Special Masters
oracknows | March 15, 2010Perhaps you've heard of the case of Poul Thorsen. Perhaps not. Either way, that anti-vaccine movement was making a huge deal over this Danish psychiatrist and researcher for two reasons. First, he has become embroiled in some sort of scandal involving research funds at his former place of employment, Aarhus University, leading the ever-hyperbolic Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. to post a characteristic bit of conspiracy mongering nonsense to that font of anti-vaccine nonsense, The Huffington Post, in an article entitled Central figure in CDC Vaccine Cover-Up Absconds with $2M. The second reason is…
oracknows | March 8, 2010I haven't written much about this before, at least not in this context, but vaccine scares are nothing new, nor is execrably fear mongering journalism about vaccines. Those of you who read Paul Offit's Autism's False Prophets or Arthur Allen's Vaccine probably know about a particularly egregious example of both that occurred in the early 1980s and concerned the DTP (diptheria-pertussis-tetanus) vaccine. In 1982, the local NBC affiliate in Washington, DC aired a special report entitled DPT: Vaccine Roulette. Indeed, Vaccine Roulette was the prototype of the muck-raking, sensationalistic sort…