Antivaccine nonsense
oracknows | March 28, 2008I tell ya, I get sick for a few days, and the antivaccination cranks come out of the woodwork. This time around, it's über-crank Vox Day entering the fray (or, as I like to call him Vox "hey, it worked for Hitler" Day). We've seen him in action before. Be it using the example of Nazi Germany as a reason why we could, if we so desired, round up all the illegal immigrants in the country and eject them, labeling women as "fascists" who shouldn't have the right to vote, or falling hook, line, and sinker for an evidence-free antivaccination claim, when it comes to an inflated opinion of his own…
oracknows | March 28, 2008I have good news and bad news for you.
First, the good news. The devastating death crud that has kept me in its grip for nearly a week now appears to be receding. For the first time, "whining" or not, I start to see the light at the end of the tunnel. Whether it's due to PalMD's kind offer of Pranic Healing or not, I don't know, but things are on the mend.
And now the bad news. There will be no Friday Dose of Woo this week. The reason is simple. My mucus-laden head continues to pound, and my hacking cough continues to put me into an ill mood. This makes it very difficult to attain and…
oracknows | March 21, 2008If you ever have any doubt at the sheer level of unscientific fearmongering and lunacy antivaccinationists like to foment, all you have to do is head to the comments section regarding the David Kirby article in the Atlanta Journal-Constitution that I deconstructed yesterday. Given that the Age of Autism site linked to it to send its ravening horde of antivaccinationists to descend upon the unsuspecting editors there, I feel that balance demands that I send my ravening hordes there to provide a modicum of counter-argument. (Well, I would send my ravening hordes if I actually had any; instead,…
oracknows | March 20, 2008I have to hand it to Dan Olmsted. As Dr. Michael Egnor is for "intelligent design" creationism, ol' Danny Boy is the Energizer Bunny of antivaccinationism. Tag-teaming with fellow "journalist" David Kirby, who seems able to live rather well without actually, you know, having a regular job, ex-UPI correspondent Olmsted form the not-so-dynamic duo of vaccine and autism pseudoscience, the unrelenting propagandists who, despite all evidence to the contrary, keep insisting that it really, truly is the mercury in the vaccines and then, when science shows that it really isn't the mercury in…
oracknows | March 16, 2008I'm about to head home from the conference; so I don't have much time to do one of my usual posts. However, there is a brief bit that irritated me regarding the Hannah Poling case, and it comes from Dr. Sanjay Gupta:
I want to continue the discussion today. Couple of points. First of all, it seems as if parents bring up concerns about vaccines, they are automatically portrayed as anti-vaccine. Why is that? Is it possible to completely believe in the power and benefits of vaccines, but still have legitimate and credible concerns?
This statement shows that Dr. Gupta is rather clueless about the…
oracknows | March 11, 2008Buried in yesterday's post was a link to a post on the Science Business blog, which is one of the blogs of Forbes magazine that was a dangerous gratification to my ego in that it mentioned this humble blog as one of the Autism Debate Go-To Blogs. Although Matthew Harper, Associate Editor at Forbes, left out three go-to blogs about autism that probably surpass this blog (namely, Left Brain/Right Brain, Neurodiversity, and Autism News Beat), Harper did make an interesting observation about yours truly:
Respectful Insulence is written by a surgeon who goes by the nom-de-blog Orac. He blogs on…
oracknows | March 10, 2008Damn you, mercury militia.
I had had another topic entirely in mind for this week's post, but, as happens far too often, news events have overtaken me in the form of a story that was widely reported towards the end of last week. It was all over the media on Thursday evening and Friday, showing up on CNN, Larry King Live, the New York Times, and NPR. It happens to be the story of a girl from Georgia named Hannah Poling whose case before the Vaccine Injury Compensation Program (VICP), which had originally part of a much larger proceeding known as the Autism Omnibus, was settled. This settlement…
oracknows | March 8, 2008Yesterday was annoying.
It started out hearing about the vaccine injury case conceded by the government in a story on NPR on during my drive into work. As I walked through the clinic waiting area on the way to my lab, the TVs in the waiting rooms were all on CNN, where--you guessed it!--there was more ignorant blather about how the government supposedly had "conceded" that "vaccines cause autism." I'll give the Polings and the antivaccinationists who are trying to use their case (with, apparently, them as willing accomplices) as a propaganda tool, they're good propagandists. Try as I might, I…
oracknows | March 6, 2008There's an idiotic poll up at Larry King Live with the question: "Do you believe vaccines cause or contribute to autism?" Idiotic, because it's science that says whether or not vaccines cause or contribute to autism. Whether the public thinks they do or not is irrelevant to the biological, medical, and clinical science that say, to the best of our knowledge, they do not.
Even so, please go tell him the real science about vaccines and autism. The pseudoscientists have already stacked the deck, and clearly antivaccinationists are voting, as the numbers are running around 80% to 20% in favor of…
oracknows | March 6, 2008I should have seen this one coming a mile away in light of the concession of vaccine injury in the case of one child that led to the incredibly shrinking causation claim when it comes to vaccines and autism. Having had it conclusively demonstrated through several large studies in multiple countries that mercury in vaccines does not cause autism (nor do vaccines themselves), the mercury militia are rapidly changing course. No longer is autism a "misdiagnosis for mercury poisoning."
Now it's a "misdiagnosis for mitochondrial diseases."
