vaccines
oracknows | August 4, 2014
As prolific as I am, I have actually slowed down. Long time readers know this, as I used to have a post up seven days a week and sometimes two or more in a day. These days, I’ve made it a rule that I don’t post on weekends (except if something really catches my eye and I can’t control the blogging itch until Monday), and I almost never post more than once a day on weekdays. Heck, of late I’ve even been known to miss a weekday every now and then without even recycling posts from my not-so-super-secret other blog. It’s good, as I was a bit insane back then.
What I’m talking about is an…
oracknows | August 3, 2014
I’ve been a bit of a bad, bad boy. Well, not exactly. Rather, I’ve just been a bit lazy and/or forgetful. I know, I know. How can the ultimate Tarial cell-fueled supercomputer in the neat, compact form of a Plexiglass-encased cube of multicolored blinking lights be lazy or forgetful? Maybe “lazy and forgetful” are the wrong words. After all, my namesake (or should I say “‘nymsake”) Orac was well known for being easily distracted when he encountered an observation or question that interested him (such as black holes and limericks), so much so that it sometimes got the crew of the Liberator…
tsmith | July 29, 2014I can hardly do Dr. William Foege justice with a short introduction. He is one of the scientists who led the global smallpox eradication efforts. He developed the concept of ring vaccination, which targeted vaccination to those individuals around a known case of smallpox. This concept really made eradication possible, as it eliminated the need for universal vaccination. Following the success of the smallpox campaign, he has worked tirelessly to increase global vaccination rates. He led the effort to provide low-cost treatments for river blindness, resulting in an immense reduction in that…
oracknows | July 22, 2014
Only really long time readers will remember this, but back in the day (June 2005, to be exact), I discovered Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. and his antivaccine nuttery when he published his epically bad piece of antivaccine conspiracy mongering, Deadly Immunity, both in Salon.com and Rolling Stone (the latter of which doubled down on it a few years later by reposting it). My deconstruction of the logical fallacies, errors of science and fact, and just general silliness of Kennedy’s article was one of the first times I was ever really “noticed” in the blogosphere. Since then, every so often, or so…
sa smith | July 21, 2014Some of you might remember the waves made earlier this year about 'The Immunity Project'. They were crowdsourcing an HIV vaccine that was magical and amazing and they were totally going to give it away for free!!
YAY!
... Except 'The Immunity Project' basically had nothing to back their claims up.
No publications, the investigators had no connection to HIV vaccine research, and the marketing claims made by 'The Immunity Project' were outlandish (more from Skeptical Raptor).
We were assured that a publication was in the works, and to their credit, that publication is now available in a peer-…
oracknows | July 17, 2014
Ever since I first became aware of the antivaccine movement more than ten years ago, I’ve had little choice but to periodically pay attention to one of the godfathers of the antivaccine movement, Andrew Wakefield. Wakefield is the quack whose dubious case series that The Lancet foolishly published in 1998 launched a million antivaccine quacks. Ever since his disgrace, in which he was stripped of his U.K. medical license (or, as the lovely British phrasing goes, he was “struck off”), then later was pushed out by the board of directors at Thoughtful House and had his Lancet paper retracted…
oracknows | July 2, 2014Can we just say that vaccines are safe, already? Can we just say that, of all the medical interventions ever conceived by the minds of humans, vaccines have almost certainly saved more lives and prevented more illness? Can we finally say that vaccines do not cause autism?
Of course not, unfortunately. I ask the same question about whether we can finally say that the earth isn’t 6,000 years old, but rather billions of years old, and there are still people out there who believe that evolution is a sham and the earth really is only 6,000 years old. Truly, the irrationality of humans is without…
oracknows | June 27, 2014Yesterday’s post was just too depressing to contemplate and even more depressing to write. It was a total downer after seen the awesomeness that was John Oliver gloriously skewering America’s Quack Dr. Mehmet Oz. That’s why I think it would be good to finish this week on an amusing note. Well, it would be amusing if it weren’t for my knowledge that the woman who wrote the post I’m about to “analyze” has an autistic child and is subjecting that child to quackery. Actually, that’s true of pretty much every woman who blogs at the wretched hive of scum and autism biomed quackery where this post…
lborkowski | June 18, 2014by Phyllis Freeman and Anthony Robbins, MD, MPA
One of our public health heroes, Ciro de Quadros, a public health physician from Brazil died on May 28, 2014. We need his attitude, skills, and persistence more than ever today. Ciro was a master of innovation, particularly in his efforts to prevent infectious diseases with vaccines. It seems especially timely today to review highlights of his career.
