Antivaccine nonsense
oracknows | January 6, 2015
Readers who've been following this blog a while would probably not be surprised to learn that one of my all time favorite movies is Ghostbusters. In fact, it's hard to believe that the movie is now 30 years old. It makes me feel so old, given that I saw the movie in the theater when it came out. Be that as it may, there's a scene near the end of the movie, where an ancient god Gozer the Gozarian, takes the form of a giant Stay Puft Marshmallow Man, tromping through New York City destroying things, all thanks to a stray thought by Ghostbuster Ray Stantz (played by Dan Ackroyd) that inspired…
oracknows | December 31, 2014She's baa-aack.
Remember Stephanie Seneff? When last Orac discussed her, she had been caught dumpster diving into the VAERS database in order to torture the data to make it confess a "link" between aluminum adjuvants in vaccines and acetaminophen and—you guessed it!—autism. It was a bad paper in a bad journal known as Entropy that I deconstructed in detail around two years ago. As I said at the time, I hadn't seen a "review" article that long and that badly done since the even more horrible article by Helen Ratajczak entitled Theoretical aspects of autism: Causes–A review (which, not…
oracknows | December 29, 2014
Christmas is over, and we're in that weird time between Christmas and New Years Day, when, usually at least, I have to work but so many people are out and so few patients seem to want to come in that it hardly seems worth the effort. So it is with the blog, too. The week between Christmas and New Years tends to be the lowest traffic period of the year. Although that's been true this year as well, I've noticed more commenting activity than I usually see. So, I figured, what the heck? There are odds and ends worth writing about, although I don't plan on doing an epic posts before next Monday…
oracknows | December 26, 2014
After I woke up this morning, the haze induced by feasting and hanging out with family only slowly clearing, I debated about whether I wanted to post anything at all today. After all, in much of the English-speaking world, it's still a holiday, Boxing Day. Although not an official holiday here in the US, when Christmas is on a Thursday, as it was this year, Boxing Day becomes an unofficial holiday that the majority of people not working in the retail sector seem to take off, the better to produce a four or five day weekend, depending upon whether they took Christmas Eve off as well. Also, it…
oracknows | December 23, 2014
Having recently discovered a veritable Library with Doctor Moon of antivaccine misinformation and quackery known as Modern Alternative Mama's blog, Facebook page, Twitter feed, and YouTube channel, I couldn't resist taking one more drought from the same well. It is, after all, almost Christmas, and truly, as far as the blog is concerned, the discovery of Kate Tietje, a.k.a. Modern Alternative Mama, was an early Christmas gift that could not but be opened immediately. Besides, with Christmas coming up in a couple of days, after today I plan on taking a brief blog break until Friday, with…
oracknows | December 22, 2014
One of the depressing things about having dedicated over a decade of one's life to combatting pseudoscience and quackery is that, no matter how much I think I've come to be familiar with all the woo that can be out there and all the players promoting that woo, there are always new people popping up. It's impossible for one person to keep track of them all. Sometimes, however, there are, for example, antivaccine activists that I haven't heard of before whom I really think I should have heard of sooner than this. Such is the case with Kate Tietje, who blogs at Modern Alternative Mama.…
oracknows | December 10, 2014
One aspect of my life that's kind of strange is how I've basically ended up back where I started. I was born and raised in southeast Michigan (born in the city of Detroit, actually, although my parents moved to the suburbs when I was 10). After going to college and medical school at the University of Michigan, I matched at a residency in Cleveland (regular readers know that it was Case Western Reserve University), and then did a fellowship in surgical oncology at the University of Chicago. Finally, I ended up taking my first "real" (i.e., faculty) job at the Cancer Institute of New Jersey…
oracknows | December 5, 2014
If there's one thing about having a demanding day job, it's that the cranks usually have the advantage. They can almost always hit first when a news story comes out that they can spin to attack their detested science. On the other hand, it usually ensures that by the time I get home, have dinner, and settle down in front of the TV with my laptop to discusse the latest bit of science, there's some tasty crankery to deconstruct.
Oddly enough, tonight appears not to be one of those times. Heck, as of this writing, even that wretched hive of antivaccine scum and quackery, Age of Autism,, doesn…
oracknows | December 1, 2014
Every so often there's an article that starts making the rounds on social media, in particular Facebook and Twitter, that cries out for a treatment by yours truly. Actually, there are more such articles that are constantly circulating on social media that I could work full time blogging and still not cover them all. So I'm stuck picking and choosing ones that either (1) particularly pique my interest; (2) irritate me enough to goad me into action; or (3) reach a level of ubiquity that I can no longer ignore them. I don't think this one's hit #3 yet, but it certainly scores on #1 and #2.…
oracknows | November 21, 2014As this goes live I’ll be heading to the airport, my purpose being to wing my way to Skepticon 7, where I’ll be speaking tomorrow on a little ditty I like to call The Central Dogma of Alternative Medicine. It’ll be fun, and I’m looking forward to it. However, in true Orac fashion, I haven’t finished the slides and outline for my talk yet, something I hope to do on the planes (there are no direct flights to Springfield, MO from here) and the 3+ hour layover I have to look forward to in Chicago.
