polio vaccine
CNBC publishes an antivaccine press release from the Weston A. Price Foundation and Leslie Manookian
oracknows | March 5, 2015One of the things I've noticed over the last decade of covering pseudoscience and quackery from a skeptical point of view is that no pseudoscientific trope ever really dies. This is particularly true of antivaccine tropes. No matter how many times this piece or that of antivaccine misinformation is slapped down, sooner or later it always resurfaces. Indeed, I remember one article that I've seen resurface on several occasions that inevitably bears a title that is some variation of a statement that a "new study vindicates Andrew Wakefield." Every time that article pops up, various antivaccine…
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…