Vaccine Resistance Movement

Nearly eleven years ago, back in April 2005, I opened my work e-mail (I was working at a different university back then) and saw an e-mail from someone whose name I had seen before, one Mr. William P. O'Neill. Opening the e-mail, I was shocked to find an e-mail to Orac; worse, the e-mail was cc'ed to my cancer center director, my division chief, and my chairman. In it, O'Neill outed me as Orac and was threatening to sue me over a post I did. Naturally, it was interspersed with accusations of my being a "pharma shill" and having lied about him. Now here's the odd thing. This is the post that…
One of the best things about blogging is that I don't feel obligated to cover a topic completely in one post because I know I can always write another one or revisit the topic later. It also allows me to look at what I like to call "variations on a theme" of various kinds of quackery (or anything else, for that matter). View this as a post looking at one such variation on a theme. The theme this time is the tendency of antivaccine activists to demonstrate their utter cluelessness when it comes to designing clinical studies. This cluelessness virtually always manifests itself in the frequent…