response, and it's a good one (for a politician, anyway):…
oracknows | March 10, 2009Crank alert!
Age of Autism has announced that David Kirby and Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. will be on the David Bender Show at 1:15 PM today.
It would be nice if, to counter the antivaccine activists, reality-based listeners would call in, although I am very pessimistic that Bender would give them a fair shake, given that he has said this about Deepak Chopra:
I had the pleasure of interviewing a man whose work I've admired for many years, but had never met--Dr. Deepak Chopra.
Any man who admires Deepak Chopra's work has a serious problem with reality. I've never listened to Bender's show before,…
oracknows | March 9, 2009
Regular readers of this blog know pretty much what I think of Jenny McCarthy. In brief, she's an opportunistic, scientifically ignorant but media-savvy twit whose hubris leads her to believe that her Google University education, coupled with her personal anecdotal experience, render her proclamations that vaccines cause autism and that "biomedical" quackery can cure it more convincing than all that boring science, epidemiology, and clinical trials. Indeed, her critical thinking skills are so poor that she was once a huge booster of the "Indigo Child" movement, but had to try to purge the…
palmd | March 4, 2009OK, the title is inaccurate. Kirby is not bound by the same code of ethics as researchers and doctors, so perhaps he's not unethical. But his latest rant in HuffPo encourages unethical behavior. Honestly, I'm getting tired of writing about this guy, but he just keeps bringing the stupid, and something about that just calls out for a response.
So what's so horrible about his latest hunk of drivel? Well, first he starts with a blatant misinterpretation of the truth:
It is not accurate for members of the media to report that the link between vaccines and autism has been "disproven."…
oracknows | February 26, 2009Busted!
All right, I give up. Since I've been sucked into the whole vaccine thing again after only one day away, I might as well highlight this simultaneously amusing and depressing tidbit. Earlier today, I wrote about a coordinated attack by the antivaccine movement on the Autism Omnibus decision two weeks ago. Given that it involved Generation Rescue, Jim Carrey, Jenny McCarthy, Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., Deirdre Imus and her eirdre Imus Environmental Center for Pediatric Oncology, the Huffington Post, Age of Autism, and various other antivaccine activists, I thought it pretty obvious that…
oracknows | February 26, 2009"Just when I thought I was out... they pull me back in."
At least, that's what Michael Corleone said in The Godfather, Part 3, and even though I'm not a mafia don, I can sort of relate to where he's coming from, if you know what I mean. It seems that whenever I try to get away from blogging about the nigh infinite level of stupidity and pseudoscience that emanates from the disease promotion movement (i.e., the antivaccine movement), it seems as though they somehow find a way to pull me back in. Of course, I'd rather like to think of myself as the reluctant gunslinger pulled out of retirement…
palmd | February 25, 2009The Autism Omnibus Trial is a conundrum for the infectious disease promotion movement. Still, their ability to pick up the goalposts and run is unmatched, and that is just what David Kirby and Robert Kennedy, Jr. have done in today's Huffington Post.
To review, the recent Omnibus decision looked at a few test cases for the "vaccine causes autism" hypothesis, and tossed them for being inconsistent with reality. This correlates well with what science has to say about the issue.
But of course the overwhelming evidence isn't going to deter these superheroes. They know the answer, and they're…
oracknows | February 24, 2009Alright, I know that, after yesterday's epic post (which was long even by Orac-ian standards), I said that I was going to try to get away from vaccine blogging for a while. I lied. Well, not really. At that time I really did mean it. But then I came across something that I just couldn't leave alone.
Regular readers of this blog know my opinion of Andrew Wakefield, namely that he is a fraud, a quack, a charlatan, and a danger to the health of autistic children and public health in general. There is, as documented in my post and elsewhere, abundant evidence to support my opinion. But apparently…