vaccines
oracknows | June 6, 2016One major thing that differentiated science-based medicine (SBM) from alternative medicine and quackery is that in SBM there is a generally accepted standard of care. This was even the case back in the days before the proliferation of evidence-based guidelines, in which professional societies and expert panels try their best to synthesize what is often an unwieldy mass of sometimes conflicting studies into guidelines on best care practices for different conditions. True, back then there was wider latitude because each physician was largely left to fend for himself in applying the medical…
oracknows | May 25, 2016There's always been a major thread of distrust of the medical profession in the African-American community, understandably so given the history of abuses such as the Tuskegee Syphilis Experiment, in which the natural progression of untreated syphilis was studied in African-American men for 40 years. It’s not just that experiment that’s responsible, either. During the time of slavery, slaves often served as the subjects of medical experimentation. Dr. Crawford Long, for instance, conducted most of his early experiments with ether on slaves, while Dr. Walter F. Jones used slaves to test a…
oracknows | May 23, 2016Sigh. Here we go again. Robert De Niro is letting his antivaccine freak flag fly again, this time even higher than usual, by revealing that in the wake of the antivaccine debacle at his Tribeca Film Festival he is going to make his very own documentary about vaccines. It’s the continuation of a process that, depressingly, revealed Robert De Niro to be perhaps the biggest A-list antivaccine celebrity out there.
First, a bit of background to bring newbies up to speed. A couple of months ago, science-based medicine advocates were scratching their heads over news that the Tribeca Film Festival…
oracknows | May 13, 2016It’s been a while since I paid attention to the movie, but the publicity among the antivaccine movement for Andrew Wakefield’s and Del Bigtree’s movie VAXXED: From Cover-Up to Catastrophe continues apace. Sadly, I missed my opportunity to see Bigtree himself doing a Q&A for the movie when it rolled through Detroit a a week and a half ago, mainly (1) the evening Del Bigtree and Polly Tommey rolled through my neck of the woods happened to coincide with a day that I had to drive to Saginaw for a 7:30 AM talk (hint: it’s nearly a two hour drive from where I live) and then had to give a talk…
oracknows | May 10, 2016It’s no secret that I’m a big fan of John Oliver. When my aging body allows me to stay awake late enough on Sunday nights and there’s a new episode on, I’ll almost always be watching. Since starting his own show Last Week Tonight With John Oliver on HBO, Oliver’s become quite the expert at using humor to explain and bring attention to injustices that are widely ignored and to skewer politicians and blowhards.
This Sunday, he turned his attention on science reporting:
I certainly would have written about this for yesterday, except that at 11:30 PM on Sunday night there’s only one place for…
oracknows | May 8, 2016I realize that it's a cliché to say so, but some clichés are true. Time really does fly. It's hard to believe that a year ago California—and, by proxy, the rest of the country—was in the throes of a major political war over the bill SB 277. SB 277, you will recall, was a bill introduced into the California Assembly in the wake of the Disneyland Measles outbreak in early 2015 that eliminated non-medical exemptions to school vaccine mandates beginning with the 2016-2017 school year. Ultimately, SB 277 passed and was signed into law by Governor Jerry Brown last July. It was an uncommon victory…
oracknows | May 2, 2016[Note: Since this was written, Donald Trump won Indiana and Ted Cruz has suspended his campaign. This is why I changed the title of this post on Tuesday night. Meet your presumptive nominee, Republicans.]
I haven’t written anything about Donald Trump and vaccines in a while. When last I did write about him, I enumerated his long, sordid history of making ridiculously pseudoscientific antivaccine statements linking vaccines to autism dating back at least to 2007. That was when I first discovered him and referred to him as the latest celebrity antivaccinationist drinking the Kool Aid of vaccine…
oracknows | April 29, 2016Three days ago, I noted a disturbance in the antivaccine Force.
Last night, I noticed that that disturbance continues.
The first time around, it was Brian Hooker, a biochemical engineer turned incompetent antivaccine “epidemiologist” completed the circle of clueless conspiracy mongering, who was at the center of the disturbance. His conspira-woo tapped into the Dark Side of the Force by taking a conspiracy theory that the antivaccine movement has been flogging for nearly two years now (as hard as it is to believe, it started in August 2014!), a conspiracy known as the “CDC whistleblower” and…
oracknows | April 21, 2016I heard the news yesterday morning.
I was in clinic seeing patients. It was a bit of a slow morning; there was time between patients. So I spent it, as is my wont when clinic is a bit slow, signing charts (OK, signing off on charts in the electronic medical record; I haven’t actually physically signed a chart in a while) and idly checking Facebook and Twitter when finished with that. Then I saw it: Authorities Respond to a Medical Call at Paisley Park, with a comment that Prince was dead. I read the article; it said that someone had been found dead at Prince’s estate in Minneapolis and that…
oracknows | April 21, 2016Now that I’ve dispensed with Mike Adams’ attacks (for now), It’s time to get back to business as usual. No way am I going to let Adams interfere with the business of this blog for more than one day to take note of it, even though he’s now gone basically batshit crazy.
