Antivaccine nonsense
oracknows | September 23, 2007ERV explains: Vaccines strengthen superpowers.
Take that, Jenny McCarthy!
oracknows | September 22, 2007I have to tip my hat to Kevin Leitch. I really do. He's done something that I couldn't manage to force myself to do, at least not completely.
He's subjected himself to the entire episode of The Oprah Winfrey Show in which Jenny McCarthy showed up to plug her new book about her fight to "save" her child from autism, Louder Than Words: A Mother's Journey in Healing Autism.
Far be it from me to attack Jenny McCarthy for wanting to help her autistic son. Her devotion is admirable, and virtually all parents, other than crappy parents, want to help their children. The problem is that, in seeking to…
oracknows | September 20, 2007I don't know how I missed this one, but it jut goes to show that antivaccination ignorance with respect to autism is truly a bipartisan affair. You have folks like Representative Dan Burton on the right, and on the left you have this particular Daily Kos diarist, who falls like a ton of bricks for the recent Generation Rescue "study" of autism rates in vaccinated versus unvaccinated children:
The first ever study comparing vaccinated to unvaccinated children was completed with startling results.
Vaccines Caused Autism
Vaccines Caused Asthma
Vaccines Caused ADHD
The study was privated funded…
oracknows | September 18, 2007I'm rather amused.
No, I'm very amused.
Yesterday, as you may recall, I discussed a seemingly alarming e-mail that's going around about a 17-year-old boy with melanoma whom the State of California had allegedly removed from the custody of his mother because she and he had wanted to use "advanced natural medicine" to treat his melanoma, rather than surgery and chemotherapy. I pointed out a number of questionable elements in the story that made me very suspicious of its accuracy, not the least of which is the fact that the mainstay of melanoma treatment is surgery plus biological therapy, not…
oracknows | September 14, 2007Regarding Dan Olmsted's latest foray into autism pseudoscience at Rescue Post, Kev asks, "Why aren't you scared to death?"
Olmsted's latest happened to appear while I was on vacation a couple of weeks ago, and there's so much other interesting stuff out there to blog about since I got back that I never got around to addressing yet another of his attempts to blame autism on mercury. This time, though, just like J.B. Handley and others who have been steadily backing away from the "mercury in vaccines causes autism" hypothesis (mainly because each new epidemiological study that comes out fails…
oracknows | September 10, 2007Way back when I first started my blog, one of my favorite blogs was A Photon in the Darkness, in which Prometheus regularly demolished quackery, particularly autism-related quackery. Sadly, Prometheus' blogging has become more and more sporadic over the last year or so, with gaps sometimes longer than a month between posts. I was worried that he might be retiring permanently from the blogosphere. That would be a great loss.
Recently, however, Prometheus has been a bit more active. In fact, he's even moved his blog to a new location: http://www.photoninthedarkness.com. Moreover, he's recently…
oracknows | September 9, 2007Kevin Leitch informs me that DAN/ARI are asking people to leave a message for Andrew Wakefield.
Yes, that Andrew Wakefield, the man who almost single-handedly started a scare over the MMR vaccine, the man who was paid by lawyers and was either so clueless, careless, and/or dishonest (take your pick) that the lab where he did his research where he "found" measles RNA sequences in the guts of autistic children didn't do even the most basic controls to eliminate false positives.
Not surprisingly, essentially all the messages are nauseatingly supportive and full of praise. Here's a sample:
Thank…
oracknows | September 4, 2007A couple of weeks ago, before I went on vacation, the BBC aired a two-part documentary by Richard Dawkins entitled The Enemies of Reason. Part One dealt primarily with the paranormal and various New Age phenomena, while Part Two, which aired mere days before my London trip, dealt squarely with alternative medicine in an uncompromising fashion. One key segment of Part Two discussed the bizarre magical thinking that is known as homeopathy. Although I quibbled a bit about certain aspects of how Dawkins presented homeopathy, overall I thought it was the best deconstruction on video of the…
oracknows | September 2, 2007An excellent op-ed article by Michael Fitzpatrick characterizes quite well the hysterical fear based on no evidence that Andrew Wakefield and his accomplices started in the U.K. over the MMR vaccine and the unfounded claim that it causes autism and bowel disorders:
The rise of a combination of extreme scepticism towards established sources of authority in science and medicine and anxiety about environmental threats to our wellbeing has led many to put their faith in self-proclaimed mavericks and alternative healers and charlatans. The recent outbreaks of measles, which resulted last year in…
oracknows | September 1, 2007I hadn't been planning on doing any serious pieces to intersperse within the reruns of old posts while on vacation. Despite the impression some have gotten from my Random Observations posts about London and Britain, we've had an absolutely wonderful time the last week and are sorry to see it end. (Although I understand that I might have ruffled a few feathers when I complained about restaurant service, who would have thought that a post about how polite and friendly Londoners seem to us or an intentionally silly post about our failure to have seen any squirrels in London would have ruffled a…
oracknows | August 30, 2007Vacation time! While Orac is off in London recharging his circuits and contemplating the linguistic tricks of limericks and jokes or the glory of black holes, he's rerunning some old stuff from his original Blogspot blog. This particular post first appeared on July 20, 2005. This one seems downright prescient as I read it again. Enjoy!
