autism
Is Sharyl Attkisson feeling the heat over her irresponsible reporting of the Alex Spourdalakis case?
oracknows | September 6, 2013Yesterday, I did a bit of navel gazing about how cranks, quacks, and antivaccinationists have a penchant for attacking skeptics at work in order to try to intimidate them into silence. Reading the post over again, I realize that it came across perhaps more whiny than it should have, but I guess I was just in that sort of mood when I wrote it. One thing that I didn't discuss, though, is how attacks like this have traditionally been a very reliable indication that that I'm on the right track with respect to the quackery being called out. When I write my usual, run-of-the-mill posts about…
oracknows | September 4, 2013Antivaccinationists, quacks, and apologists for antivaccinationists and quacks (but I repeat myself) seem to have an illusion that I'm just swimming in pharma lucre, that I sit in my underwear grinding out magnum opus-worthy after magnum opus-worthy blog posts, all so that I can rake in the cash hand over fist, lead a life of pure luxury, and enjoy ruthlessly crushing any hint of dissent regarding science-based medicine. Even if that assessment were completely true, as Lord Draconis Zeneca tells us that it is, it's not all easy being a prolific, logorrheic pharma shill servilely doing the…
Sharyl Attkisson and CBS News: Lying by omission about the murder of autistic teen Alex Spourdalakis
oracknows | September 1, 2013The damaged done by the antivaccine movement is primarily in how it frightens parents out of vaccinating using classic denialist tactics of spreading fear, uncertainty and doubt (FUD). Indeed, as has been pointed out many times before, antivaccinationists are often proud of their success in discouraging parents from vaccinating, with one leader of the antivaccine movement even going to far as to characterize his antivaccine "community, held together with duct tape and bailing wire," as being in the "early to middle stages of bringing the U.S. vaccine program to its knees." Meanwhile, just…
oracknows | August 27, 2013If there's one thing antivaccinationists hate having pointed out to them, it's that they are antivaccine. If you really want to drive an antivaccinationist up the wall, point out that they are antivaccine. Sure, there are a few antivaccinationists who openly self-identify as antivaccine and are even proud of it, but most of them realize that society frowns upon them—as well it should given how antivaccinationists are responsible for outbreaks of vaccine-preventable disease. Moreover, most antivaccine activists really believe that vaccines are harmful. They're wrong, of course, but that doesn'…
oracknows | August 18, 2013I've made no secret of my opinion of Jenny McCarthy. To put it mildly, I don't think that much of her, particularly her flaming stupid when it comes to her promotion of dangerous antivaccine nonsense. To her, vaccines are chock full of "toxins" and all sorts of evil humors that will turn your child autistic in a heartbeat if you let those horrible pediatricians inject them "directly into the bloodstream" and in general "steal" your "real" child away from you the way she thinks vaccines "stole" her son Evan away from her. Indeed, among other "achievements," she's written multiple books about…
oracknows | August 6, 2013As supporters of science-based medicine know, in the woo-sphere, there is only One True Cause of Autism, and that is vaccines. At least, so it would seem. The idea that vaccines cause autism is based largely on anecdotes tinged with confirmation bias and selective memory mixed with a massive confusing of correlation with causation whereby the increase in autism prevalence over the last twenty years appears to correlate with an expansion of the vaccine schedule. Of course, as skeptics know, correlation does not necessarily equal causation, and I've often asked the question why it has to be the…
oracknows | August 4, 2013Here we go again.
The "Holy Grail" (well, a "holy grail") of the antivaccine movement is to have a "vaccinated versus unvaccinated" study performed, or, as it's frequently abbreviated a "vaxed verus unvaxed" study. They believe that such a study will confirm their fixed belief that vaccines are the root of nearly all health issues children suffer today, particularly autism and autism spectrum disorders. In particular, they believe that a "vaxed versus unvaxed" study would demonstrate once and for all that vaccines are the cause of the "autism epidemic." Hilariously, a few years back, the…
oracknows | August 2, 2013"Alternative medicine," so-called "complementary and alternative medicine" (CAM), or, as it's become fashionable to call it, "integrative medicine" is a set of medical practices that are far more based on belief than science. As my good bud and collaborator Mark Crislip so pointedly reminded us last week, CAM is far more akin to religion than science-based medicine (SBM). However, as I've discussed more times than I can remember over the years, both here and at my not-so-super-secret-other blog, CAM practitioners and advocates, despite practicing what is in reality mostly pseudoscience-based…
oracknows | August 1, 2013After a brief foray yesterday into discussing atheism, tone deafness, and the Holocaust (how's that for an odd combination?), I'm ready to get back to more—shall we say?—conventional topics. One topic that's been popping up at that other wretched hive of scum and antivaccine quackery (one of the ones other than Age of Autism) reveals something about the antivaccine movement that I find educational. Specifically, it has to do with how, once a parent has drunk deeply of the antivaccine Kool Aid, she behaves in a rather cult-like manner. I'll show you what I mean, and the post that best…
oracknows | July 29, 2013You might find this hard to believe, but sometimes I find the antivaccine crank blog Age of Autism to be useful. Obviously, I don't find it useful in the same way that its editors think it is useful. Those paragons of the arrogance of ignorance and fetishism of hatred of science-based medicine don't actually teach me anything about vaccines and autism. The torrents of pseudoscience, quackery, conspiracy mongering, and hostility do, however, serve their purpose. They keep my finger on the pulse of the "autism biomed" movement and what the latest "autism biomed" quackery du jour is. It looks…
oracknows | July 19, 2013I promised myself that I was done writing about Jenny McCarthy this week. Two posts, a lengthy one and a brief one, lamenting her being hired for a national daytime talk show was, in my view, enough. Unfortunately, something's happened that makes me want to make like Arnold Schwarzenegger in that famous scene from the 1980s action flick Commando, in which he had promised one villain that he would kill him last. Later in the film while holding this same villain over a cliff, Arnold says, "Remember when I promised I would kill you last? I lied."
