Anthony Mawson
oracknows | May 18, 2017It looks as though the check has finally cleared.
You might be wondering what I'm referring to. A little more than a week ago, I took note of how a truly awful survey masquerading as a "study" had risen from the dead once again as two publications in a notorious bottom-feeding predatory "open access" journal after having been retracted after publication in a somewhat less notorious but similarly bottom-feeding predatory "open access" journal. Whether or not these studies were actually retracted the second time around is somewhat unclear. What is known is that they were on the Open Access Text…
oracknows | May 10, 2017Over the last couple of days, I've been writing about two incredibly bad "studies" by Anthony Mawson, an antivaccinationist and Andrew Wakefield fanboi, who first published one of them in a bottom-feeding predatory open access journal and saw it retracted. Then he appears to have divided the study up two minimal publishable units and had them published as two papers in a bottom-feeding predatory open access journal even lower on the food chain that the first, after having promoted its second coming among the antivaccine crowd. Obviously, I'm not going to go into the details of each study's…
oracknows | May 8, 2017[Editorial update: I woke up this morning to find out that the answer to my question in the title is almost certainly yes. The post has been quickly altered to reflect that. See below.]
Believe it or not, I overlooked something in yesterday's post about a putrefying, rotting mess of a "vaccinated versus unvaccinated" study carried out by an Andrew Wakefield fanboi named Anthony Mawson that purported to have found that vaccinated children have a much higher prevalence of neurodevelopmental disorders (NDDs) and and diseases not preventable by vaccines than unvaccinated children. I'll refer you…
oracknows | May 7, 2017Some posts I really enjoy doing. I'm so fired up by the topic that the words flow, and I finish a post in record time. Other posts are more of a chore, written not so much because I'm excited by the topic, but because I feel duty bound to address it. I feel the need to write such posts when, for example, a bit of pseudoscience has gained traction in mainstream groups and readers keep writing me about it, to the point where I finally give in. This is one of the latter posts. None of this is to say that I don't still do my best with these posts to explain and argue my points. Fear not, I'll get…
oracknows | February 24, 2017There are a thousand crappy studies out there carried out with the explicit (although often unspoken) goal of demonizing vaccines by "proving" that they cause autism. Indeed, over the last 12+ years that I've been blogging here, I've deconstructed more such studies than I can remember—or would care to remember if I could. Unfortunately, if there's one thing I've learned about some of these studies, it's that they're like the killers in 1980s slasher flicks. You remember them? Killing machines like Jason Voorhees or Michael Myers, who mowed through teens misbehaving (often by having sex) for…
oracknows | November 28, 2016I don’t have many “rules” per se about blogging, but one informal rule that I do live by is that I never blog about a study if all I can access is the abstract. In general, I insist on having the complete study before I will blog it, because to me the abstract isn’t enough. Basically, if I’m going to blog a study, I generally want to do it right and be able to read the whole paper, because that’s the only way to properly analyze a paper. I find this rule particularly important when analyzing the latest bit of antivaccine pseudoscience, especially because most antivaccine activists don’t go…