thimerosal
oracknows | February 26, 2017Way back in the early days of my blogging career, I remember coming across a "challenge" by a man named Jock Doubleday. I didn't know it at the time, but Doubleday had achieved some notoriety before his "vaccine challenge" as the director or Natural Woman, Natural Man, Inc. and the author of such amazing works as The Burning Time (Stories of the Modern-day Persecution of Midwives) and Lolita Shrugged (THE MYTH OF AGE-SPECIFIC MATURITY). His "challenge" was in the same vein as his previous work, only more so and full-on antivaccine. The reason I'm bringing up Doubleday again after all these…
oracknows | February 15, 2017I must admit, Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., environmentalist and, unfortunately, antivaccine crank of the thimerosal fear mongering variety, has been rather busy lately. After having gone mostly silent on vaccine issues compared to his original flurry of misinformation and conspiracy mongering back that began back in 2005, several years past with almost nary a word from the lesser scion of a great American family on vaccines. This was a very good thing. Then, in 2014, he decided to reappear, co-authoring an antivaccine book with functional medicine quack Mark Hyman, a book with mouthful of a title…
oracknows | March 13, 2016One of the most pernicious lies promoted by the antivaccine movement is a trope that I've labeled the "toxins gambit." Basically, it's the lie, oft repeated in hysterical terms, that there are all sorts of horrible toxic chemicals in vaccines, and it is those toxic substances that are responsible for the claimed adverse effects of vaccines. Now, it is true that there are substances in vaccines that can be toxic, but the toxins gambit completely ignores a little thing known as the dose-response curve or, if you want to go hundreds of years back in time, the admonition attributed to Paracelsus…
oracknows | December 7, 2015The blog post of mine that arguably "put me on the map" in the skeptical blogosphere was my very Insolent, very sarcastic deconstruction of Robert F. Kennedy, Jr.'s deceptive pseudoscience-ridden bit of fear mongering that he called Deadly Immunity. It was originally jointly published both by Salon.com and Rolling Stone, a blot that neither publication will ever overcome. At least Salon.com retracted the article over five years later. Rolling Stone never did, although the article is now available only to its paid subscribers.
The reason I mention this "past glory" (if you can call it that) is…
oracknows | April 28, 2015I've written on multiple occasions of what I like to refer to as "antivaccine dog whistles." In politics, the term "dog whistle" refers to things politicians can say to certain groups, usually groups with odious views, that they are with them without actually echoing the views for which the group at which the dog whistle is aimed. The intended target audience gets the message, while those not familiar with the issues either don't get the message or see what is being said as something unobjectionable, even admirable. Think "states' rights" versus civil rights, for example.
It turns out that…
oracknows | January 8, 2015
So here it is, already a week into 2015. Truth be told, I'm still finding myself having a hard time believing that it's already 2015, but then I say that about every year in early January. Be that as it may, I've already seen one hopeful sign that it could be a decent year when it comes to science refuting claims of the antivaccine movement. In fact, there's already been a study that once again fails to find even a hint of a whiff of a whisper of evidence for a link between vaccines and autism. It comes in the form of a study from Japan published online in Vaccine on January 3 (which, oddly…
oracknows | September 11, 2014
ORAC NOTE: I’ve added the links to the video segments, which are now up at the Dr. Oz website. I also did a screen grab of a certain really stupid thing that I noticed when I watched the segment but, because I was watching it on DVR, didn’t have the ability to show you. It’s near the end. Enjoy.
When last we left “America’s doctor,” Dr. Mehmet Oz, in June, he was having his posterior handed to him by Senator Claire McCaskill (D-MO) in a Senate hearing about the deceptive marketing of supplements in which his over-the-top promotion of supplements like Garcinia gambogia, green coffee bean…
oracknows | August 29, 2014
It is as I had feared. I must do one more post on a story that I’ve been blogging about for one solid week now. Hopefully after this, I will be able to move on to other topics last week, but after spending this whole week writing just about this, I figured, “What the heck? It’s Friday. Might as well make it a solid week and move on next week. I hope.” What am I referring to? Those familiar with the story, as in past installments, can skip the recap (but shouldn’t). I feel obligated to include one because of all the new readers who have appeared for these peerless bits of, in this case, not…
oracknows | June 16, 2014It was just over a year ago that I had my last bit to say about a man who can arguably called the antivaccine activist who gave Orac his start. I'm referring, of course, to Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. Indeed, my first deconstruction of the nonsense about vaccines that Kennedy laid down in 2005 in an article foolishly and irresponsibly published in both Salon.com and Rolling Stone was what got Orac noticed, a mere six months or so after this blog had begun—exactly nine years ago, today, amazingly enough. (Holy crap, this blog is old...) Every so often, Kennedy has reappeared to spread fear,…
oracknows | June 3, 2014
It's always jarring when I go to a scientific meeting, in this case the American Society of Clinical Oncology (ASCO) meeting, imbibe the latest clinical science on cancer, and then check back to see what the quacks are doing. On the other hand, there was a session at this year's ASCO on "integrative oncology" (stay tuned for an...Insolent...discussion of it sometime in the next few days after I get a chance to watch the videos again and look up the papers cited in support of woo), so maybe it isn't as jarring as it once was to come back into the real world.
Thus I saw in my Google Alerts…
oracknows | October 13, 2013If there's one thing that the antivaccine fringe wants above all else, it's legitimacy. They crave it almost above all else. They want to be taken seriously from a scientific standpoint. Unfortunately, what they fail to realize is that to be taken seriously from a scientific standpoint you really need to demonstrate that you actually understand science. At the very least you can't be spouting pseudoscience, but that's what antivaccinationists do constantly. Virtually every argument they make trying to demonstrate that vaccines are the root of all evil (or at least cause autism, autoimmune…
oracknows | December 18, 2012One of the oldest topics I've dealt with on this blog, a topic that I've been writing about on and off (unfortunately, mostly on) about the antivaccine movement. Ever since I first discovered about a decade ago that, yes, there are people ignorant enough about science and medicine that they actually think that vaccines are harmful and cause autism, as well as actually believing that it is a good idea not to vaccinate their children against even deadly diseases like the measles, polio, Haemophilus influenzae type B (HiB), and more. As a group, hiding behind the risible claim that they are "not…
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 | 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…
terrasig | September 18, 2009Prof Tara Smith thought it important enough to come back from her hiatus to explain why she's doing the same for her kids.
That's why.
Addendum (20 Sept 2009): In my rush to put up a very quick post on Friday, I just saw that Revere at Effect Measure put up a detailed post on why we should always get the regular seasonal flu vaccine regardless of the current H1N1 pandemic.
oracknows | February 13, 2009Unfortunately, as we have been dreading for the last four months or so since her relapse was diagnosed, my mother-in-law passed away from breast cancer in hospice. She died peacefully, with my wife and the rest of her family at her side. As you might expect, I do not much feel like blogging. Because I foresaw this day coming, however, I did set up a series of "Best of" reposts to autopost for you while I am in mourning. Some I have even updated and/or spiffed up with actual editing. If you've been reading less than a year or two, they're new to you. If not, I hope you enjoy them again. I don'…