And why now? For one, because just now efforts to eliminate polio are foundering in the wake of the US CIA’s disastrous and hugely counterproductive scheme to identify Osama bin Laden’s children…
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,…
milhayser | June 13, 2014When a parent chooses not to vaccinate their child, they put many other people at risk. Some infants cannot be vaccinated due to medical complications, and even fully-vaccinated people are not always fully protected. Jessica Parsons tells the story of baby Finn on Aetiology, who was diagnosed with Ewing’s Sarcoma at the age of 3 months and has been undergoing chemotherapy, surgery, and blood transfusions ever since. Because he was immunosuppressed, Finn could not be vaccinated, and despite responding well to cancer treatments, his life was imperiled by a case of whooping cough. Meanwhile, on…
oracknows | June 6, 2014The other day, I expressed my disappointment at how Samantha Bee of The Daily Show got the politics of antivaccinationism wrong in a segment that was funny, but promoted the stereotype of antivaccine activists as being mainly crunchy lefties. In that post, I mentioned how the Texas Republican Party had a plank in its platform for "vaccine choice" in 2012. Now, thanks to PZ Myers, I notice that the plank appears to be there still for 2014:
All adult citizens should have the legal right to conscientiously choose which vaccines are administered to themselves, or their minor children, without…
oracknows | June 4, 2014Not surprisingly, being a guy who leans mildly left, I like The Daily Show. Jon Stewart and his writers are incredibly adept at skewering all manner of bovine excrement, be it political, scientific, or otherwise. In particular, the way Stewart and company skewered the American Council on Science and Health (ACSH) for its promotion of the chemical industry. Indeed, Samantha Bee, who did the infamous Little Crop of Horrors segment that mocked ACSH for its defense of pesticides über alles and its criticism of Michelle Obama's healthy eating initiative.
Another Daily Show segment by Samantha Bee…
sa smith | May 27, 2014The MMR vaccine does not cause autism. The guy who initially made that claim made it all up, and literally no one since has found any evidence to support that claim.
We have known this for quite a while now, and yet, the anti-MMR fad is still going, and parents arent vaccinating their kids. And its the *kids* who suffer from their parents poor decisions.
So what are scientists and physicians to do? How can we get the message across to anti-vax parents?
Effective Messages in Vaccine Promotion: A Randomized Trial
Researchers in this paper tried four approaches to educate/get parents to agree to…
oracknows | May 26, 2014Of all the clueless antivaccinationist out there, one stands out as being particularly dangerous to public health. That person is the antivaccine reporter whom I've periodically been forced to castigate ever since around 2007 when she laid down such a seethingly hot bit of napalm-grade antivaccine stupid that she grabbed my attention with her combination of ignorance and arrogance (a.k.a., the arrogance of ignorance or the Dunning-Kruger effect), Sharyl Attkisson. Since then, Attkisson has managed to get on my radar through her sucking up to Andrew Wakefield, playing footsie with the…
oracknows | May 21, 2014Well, it snuck up on me again, the way it has a tendency to do every year. Maybe it's because Memorial Day is so early this year. Maybe it's because there's just so much work to do this week given the multiple grant deadlines. Whatever the case, it just dawned on my last night that today is the first day of the yearly autism quackfest known as AutismOne (AO), which is being held at the Intercontinental O'Hare Hotel near Chicago. Of course, things are different this year. Given the schism between team Crosby and pretty much everyone else in the antivaccine movement, it's unclear what the deal…
oracknows | May 19, 2014May I just say something again? (Actually, it's my blog; so I'll say it if I want to regardless of whether you want me to or not.) You know that "hypothesis" that vaccines cause autism, the one that has been at the core of the modern antivaccine movement over the last 15 years or so? Well, it's not pining for the fjords, if you know what I mean. No it's not pinin'! It's passed on! This "hypothesis" is no more! It has ceased to be! It's expired and gone to meet it's maker! (Well, actually, since one of its makers, Andrew Wakefield, is still around, I'm not sure what in practice that actually…
oracknows | May 18, 2014I hadn't really planned on writing again about everyone's favorite conspiracy theorist and promoter of quackery, Mike Adams, at least not so soon after the last time I did it, which was only last week after Adams appeared on Dr. Oz's daytime television show to push his "laboratory." Adams, as you might recall, goes by the Internet moniker the "Health Ranger" (which would really more appropriately be "Health Danger") and is the man responsible for one of the quackiest sites on the Internet, NaturalNews.com, a repository for nearly every form of medical pseudoscience known to humans, mixed in…
oracknows | May 11, 2014Besides yesterday being Mothers' Day yesterday, I had a lot of grant stuff to do, which means that this one will be a quickie. On Saturday, a reader sent me a link to one of the most useful sites I've ever encountered. I realize that over the weekend it's spread around the skeptical blogosphere like the proverbial wildfire, which is unfortunate (for me) given that I've made it a personal rule that I don't post on the weekend any more, barring amazing developments. Still, this one tempted me. It's a website called Spurious Correlations, and it is exactly what it claims to be. Its usefulness…
oracknows | May 9, 2014
There's a certain category of posts that I like to call (to myself, anyway) "taking care of business" posts. Usually, it's a post about something that I missed the first time around but has, for some reason, reappeared on my radar screen or something that I wish I had written about when it first showed up but didn't to the point that I don't care that the material is over a week old, which, let's face it, might as well be a year old in blogging time. On the other hand, there's still no time like the present, so let's take care of some business. There is the added benefit that taking care…