katie couric

Katie Couric riled up the internet last week with her uncritical promotion of anti-vaccine viewpoints on her talk show. It was certainly a twist in the professional narrative of a woman who has undergone televised colonoscopy and mammography to promote cancer awareness. That awareness should have been front-and-center in her discussion of HPV vaccines as well, since HPV infection can lead to cancers of anywhere people put their genitals. Instead, Couric featured two mothers convinced that HPV vaccines had caused death and injury, respectively, to their daughters. On Respectful Insolence, Orac…
Vaccines against the human papilloma virus (HPV), such as Gardasil and Cervarix, seem to have a strange power over people who are otherwise reasonable about science and vaccines. For some reason, HPV vaccines seem to have an uncanny ability to turn such people into raging antivaccinationists almost as loony as the merry band of antivaccine loons over at Age of Autism. At the very least, they seem to make seemingly reasonable people susceptible to blandishments and tropes for which they'd normally otherwise never fall. Truly, Gardasil and Cervarix seem to be vaccines that make reasonable…
Regular readers keeping up on infectious disease issues might have seen Seth Mnookin's post yesterday, warning of an upcoming episode of the Katie Couric show  focusing on the HPV vaccine. Even though Mnookin previously spoke with a producer at length regarding this topic, the promo for the show certainly did not look promising: "The HPV vaccine is considered a life-saving cancer preventer … but is it a potentially deadly dose for girls? Meet a mom who claims her daughter died after getting the HPV vaccine, and hear all sides of the HPV vaccine controversy." And indeed, reviews thus far show…
I'm not really happy to have to write this post, but a blogger's got to do what a blogger's got to do. The reason is that Katie Couric has done something requires—nay, demands—a heapin' helpin' of Orac's characteristic Respectful Insolence. Why should I give the proverbial rodent's posterior about who gets the Insolence today? The reason is that, when it comes to medicine, Katie Couric has done a fair amount of good. After the tragic death of her husband at a young age from colon cancer, she became an activist and spokesperson for colorectal cancer awareness, even famously undergoing her very…
Attention Festival Fans! The Festival has been awarded spaces for 18 people to march in the National Cherry Blossom Festival Parade. We have decided to give our fans the opportunity to win these spaces to march alongside legendary NASA astronaut Buzz Aldrin, the Festival's Mondo Spider and other personalities in the 100th Celebration of the National Cherry Blossom Festival Parade, Saturday April 14, 2012 in Washington, DC! To win a space in this unforgettable festive event, which this year features Buzz Aldrin as Parade Grand Marshall, Katie Couric as co-host and Alex Trebek as parade route…
I'm not infrequently asked why the myth that vaccines cause autism and other anti-vaccine myths are so stubbornly resistant to the science that time and time again fails to support them. Certainly useful celebrity idiots like Jenny McCarthy are one reason. So, too, are anti-vaccine propaganda websites and blogs such as Age of Autism and anti-vaccine organizations like Generation Rescue, the National Vaccine Information Center, and SafeMinds and the organizations that publish them. However, these are clearly not the only reason. Alone, these people and organizations are in general quite…
tags: Sarah Palin, Katie Couric, parody, humor, streaming video If you haven't seen this yet, I know you are going to enjoy it. If you have seen it before, you'll love seeing it again -- incidentally, I worked at the "goofy evolution museum" [6:49]
tags: Palin-Couric interview, Sarah Palin, Katie Couric, Palin Foreign Policy experience, streaming video Apparently, during an interview with Katie Couric, Sarah Palin made a mockery of herself as a vice presidential candidate, as a governor of the state of Alaska, and as a woman. I have a video (below the fold) of part of this interview with Katie, along with the transcripts of part of that interview where Sarah describes her foreign policy experience. Hey Sarah, what do Alaska and Russia trade? Polar Bears?? There is NO WAY this moron is qualified to do anything at all. I have potted…