Anti-Vaccine
tsmith | January 15, 2015Measles has come to the happiest place on Earth. As of this writing, a total of 32 cases of measles have been linked to Disneyland visits that took place between December 17th and 20th. About 75% of the cases identified to date were not vaccinated, either because they chose to forgo vaccines or because they were too young, and at least 6 have been hospitalized.
A measles outbreak is a public health disaster, which can cost into the millions of dollars in health resources. You can be sure that public health workers in California and beyond are working overtime trying to identify cases, educate…
milhayser | December 16, 2013Katie Couric riled up the internet last week with her uncritical promotion of anti-vaccine viewpoints on her talk show. It was certainly a twist in the professional narrative of a woman who has undergone televised colonoscopy and mammography to promote cancer awareness. That awareness should have been front-and-center in her discussion of HPV vaccines as well, since HPV infection can lead to cancers of anywhere people put their genitals. Instead, Couric featured two mothers convinced that HPV vaccines had caused death and injury, respectively, to their daughters. On Respectful Insolence, Orac…
oracknows | January 14, 2013I sense a disturbance in the antivaccine Force, which is, of course, by definition the Dark Side.
Whenever I sense such a disturbance, there are a number of possible reactions that it provokes in me. One such reaction is alarm, as when antivaccine activists say something that is just clever enough to sound plausible enough that it might cause trouble. It never is, of course, but it often takes a close reading and some research to figure out what the game is and deconstruct the nonsense. Sometimes, my reaction is amusement, as when an antivaccine activist says something that is so hilariously…
tsmith | March 28, 2011There has been a surge of interest recently in science denial, particularly revolving around the issue of vaccines. Last year saw the release of Michael Specter's Denialism; in the last few months, three others have been released: Seth Mnookin's Panic Virus, Robert Goldberg's Tabloid Medicine, and Paul Offit's "Deadly Choices." More about each of them after the jump.
"The Panic Virus" by Seth Mnookin focuses on the general topic of media-fueled science denial, using vaccines as the case study. Like Offit's recent "Autism's False Prophets, Mnookin details a bit of the history of the anti-…
oracknows | June 30, 2010ORAC SAYS: Please note my disclaimer.
After the events of last week, I'm a bit sensitive when it comes to matters like the one I'm about to discuss. Having the anti-vaccine cranks over at the Age of Autism weblog trying to get me fired over my blogging has a tendency to do that to me. (The details are out there if you haven't heard of it; I will say nothing more of it here.) In any case, if there's anything the events of last week drove home to me, it's that a sina qua non of anti-science cranks like the leaders of the anti-vaccine movement is that, when faced with serious scientific…
oracknows | May 3, 2010It just so happens that I was up quite late last night doing--what else?--writing yet another grant application (well, two actually). Even though the grants aren't due until Wednesday, Tuesday happens to be my operating room day, meaning I need to get this done and buried by tomorrow afternoon at the latest. In any case, I had been planning on just posting a rerun or two, as is my wont when real life gets so crazy that even my rapid-fire blogorrhea is curtailed, and then someone had to go and send me something that merits at least a brief bit of Insolence. Try as I might not to get sucked…
oracknows | April 12, 2010Six days ago, celebrity spokescouple for the anti-vaccine movement, Jenny McCarthy and Jim Carrey, announced their breakup over Twitter. Some of us who have been following the antics of "Jenny McCarthy and Jim Carrey's Autism Organization - Generation Rescue" have wondered what this would mean for the pro-disease movement pushing the idea that vaccines cause autism. Would Jim Carrey still lend his considerable Hollywood clout, which is at least an order of magnitude greater than Jenny McCarthy's, to Generation Rescue? We didn't have long to wait. By Friday, Generation Rescue had completely…
oracknows | April 11, 2010It has now been nearly two months since Andrew Wakefield was forced to resign from Thoughtful House in the wake of his being found guilty of research misconduct by the British General Medical Council (GMC), the withdrawal of Wakefield's infamous 1998 Lancet paper, and the withdrawal of Wakefield's last grab at scientific credibility, his infamous hepatitis B "monkey study." After a period of silence, over the last week, Wakefield has started to pop up in the public eye again, most recently last week in an interview for an independent filmmaker that is getting wide play in the anti-vaccine…
oracknows | February 18, 2010Last night, it came to light from a posting on the Thoughtful House Yahoo! discussion group that Andrew Wakefield has apparently resigned from Thoughtful House. I have yet to see confirmation anywhere, although Brian Deer has chimed in that this comes as no surprise to him and that he suspects that Dr. Arthur Krigsman, Anyssa Ryland, and Jane Johnson are behind Wakefield's ouster. However, more interesting is this comment from Liz Ditz. In it, she points out a couple of interesting bits of background.
Tidbit #1 from 2008:
In 2007 alone, Thoughtful House saw 1,500 new patient requests -- or…
oracknows | February 10, 2010While I'm at it blogging about the trial of Anne Mitchell, the nurse who is being maliciously prosecuted for having reported a doctor who hawks serious woo in the form of colloidal silver for H1N1 and who also happens to be buddies with the County Sheriff, I thought it would be worthwhile to post this update from ABC News:
I also want to report report on the latest update I've received from the Texas Nurses Association, which is covering the trial every day:
THANK YOU to everyone who has contributed to the TNA Legal Defense Fund in support of Anne Mitchell. A number of donations have come…
oracknows | February 9, 2010Remember how I've been following the story of two Texas nurses who were fired and prosecuted on trumped up charges, first in September and then a couple of days ago as the case went to trial? Of course you do. I made it very, very plain that I view this malicious prosecution to be a horrific miscarriage of justice that will have a potentially grave chilling effect on nurses who witness physician misconduct and want to report it. After all, Anne Mitchell, RN and Vickilyn Galle, RN found themselves facing jail for doing nothing more than living up to their professional code of ethics when they…
oracknows | February 5, 2010Thanks to Andrew Wakefield, it's been pretty much vaccine week for me. Well, mostly anyway, I did manage to have some fun with Mike Adams and the immune system, but otherwise it's been all vaccines all the time this week. As I mentioned yesterday, at the risk of dwelling on one topic so long that I start driving away readers, I've just decided to ride the wave and go with it until it's over. Unless something blows up over the weekend, I rather suspect that, for all intents and purposes, it'll be over as of today and I can move on to other topics starting Monday. At least I hope so.
But there'…
oracknows | February 4, 2010I realize I complain periodically about when I get into what seems to me to be a rut in which I'm writing pretty much only about anti-vaccine lunacy. This is just such a week, when the news on the vaccine front has been coming fast and furious, first with Andrew Wakefield's being found to have behaved unethically and dishonestly by the British General Medical Council, only to be followed up a few days later with the news that the editors of The Lancet had retracted his 1998 paper, the paper that started the MMR scare in the U.K. and launched a thousand autism quacks. Meanwhile, the cranks…
oracknows | January 31, 2010
Looks like I picked the wrong week to give up sniffing glue.
Well, not really. Maybe it looks more like I picked the wrong NIH grant cycle to be submitting an R01. After all, the deadline for my getting my grant to my university's grant's office coincided very closely with the announcement of the General Medical Council's ruling in the Andrew Wakefield case on Thursday. As I pointed out in a brief post yesterday, the complete 143-page ruling can be found here (if you want to avoid AoA or Generation Rescue) or here (if you want to annoy J.B. Handley by showing traffic coming from this blog…