Unfortunately, no sooner has Andrew Wakefield’s quackfest of a propaganda “documentary” (VAXXED: From Cover-up to Catastrophe) been dealt with than another antivaccine propaganda film rears its ugly head. Readers have made me aware of a new Facebook page, website, Twitter feed, Instagram page, and YouTube channel for a movie…
oracknows | April 19, 2016Several of you have noticed that a certain friend of the blog has been under attack from one of the quackiest of Internet quacks out there. Here is his response. The paranoia and stupidity are black hole level density. (Yes, instead of posting the whole thing, I've simply posted a link to our friend's discussion and rebuttal of Adams' charges.)
oracknows | April 15, 2016J.B. Handley is an antivaccine activist, founder of the mercury militia "autism biomed"-loving group Generation Rescue, and apparent discoverer of the original clueless antivaccine celebrity Jenny McCarthy, who became president of the organization he had founded. It was a position from which McCarthy proceeded to do her best to drive down vaccination rates by publicly spewing antivaccine misinformation, all the while parroting the standard talking point that antivaccine activists like to trot out to counter charges that they are antivaccine. Indeed, it was arguably she who made this talking…
oracknows | April 8, 2016Nearly two weeks ago, a story that I had been blogging about almost nonstop for a week reached its conclusion when Robert De Niro decided to pull the antivaccine movie Vaxxed: From Cover-up to Catastrophe from the Tribeca Film Festival, of which he was one of the co-founders. Before that, he had revealed that it was he who had bypassed the festival's regular selection procedures and asked that the film be shown. All of this happened after an uproar over a film so full of antivaccine quackery, conspiracy theories about William W. Thompson (a.k.a. the "CDC whistleblower" in antivaccine circles…
oracknows | March 31, 2016I wish this post were an April Fools Day joke, but it is not.
Three weeks ago, Skeptical Raptor and I wrote posts describing how a particularly vicious, nasty antivaccine troll named Heather Murray had successfully gamed Facebook reporting algorithms intended to report abuse in order to silence pro-science bloggers. It is, unfortunately, a tactic that I first heard about over two years ago, when antivaccine activists affiliated with what was then called the Australian Vaccination Network (AVN) used the same sort of tactics to target pro-science bloggers and activists associated with a group…
milhayser | March 30, 2016A new review of the scientific literature confirms the truth about vaccine exemptions; they endanger everyone. On The Pump Handle, Kim Krisberg outlines the horrible realities of vaccine-preventable disease, and writes that vaccine refusal has "accelerated the resurgence of whooping cough and measles here in the U.S." On Respectful Insolence, Orac writes "the MMR [vaccine] is very effective against measles, over 90%, but not 100%." Meanwhile, with whooping cough, vaccine-induced immunity wears down over time.
These windows of opportunity for infection would be inconsequential in a fully…
oracknows | March 27, 2016I knew it wouldn't take long. I just knew it.
The moment I learned that Robert De Niro had reversed himself and decided to pull Andrew Wakefield's dishonest antivaccine propaganda "documentary" from his Tribeca Film Festival after having admitted that he was the one who had greased the wheels to get it accepted for screening there, I knew the conspiracy theories would fly fast and furious. And so they have.
So agitated by De Niro's decision are antivaxers that the chief antivaccine loon at his very own wretched hive of scum and quackery, Mike Adams, wrote not one, not two, but three posts in…
oracknows | March 24, 2016Ever since I mentioned on Tuesday that the prestigious Tribeca Film Festival had taken a massive dump on reality and science by selecting for screening Andrew Wakefield's antivaccine propaganda "documentary," Vaxxed: From Cover-up to Catastrophe, dedicated to the so-called "CDC whistleblower," the topic has taken over, as topics sometimes tend to do here. In response to the mounting criticism for featuring a film by a scientific fraud clearly intended as an "I'll show you all" moment to persuade viewers that Wakefield was right after all about his long discredited claim that the MMR vaccine…
kkrisberg | March 23, 2016A recent study finds vaccine refusals have, indeed, accelerated the resurgence of whooping cough and measles here in the U.S. The findings are making headlines around the country — and comment sections are filling up with vitriol from anti-vaxxers — but it would feel amiss not to highlight the study on a blog dedicated to public health. But first, let’s remind ourselves of the pain and suffering that preceded vaccines.
Here’s a brief snapshot of what life was like before vaccines and what it’s currently like for people without access to these life-saving medicines:
Whooping cough (pertussis…
oracknows | March 22, 2016When last we left Andrew Wakefield, hero to the antivaccine movement, he was a headliner on the Conspira-Sea Cruise, a cruise filled with conspiracy theorists, crop circle chasers, cranks, quacks, and antivaccine activists. It was a huge come down from his formerly exalted position as chief spokesman and "scientist" for the antivaccine movement, a position he enjoyed for many years before he was struck off (i.e., had his medical license stripped from him) in the UK and later had his scientific fraud documented so thoroughly by investigative reporter Brian Deer. Since then, it's all been…
oracknows | March 18, 2016When I wrote about a systematic review of the medical literature regarding measles and pertussis outbreaks that demonstrated quite convincingly that, for these two diseases at least, the nonmedical exemptions and vaccine refusal endanger everyone, not just the unvaccinated, I was rather disappointed. I was rather disappointed because, although the article had been in press a couple fo days at the time, no antivaccine loon had taken it on with the bad arguments that I mentioned. If there's one thing that seems to escape antivaccinationists, it's that the unvaccinated are at much more risk in…