Except that I wasn't lying at the time. I really…
oracknows | July 17, 2013Sometimes, the mainstream press gets it (mostly) right, and Jake Tapper actually got it right in a report on CNN yesterday about Jenny McCarthy's having been hired by ABC as a regular on The View. Although I don't like how Jake Tapper describes Generation Rescue as an "autism organization" (it is clearly an antivaccine group), and he perhaps didn't rebut Jenny's ludicrous claim that she is "not antivaccine" but rather "pro-safe vaccine" (seriously, he showed McCarthy's 2008 antivaccine protest in Washington and didn't even pick the most inflammatory signs as a counterpoint to McCarthy's…
oracknows | July 10, 2013Like Steve, I'm off to The Amazing Meeting today. I don't know how much I'll be posting, but, as Han Solo so famously said, "Hey, it's me." I'm sure I won't be able to resist. In any case, I'll be taking part in the Science-Based Medicine workshop tomorrow, and, for the first time ever, I'll be giving a talk on the main stage on Saturday, as half of a tag team with Bob Blaskiewicz slicing and dicing our favorite cancer doctor Stanislaw Burzynski. That will be followed by a panel on—what else?—science-based medicine and how to take on the cranks, quacks, and dubious in medicine.
In any case,…
oracknows | July 8, 2013I don't know why I'm interested in this, to the point where I'm on my sixth post about it since February. I sometimes even ask myself that very question, because taking an admittedly somewhat perverse interest in the internecine feuds among antivaccinationists. Maybe it's a bit of schadenfreude. Maybe it's just me. Whatever the reason, the ongoing feud between Jake "Boy Wonder" Crosby and his former mentors and allies in the antivaccine movement keeps bringing me back for more, as it did last week after a couple of months away. Maybe it's because when the antivaccine movement is fighting…
oracknows | June 30, 2013There's a general rule that whenever you see two enemies fighting with each other that you should generally just let them. Of course, some might argue, as Gandalf did about Saruman and Sauron, that the winner of the fight would emerge stronger and free of doubt, making him harder to conquer. Fortunately, I don't think this will be a problem in this case in the battle I'm about to discuss. There's also the saying that the enemy of my enemy is my friend, but unfortunately I don't think that that saying applies here either. In this case, it's a question of which of the two combatants I consider…
oracknows | June 28, 2013A little more than a week ago, I took note of Dr. Paul Offit's new book, Do You Believe in Magic? The Sense and Nonsense of Alternative Medicine and a story in which he was featured in USA Today about the nonsense that is alternative medicine. The news story coincided with the release of Paul Offit's book, which of course led me to express my admiration for not only Offit's ability to write good books about topics that interest me but to garner the publicity of a major story in a national newspaper published the same day his book was released. No wonder he drives the antivaccine lunatic…
oracknows | June 27, 2013Antivaccinationists endanger public health. They deny to high heaven that that is what they do, but they are deluding themselves. Their fear mongering about vaccines, in which vaccines in general or specific ingredients are portrayed as causing autism and a wide variety of chronic diseases, despite study after study failing to find even a whiff of a hint of a correlation between vaccines or vaccine ingredients and autism, have resulted in precipitous declines in vaccination rates in some areas and contributed to an increase in the distrust of vaccines by parents. In the US, although overall…
oracknows | June 25, 2013Once again, real life, mainly the eternal search (i.e., groveling) for grant money to keep my lab going, interferes with unreal life. Three grant applications due the same week will do that. Hopefully this will be the last time for a while, at least until unreal life might interfere with unreal life in a couple of weeks at TAM.
In the meantime, it occurs to me. With the recent reacquaintance of skeptical bloggers with the amazing antivaccine crankery that is Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. (specifically, when he decided to use Holocaust analogies for vaccines and autism), I thought it might be fun to…
oracknows | June 20, 2013Every so often, I like to try to get into the mind of an antivaccine crank, a quack, or crank of another variety, because understanding what makes cranks tick (at least, as much as I can given that I'm not one) can be potentially very useful in my work trying to counter them. On the one hand, it's not easy, because understanding conspiracy theorists, really bad science, and a sense of persecution shared by nearly all cranks doesn't come natural to me, but it's a useful exercise, and I encourage all of you to do it from time to time. While it might not be possible (or even desirable) to "walk…
oracknows | June 17, 2013It's been a while since I've written about MMS. You remember MMS, don't you? It's an abbreviation for "miracle mineral solution," a solution first promoted by a man who is inaptly named Jim Humble. Basically, as I've described in multiple blog posts, MMS is bleach, specifically chlorine dioxide (ClO2). I first became acutely aware of it a little more than a year ago, when I noticed that the antivaccine autism biomed quackfest known as Autism One featured a talk by a woman named Kerri Rivera, who advocated using MMS to "bleach autism away," as I put it at the time. Of course, Jim Humble doesn'…