Today in Washington, there will be a march, called (with unintentional irony) the Power of Truth march. Its organizers claim that it will be to "protest the use of mercury in vaccines" (never mind that the mercury was taken out of nearly all vaccines in the U.S…
oracknows | August 28, 2007Vacation time! While Orac is off in London recharging his circuits and contemplating the linguistic tricks of limericks and jokes or the glory of black holes, he's rerunning some old stuff from his original Blogspot blog. This particular post first appeared on February 10, 2005. Enjoy!
A few days ago, I had been thinking that it's been a long time since I've blogged about alternative medicine. I was going over a list of potential topics, debating whether I should talk about alt-med in general or pick specific "therapies." And then, there it was, sitting in the in-box on my desk at work, a…
oracknows | August 27, 2007Vacation time! While Orac is gone recharging his circuits and contemplating the linguistic tricks of limericks and jokes or the glory of black holes, he's rerunning some old stuff from his original Blogspot blog. This particular post first appeared on December 21, 2005 Enjoy!
When you blog about a certain topic long enough and post strong opinions about it often enough, you start to gain a reputation as one of the go-to bloggers on that particular topic, whether you originally intended it that way or not. Consequently, I wasn't too suprised when a reader sent me a piece by another blogger…
oracknows | August 27, 2007Even when I'm on vacation, lots of other great bloggers aren't. The lack of writing on my part makes it even easier for me to point you in the direction of posts likely to be of interest to my readers. Fortunately Prometheus has started posting again after one of his all-too-frequent hiatuses, and here are two of his recent posts worth checking out:
Another nail in the coffin
Myths and Legends of Autism: Part 1, The Myth of the Poor Excretor
oracknows | August 27, 2007Vacation time! While Orac is off to London recharging his circuits and contemplating the linguistic tricks of limericks and jokes or the glory of black holes, he's rerunning some old stuff from his original Blogspot blog. This particular post first appeared on December 19, 2005. I don't know if Bill Maher is still an antivax nutcase, but I'm guessing that he probably is. Enjoy!
Via Skeptico, I've learned of some more antivaccination stupidity issuing forth from self-proclaimed "skeptic" Bill Maher during his recent appearance on Larry King Live. Get a load of this:
MAHER: I'm not into…
oracknows | August 26, 2007Vacation time! While Orac is gone recharging his circuits and contemplating the linguistic tricks of limericks and jokes or the glory of black holes, he's rerunning some old stuff from his original Blogspot blog. This particular post first appeared on July 6, 2005 and is the very first time ever that the Hitler Zombie appeared in a horror story form. As such, it was a landmark day in the annals of Respectful Insolence. Appropriately enough, it's over what had become a frequent blogging topic even back in those early days. Enjoy!
Deep within a dark crypt, far beneath the ground, it slept. The…
oracknows | August 22, 2007Good news! Dr. Roy Kerry, the quack whose careless use of intravenous chelation therapy for autism resulted in the death of a five year old autistic boy named Abubakar Tariq Nadama, will be charged with involuntary manslaughter:
PITTSBURGH - A doctor was charged with involuntary manslaughter Wednesday for administering a chemical treatment that state police say killed a 5-year-old autistic boy.
The child, Abubakar Tariq Nadama, went into cardiac arrest at Dr. Roy E. Kerry's office immediately after undergoing chelation therapy on Aug. 23, 2005.
Chelation removes heavy metals from the body…
oracknows | August 15, 2007Remember a couple of months ago, when I discussed testimony at the Autism Omnibus trial that showed how Andrew Wakefield had failed to do the controls when running PCR that would have revealed that the results that he interpreted as the presence of the measles virus from a vaccine strain in the guts of autistic children was nothing more than a bunch of false positives due to widespread contamination of the laboratory with plasmid containing measles sequences?
It turns out that it's not just autism pseudoscientists who forget to do the right controls when running PCR. Mike the Mad Biologist…
oracknows | August 2, 2007While I'm back on the topic of vaccines again (and that topic seems to me less and less rancorous these days, not because antivaccination "activists" have gotten any less loony but because the smoking cranks, at least the ones showing up on my blog these days, threaten to make antivaccinationists seem low key by comparison), it turns out that one of the premiere journals of medical research, Nature Medicine, has weighed in on the topic. If you want any more evidence that the antivaccination movement is becoming more and more like the radical animal rights movement in its willingness to try to…
oracknows | August 1, 2007How low will Andrew Wakefield supporters go in protecting the discredited and disgraced doctor whose shoddy and biased research sparked an antivaccination hysteria that led to falling vaccination rates in the U.K. and the subsequent return of measles and mumps?
This low.
Yes, it's a Wakefield apologist website. It misrepresents the science; whines about the hearings in the U.K. looking at Wakefield's dubious science, unreported conflicts of interest, and parrots the antivaccination lies that the MMR vaccine and thimerosal on vaccines causse autism.
In actuality, the purveyors of this…