What this means is that I was busily tweaking my talk and making some slides last night instead of…
oracknows | November 19, 2014
It was a long day in the operating room again, albeit unexpectedly so as a case that I had expected to be fairly straightforward turned out to anything but. Let’s just say, when I’m peeling tumor off of a major blood vessel, my anal sphincter tone is such that if someone were to stick a lump of coal up there it would come out a diamond. Fortunately, everything turned out fine (damn, if I don’t sometimes know what I’m doing), but that, plus the other cases, drained. This seems to be happening more and more often these days, which means that I’d better get my lab funded quick before I’m…
oracknows | November 13, 2014
Of the many lies and myths about vaccines that stubbornly persist despite all evidence showing them not only to be untrue but to be risibly, pseudoscientifically untrue, among whose number are myths that vaccines cause autism, sudden infant death syndrome, and a syndrome that so resembles shaken baby syndrome (more correctly called abusive head trauma) that shaken baby syndrome is a misdiagnosis for vaccine injury, the lie that vaccines are being used for population control is one of the most persistent. In this myth, vaccines are not designed to protect the populations of impoverished…
oracknows | November 12, 2014
Getting old sucks. I had a relatively long and busy day in the operating room yesterday, the kind of day that not so long ago I’d handle with no problem. This time around, though, it wiped me out, to the point where not long after dinner I crashed. Hard. Then I woke up around midnight long enough to drag my sorry posterior upstairs to my bed. It happens. It’s just that it seems to be happening more often these days.
So it was that I missed one of the most amusing Twitter happenings that I’ve seen in a long time; that is; until I woke up again early this AM. Dr. Oz just got pwned on Twitter…
oracknows | November 7, 2014
Gayle DeLong has been diagnosed with what she refers to as “autism-induced” breast cancer.” She’s even given it an abbreviation, AIBC. Unfortunately, as you might be able to tell by the name she’s given her breast cancer, she is also showing signs of falling into the same errors in thinking with respect to her breast cancer as she clearly has with respect to autism. As a breast cancer surgeon, regardless of my personal opinion of DeLong’s anti-vaccine beliefs, I can only hope that she comes to her senses and undergoes science-based treatment, but I fear she will not, as you will see. Her…
oracknows | November 6, 2014
Two months ago, one of the strangest stories ever to be flogged by antivaccine activists was insinuating its way throughout social media, including Twitter, Facebook, and everywhere else, where antivaccine activists were engaged in a frantic effort to get the attention of mainstream media regarding their belief that there was a "CDC whistleblower" who had revealed a "cover up" that results from a CDC study looking at age of receiving MMR vaccination was studied as a potential risk factor for autism had shown that African-American boys showed a more than three-fold increased risk due to MMR…
oracknows | November 4, 2014
I was a bit angry yesterday. I’m never happy when I see the overarching narrative that prescientific and pseudoscientific beliefs are equivalent and worth doing clinical trials on them. But the irritation I feel when I see examples of journalists credulously swallowing that narrative whole and regurgitating it in mainstream publications like the Wall Street Journal is nothing compared to the anger that is provoked when I see one of the worst antivaccine lies of all being promulgated by a person known for promoting it.
The person is Christina England. The tactic is trying to blame the…
oracknows | October 31, 2014One thing that happened this week that I didn’t get around to writing about is the 100th anniversary of the birth of Jonas Salk, which was October 28. In the annals of medicine, few people have had as immediate a positive effect as Jonas Salk did when he developed the inactivated polio vaccine (IPV). At the time the IPV became available in 1955, annual epidemics of polio were a regular feature of American life, causing panics and closing public swimming pools with a distressing frequency, causing thousands of cases of paralysis per year and many deaths. Indeed, in 1952 one particularly bad…
oracknows | October 27, 2014Grant deadline today, which means I didn’t have time to produce yet another scintillating epic for my not-so-super-secret other blog. I did, however, have time to take note of a highly annoying thing on Facebook that was brought to my attention last night and is worth a brief mention here, so that the blog doesn’t go without a post today.
The National Vaccine Information Center, founded and run by Barbara Loe Fisher, is about as antivaccine as they come. It’s also pretty blatant about spreading misinformation about vaccines hither, thither, and yon, disguised as “vaccine safety” public…
oracknows | October 22, 2014
The antivaccine movement and conspiracy theories go together like beer and Buffalo wings, except that neither are as good as, yes, beer and Buffalo wings. Maybe it’s more like manure and compost. In any case, the antivaccine movement is rife with conspiracy theories. I’ve heard and written about more than I can remember right now, and I’m under no illusion that I’ve heard anywhere near all of them. Indeed, it seems that every month I see a new one.
There is, however, a granddaddy of conspiracy theories among antivaccinationists, or, as I like to call it, the central conspiracy theory of…
oracknows | October 17, 2014
I realize that yesterday’s post was even longer than my usual post (and, given who I am, that’s saying something), but there was a thought that popped up last night about the Ebola conspiracy theories that I discussed that I can’t resist finishing the week on with a (hopefully) much more concise post. (I know, it’s me; conciseness is not exactly what Orac is about.) I know that, after a decade at this whole skeptical blogging thing, it shouldn’t bother me, but it still does. I’m referring to what these Ebola virus disease conspiracy theories say about how “they” view “us.”
First of all,…