Or it soon will be. Just wait. The new propaganda from the…
oracknows | March 3, 2008In case you had any doubt that it's about vaccines and the concept of vaccination itself, here's video of the protest held outside of the American Academy of Pediatrics a couple of weeks ago:
I'm not sure it was such a great idea to release video of this protest, given how tiny the demonstration looks and how obviously antivaccine their signs and rhetoric are. Either way, Dr. Eisenstein (whose "research" skills are legendary) makes me wonder how he earned his M.D. if he doesn't understand that the whole "toxins in vaccines" is a canard, and Dr. Ayoub is a conspiracy-monger. However, it's…
oracknows | March 1, 2008A couple of days ago, I wrote about a particularly deceptive and idiotic article by David Kirby about the settling of a case of vaccine injury by the U.S. government. Fellow skeptical physician Steve Novella couldn't resist taking a shot at Kirby as well and in doing so came up with one of the best lines about Kirby that I've ever heard in reference to Kirby's attempt to bring AZT into the discussion:
Among stiff competition, this is perhaps the most absurd and scientifically ignorant thing Kirby has every written.
Damn. I wish I had thought of that line. However, I would say to Steve that he…
oracknows | February 29, 2008Well, now I'm really in a pickle as far as the 2008 Presidential election goes. I really don't like Hillary Clinton and consider Barack Obama not ready for prime time; i.e., he's too inexperienced and too liberal for my liking. On the other hand, I used to like John McCain--at least until he started pandering to the religious right and became a cheerleader for the Iraq war. Now I have another reason not to vote for John McCain, which leaves me with not a single Presidential candidate that I can see myself voting for right now.
John McCain has credulously fallen for the blandishments of…
oracknows | February 29, 2008Earlier today I was perusing incoming links. (Yes, most bloggers do that because we like to know who's linking to us; any blogger who doesn't do this from time to time is atypical or lying about it.) What to my wondering (and I do mean wondering) eyes should appear, but Respectful Insolence appearing on a most unusual list, so much so that I didn't know whether to be proud or embarrassed.
That's right, this blog is listed as one of the Top 50 Alternative Medicine Blogs on Live Smarter. Now, I'm as vain as the next blogger, possibly even more so, but even my vanity did not protect me from the…
oracknows | February 28, 2008I didn't want to blog about this. I really didn't.
No, the reason why I didn't want to blog about this latest screed by mercury militia enabler David Kirby is not because it is about any sort of slam-dunk proof that vaccines do after all cause autism, a mistaken impression that you might get if you just looked at the crowing throughout the antivaccination blogosphere. Rather, it's because I've been forced once again to wade through Kirby's smug, self-congratulatory, and intentionally obfuscatory prose to try to figure out just what the hell he was talking about and then try to make sense of…
oracknows | February 27, 2008In case you haven't heard it enough on this blog and elsewhere: Antivaccination lunacy has consquences. In the UK, measles cases have jumped to a record high:
The number of measles cases in England and Wales jumped more than 30% last year to the highest level since records began in 1995.
The Health Protection Agency (HPA) recorded 971 cases during the year - up from 740 in 2006.
The agency issued a warning last summer urging parents to get their children immunised with the MMR jab.
Experts have repeatedly stressed that public concerns about the safety of the jab have no foundation.
As I've…
oracknows | February 25, 2008One way that pseudoscience tries to maintain a patina of respectability to the outside world, a patina that sometimes even manages to take in researchers unacquainted with its methods, is through the "research conference" that has all the trappings of a research meeting but whose topics reveal the pseudoscience at the heart of it all. Such a conference is coming up this spring in Chicago from May 21-25.
Yes, I'm talking about the AutismOne conference, which, year after year, has managed to attract luminaries of the mercury militia and antivaccination movement, along with dubious practioners…
oracknows | February 24, 2008You can read parts I and II first, if you like.
Yet another reason Bill Maher is an idiot can be found in the video below, taken from Real Time With Bill Maher from the February 8 episode. I happened to catch it in reruns and was looking for a transcript or YouTube version. It's truly appalling. This guy claims to be a rationalist and mocks religion for its irrationality, and here he is spouting off the more of his usual ignorant, idiotic, stupid ideas about medicine and, yes, downright woo, to the point where even his guests start to wonder what the heck is going on. They seem to back away…
oracknows | February 22, 2008With the invasion of the orbs discussed earlier today, it's become apparent to me that now, more than ever, a healthy dose of skepticism and critical thinking is imperative. Fortunately, the Skeptics' Circle is fast approaching and due to land on Thursday, February 28 at the Conspiracy Factory. So, if you're a skeptical blogger who wants to strut his or her stuff, now's the time to submit your best stuff from the last couple of weeks to Factician. Edition-specific instructions, deadline, and contact information are here. General guidelines for submitting and the schedule of future Skeptics'…
oracknows | February 21, 2008I've written a few posts now pointing out how, its claims that it is not "antivaccine" notwithstanding, for the mercury militia and those who think mercury in vaccines or vaccines themselves cause autism, it really is all about the vaccines, not any single ingredient, even mercury. I first noticed this nearly three years ago, and, if anything, recent events have made my observation even more obviously true. As multiple studies have exonerated the mercury-containing preservative thimerosal that was formerly found in most childhood vaccines and now only remains in trace amounts in flu vaccines…