Antivaccine nonsense
oracknows | March 13, 2016One of the most pernicious lies promoted by the antivaccine movement is a trope that I've labeled the "toxins gambit." Basically, it's the lie, oft repeated in hysterical terms, that there are all sorts of horrible toxic chemicals in vaccines, and it is those toxic substances that are responsible for the claimed adverse effects of vaccines. Now, it is true that there are substances in vaccines that can be toxic, but the toxins gambit completely ignores a little thing known as the dose-response curve or, if you want to go hundreds of years back in time, the admonition attributed to Paracelsus…
oracknows | March 11, 2016A couple of days ago, I wrote about a story of a sort that I've had to write about far too many times over the last eleven years. I wrote about the death of a child—but not just any death of a child, the death of a child who could have—should have—lived. The child's name was Ezekiel Stephan, and his parents are David and Collet Stephan. The reason that child should have lived is because he suffered from a disease that medicine can treat, meningitis. Unfortunately, his parents didn't take him to a real doctor. They took him to a naturopath, who recommended maple syrup, juice with frozen…
oracknows | March 10, 2016Nearly eleven years ago, back in April 2005, I opened my work e-mail (I was working at a different university back then) and saw an e-mail from someone whose name I had seen before, one Mr. William P. O'Neill. Opening the e-mail, I was shocked to find an e-mail to Orac; worse, the e-mail was cc'ed to my cancer center director, my division chief, and my chairman. In it, O'Neill outed me as Orac and was threatening to sue me over a post I did. Naturally, it was interspersed with accusations of my being a "pharma shill" and having lied about him. Now here's the odd thing. This is the post that…
oracknows | March 6, 2016I write about vaccines a lot here at Respectful Insolence, and for a very good reason. Of all the medical interventions devised by the brains of humans, arguably vaccines have saved more lives and prevented more disability than any other medical treatment. When it comes to infectious disease, vaccination is the ultimate in preventive medicine, at least for diseases for which vaccines can be developed. We also know that when vaccination rates fall, it opens the door for diseases once controlled to come roaring back. We saw this phenomenon with the measles a year ago in the Disneyland measles…
oracknows | February 29, 2016Here we go again.
When you've been blogging for over 11 years, particularly when what you blog about is skepticism and science-based medicine, with a special emphasis on taking down quackery (particularly cancer and antivaccine quackery), inevitably you see the same misinformation and lies pop up from time to time. Indeed, those of us in the biz not infrequently refer to such stories as "zombie lies," because no matter how often you think they've been killed they always come back. Personally, I like to refer to them as Jason, Michael Myers, or Freddy Krueger lies (or just slasher or monster…
oracknows | February 28, 2016Last week, I revisited a topic I first discussed in 2014 a couple of times. It is a topic that I find simultaneously amusing and depressing at the same time, specifically a private discussion forum known as Naturopathic Chat, or NatChat for short—or, as I like to say, Sh*t Naturopaths Say When They Think No One Is Listening.
Except, of course, as we know now, someone is listening—and has been for nearly a year and a half.
It was that person listening, who goes by the 'nym NaturoWhat, who originally allowed me a peak at the rank quackery regularly recommended by naturopaths for their patients…
oracknows | February 26, 2016About six months ago, I was highly amused to discover something called the Conspira-Sea Cruise, which I referred to at The Woo Boat. As I said at the time, file this one under the category: You can’t make stuff like this up. Certainly, I couldn't.
I've never been on a cruise. Quite frankly, the very concept of a cruise doesn't much appeal to me, at least not an ocean cruise. My wife and I have considered doing a Viking River Cruise, because a river cruise where you get to stop at multiple historic European cities and watch the countryside roll by while on the ship sounds far more appealing to…
oracknows | February 19, 2016One of the most frequent claims of supporters of so-called "complementary and alternative medicine" (CAM), which goes by the Orwellian name "integrative medicine," is that it represents "integrating" alternative medicine with science-based medicine to produce the "best of both worlds." Of course, when I think of the best of both worlds, I usually think of The Best of Both Worlds, which might well be appropriate, except that, unlike the case when the Borg assimilate a species, when science-based medicine is forced to assimilate quackery, the quackery changes it, making it weaker, not stronger…
oracknows | February 17, 2016My state is screwed up, and the epicenter of the fallout from the dysfunctional mess that is the Michigan state government is the city of Flint. As you probably recall, around the holidays a story that had previously been mainly a Michigan story broke nationally in a big way. It is the story of how a combination of the imposition of an emergency manager on the city, epic incompetence at the level of the state and local government, and outright denial of a problem for several months by the veyr state agency (the Michigan Department of Environmental Quality) charged with making sure that things…
oracknows | February 16, 2016Believe it or not, I frequently peruse Retraction Watch, the blog that does basically what its title says: It watches for retracted articles in the peer-reviewed scientific literature and reports on them. Rare is it that a retracted paper gets by the watchful eyes of the bloggers there. So it was that the other day I noticed an post entitled Journal temporarily removes paper linking HPV vaccine to behavioral issues. I noticed it mainly because it involves a paper by two antivaccine "researchers" whom we've met several times before, Christopher A. Shaw and Lucija Tomljenovic in the Department…
