personal belief exemption
oracknows | August 17, 2017Before I get into the topic at hand, I want to explain why there was no post yesterday. Some of you on Facebook might have seen my post about why, but basically, we lost power last night. We're still without power. In fact, the only reason I can write this is because I'm staying at my parents' house tonight. No, it wasn't weather. Rather, basically a nearby substation caught fire. Michigan infrastructure is great, and I really need to get a generator.
It also reminds me how much I wouldn't mind living in California. For one thing, it's a beautiful state. Even better, California was willing to…
oracknows | April 4, 2017If there's one thing about living in Michigan that is truly irritating, it is that the legislature is currently controlled by a bunch of right wing Tea Party-style Republicans, while the governor is Rick Snyder, someone who sold himself as "one tough nerd" and a reasonable centrist businessman but who's consistently refused to stand up to the worst elements in his party. Oh, and he was also asleep at the switch, contributing to the Flint water crisis. Add to that my state senator, Patrick Colbeck, who not only has antivaccine proclivities, but "questions" evolution and, of course, denies…
oracknows | September 1, 2016It’s hard for me to believe that it’s been approximately 16 years since I first discovered that there was such a thing as antivaccinationists. Think of it this way. I was around 37 or so when, while wandering around Usenet (remember Usenet?), I found the newsgroup misc.health.alternative (or m.h.a. for short), a discussion group about, appropriately enough, alternative medicine. It was there that I first encountered the claim that vaccines cause autism, sudden infant death syndrome, autoimmune diseases, and a panoply of just about every chronic disease known to humankind. Much like when I had…
oracknows | July 22, 2015My topic yesterday was When doctors betray their profession. In my post, I talked about some very unethical doctors representing tobacco companies in lawsuits against them seeking compensation for death and injury due to smoking, as well as to doctors and scientists peddling pseudoscience and quackery representing claimants in the Autism Omnibus action several years ago, in essence supporting the scientifically unsupported idea that vaccines cause autism. The reason I brought this up was to show doctors behaving badly in "conventional" and not-so-conventional medical-legal situations.…
oracknows | February 24, 2015With the Disneyland measles outbreak still going strong and striking far more unvaccinated than vaccinated, it's not surprising that a discussion has begun in some states about lax policies that permit religious and/or philosophical exemptions. In Oregon, for example, the legislature is considering SB442, a bill apparently originally intended to provide a technical fix to the process for obtaining philosophical exemptions to vaccine mandates by giving parents deadlines to submit the required documentation for non-medical exemptions, but the antivaccine troops became totally riled up when the…
oracknows | February 5, 2015
Well, the ongoing multistate measles outbreak that's been in the news for the last few weeks continues apace, which means I can't seem to stay away from the issue for more than a couple of days. For instance, yesterday I learned that five babies at a Chicago-area day care have been diagnosed with the measles. All the babies are under a year old and therefore too young to have received the MMR vaccine yet. At this point, I'm betting that most likely the baby who brought the measles to the KinderCare Day Care with this measles outbreak got it from an older unvaccinated sibling, but time will…
oracknows | December 10, 2014
One aspect of my life that's kind of strange is how I've basically ended up back where I started. I was born and raised in southeast Michigan (born in the city of Detroit, actually, although my parents moved to the suburbs when I was 10). After going to college and medical school at the University of Michigan, I matched at a residency in Cleveland (regular readers know that it was Case Western Reserve University), and then did a fellowship in surgical oncology at the University of Chicago. Finally, I ended up taking my first "real" (i.e., faculty) job at the Cancer Institute of New Jersey…
oracknows | October 3, 2014
Countering the misinformation regularly promulgated by the antivaccine movement, be it antivaccinationists who are completely off the deep end, like Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., the crew at the antivaccine crank blog Age of Autism, or that epitome of the Dunning-Kruger effect mixed with an annoying self-absorption and coffee klatch vibe (that is when it's not a wine party), The Thinking Moms' Revolution, or from seemingly more "reasonable" antivaccine advocates like pediatricians Robert "Dr. Bob" Sears or Dr. Jay Gordon. The reason is simple. Vaccines save lives. They prevent children from…