oracknows | February 10, 2016Last week, I wrote about how conspiracy theories have been flowing fast and furious about the Zika virus and microcephaly. Even if you didn't see that post (perhaps instead having seen this one), you've probably seen the news reports describing how last fall the observation of a large number of cases of microcephaly, characterized by an abnormally small head and delayed brain development, in Brazil led researchers investigating the problem to suspect a link to a virus. That virus, the Zika virus, as you recall, is a mosquito-borne flavivirus related to dengue virus and transmitted primarily…
oracknows | February 4, 2016It's an oft-stated cliche that our children our our future. That's the reason stories involving dire threats to children are considered so terrifying. It's why, for instance, Arthur C. Clarke's Childhood's End resonated so creepily. After all, as part of the end of civilization, a frightening change came over the children, who became far superior in abilities and mental power to their parents. Another example includes Greg Bear's Darwin's Radio, whose plot involves the human race being plagued by a new disease called "Herod's Flu," which causes pregnant women to spontaneously abort their…
oracknows | February 3, 2016I know I must be getting older because of Friday nights. I also know that I'm getting older because (1) there was no new post yesterday and (2) even today this post will look familiar to a significant number of our readership. Mea culpa, but trying to put the finishing touches on two R01 grants I've been working on takes a toll. Who knew? Things should get back to normal tomorrow or Friday at the latest. Be that as it may, let's get back to Fridays. After a long, hard week (and, during grant season, in anticipation of a long, hard weekend of more of the aforementioned grant writing), it's not…
oracknows | January 31, 2016Politicians and activists know that one of the most effective ways to discredit critics is to try to portray them as (1) being in the pay of someone else, such as a big corporation, or (2) part of an "organized" effort to criticize them, or (3) preferably both. That's why antivaccine cranks are so fast to deploy the "pharma shill gambit" and cranks like Sharyl Attkisson like to accuse their critics of "astroturfing." Of course, astroturfing, which is the practice of trying to make a public relations campaign promoting a message appear to originate organically from the grassroots rather than…
oracknows | January 29, 2016Michigan is a frustrating state to live in these days. Our state government has just shown itself to be epically incompetent in its handling of the Flint water crisis, which I've written about a couple of times before. Our legislature repealed our mandatory motorcycle helmet law, and as a result in this state motorcycles are more donorcycles than ever. Our state has historically had low vaccine uptake, to the point where outbreaks of vaccine-preventable diseases are too common, with pertussis returning with a vengeance. We have naturopathic quacks (but I repeat myself) trying to cure their…
oracknows | January 26, 2016Ben Swann, anchor of the evening news for the local Atlanta CBS affiliate and the face of his Truth In Media series of videos, thinks himself an investigative journalist and a truth teller, but much of what I see him reporting more closely resembles reporting as though done by a cross between Ted Baxter, Ron Burgundy, and Alex Jones. For one thing, Mr. Swann sure does love him some conspiracies, and he sure is susceptible to antivaccine nonsense, no matter how nonsensical. I first saw him in action nearly three months ago, when he credulously regurgitated the antivaccine talking points on…
oracknows | January 12, 2016I remember my PhD thesis.
In particular, I remember the years of work that went into it. I remember being grilled (with good, constructive intent) by my thesis committee a couple of times a year as I worked on it. I remember the many, many hours spend writing it. And, above all, I remember the hour-long seminar I had to give, followed by a couple of hours defending my thesis. The PhD thesis defense is usually the most stressful thing that PhD candidates go through on the path to earning their degree. Certainly it was for me.
Of course, the PhD thesis defense does contain a bit of an element…
oracknows | January 6, 2016Yesterday was kind of busy and a long day in the operating room rather drained me. So I only had time for a quick followup to yesterday's post on how Matt Carey obtained the entire document dump that the "CDC whistleblower" William W. Thompson gave to Rep. Bill Posey (R-FL), who then gave it to Alex Jones wannabe Ben Swann, who promised a story on it over a month ago but thus far hasn't delivered. Brian Deer, appropriately enough, pointed out some quotes that I hadn't really elaborated on sufficiently, as did Matt Carey in a followup post.
Back in August, Rep. Posey read an excerpt from a…
The CDC whistleblower documents: A whole lot of nothing and no conspiracy to hide an MMR-autism link
oracknows | January 4, 2016One of the stories dominating my blogging in 2015 was a manufactroversy that started in August 2014 when, after several months of rumbling in the antivaccine crankosphere that there was a CDC scientist ready to blow the whistle on an alleged coverup of evidence that vaccines cause autism, Andrew Wakefield, ever the publicity hog, released a video entitled CDC Whistleblower Revealed, in which he claimed that he had evidence of a "high level deception" of the American people about vaccine safety and revealed the "CDC Whistleblower" to be one William W. Thompson, PhD, a psychologist by training…
oracknows | December 29, 2015Vaccines and the antivaccine movement were in the news a lot in 2015. The year started out with a huge measles outbreak originating at Disneyland over the holidays last year and dominated news coverage in the early months of 2015. This outbreak had enormous consequences. It galvanized public opinion such that something I had never thought possible before, least of all in the hotbed of the antivaccine movement that is California, became possible. After a prolonged debate, the California legislature passed SB 277, a law that, beginning with the 2016-2017 school year, eliminated nonmedical…