Antivaccine nonsense
oracknows | March 24, 2014After the last couple of days of depressing posts about the utter failure of the FDA to do its job protecting cancer patients from the likes of Stanislaw burzynski, it's time to move on. Given how utterly demoralizing it was to see the FDA, in essence, pass the buck when it comes to protecting cancer patients, I thought back to more amusing times. Oddly enough, some of these times involved Burzynski. Specifically, they involved Burzynski's propagandist Eric Merola, whose spittle-flecked rants never fail to amuse.
For example, a frequent charge made by Burzynski fans like Merola is that we "…
oracknows | March 20, 2014If there's one thing a budding skeptic quickly learns is that at the core of any good woo almost invariably lurks at least one conspiracy theory. At the risk of flirting a little too close to Godwin territory, this simple fact about pseudoscience, pseudohistory, and other non-evidence-based belief systems was first driven home to me around 15 years ago when I first started becoming interested in Holocaust denial. It didn't take too long for me to discover that at the heart of Holocaust denial are various conspiracy theories. Somehow the Jews, we are told, conspired to exaggerate the number of…
oracknows | March 5, 2014I don't know if I could be a pediatrician right now.
True, I probably don't have the personality to be a pediatrician, at least not a primary care pediatrician on the front lines. After all, if I did, I probably wouldn't have become a surgeon, much less a hyperspecialized cancer surgeon. One reason (among many, of course) is that I don't have the patience to deal with non-vaccinating parents, particularly parents with massive cases of Dunning-Kruger disease. The same goes for being a pediatric nurse practitioner or nurse, who are also on the front lines in dealing with the antivaccine…
oracknows | March 3, 2014
Last week, one of my favorite comedians and filmmakers of all time passed away unexpectedly. I'm referring, of course, to Harold Ramis, whose work ranged from movies like National Lampoon's Animal House (the first R-rated movie I ever saw, actually), to gems like Ghostbusters and and Groundhog Day. In fact, in retrospect, when I posted about Brian Hooker and the antivaccine movement trying to resurrect the hoary corpse of the conspiracy theory that the CDC is some how "covering up" data that would prove that the antivaccine cranks were right all along about mercury in vaccines as a cause…
oracknows | February 25, 2014I'm home.
Oh, wait. No. Well, I'm back.
Yes, the grant has been submitted, and I'm ready to get back to my hobby of science, skepticism, and, when necessary, laying down some Insolence, both Respectful and not-so-Respectful. And, it figures, too. While I was distracted with meatspace concerns, such as trying to keep my lab from running out of money, a task that's a lot more difficult today than it was ten years ago, the quacks and cranks have been out to play. True, they probably would have been out to play regardless of whether I was available to do what I do best. It just feels as though…
oracknows | February 11, 2014After yesterday's detailed analysis of a study that's being touted far and wide as "evidence" that vitamin C cures cancer, I thought I deserved a bit of a break. No, that doesn't mean I'm going to take the day off from blogging. (Obviously, as you're reading this now.) It does mean that I plan on doing a bit of slumming, though, and what better place to slum than on some of the antivaccine crank blogs? Besides, it's almost as though they want me to apply a heapin' helpin' of not-so-Respectful Insolence to their material, given that they've put up posts that provide such ready insight into how…
oracknows | February 2, 2014Antivaccinationists irritate me, for reasons that should be obvious to regular readers. The reason is that vaccine-preventable diseases can kill. Contrary to the beliefs of many nonvaccinating parents, who downplay these diseases as being not particularly dangerous, they are dangerous. Of these, one of more dangerous vaccine-preventable diseases is pertussis. That's why a story that popped up in my Facebook feed disturbed me so. Unsurprisingly, it's on that other wretched hive of scum and quackery (with respect to vaccines), Mothering.com:
So, my almost ten month old started coughing and…
oracknows | January 19, 2014The flu season continues apace around my part of the country. I wrote about it about a week and a half ago, in particular how people don't get their flu shots because they don't think they need them, because they don't think the flu is a serious disease. Two more stories illustrate this disconnect. For instance, here's a story about three people in their 20s who died of the flu in Michigan. The key heart-wrenching passage is this:
Ashley McCormick was 23 years old when she died December 27.
"We were like, 'This is the flu. How can this happen? It's just the flu.' I mean, everybody gets the…
oracknows | January 10, 2014I realize that everyone, is looking forward to my deconstruction of Mike Adams' quacktacular attempt at being a real scientist (well, some of you, anyway). I must confess, though. I was a bit disappointed. And, being like Dug the Dog (a comparison I so frequently make), my attention was easily distracted. I'm sure I'll get back to Mikey eventually, but he really did show such a lack of imagination in his "big announcement" that I'm actually having a hard time motivating myself to apply any "Insolence" to it. It just doesn't seem worthy of the effort it would take, at least not right now.
In…
oracknows | January 6, 2014Because of my involvement in this organization, I am hijacking my own blog for one day for my own nefarious purposes. To that end, I am republishing an announcement that originally appeared yesterday at a blog that a significant fraction of you are familiar with, but nowhere near all of you. And I want all of you to know about this, because I hope that some of you will join our cause.
I'm also going to add a few words of my own, because I can't help it. (As Hans Solo once said, "Hey, it's me.") The reason this new organization, the Society for Science-Based Medicine, is so needed is because,…
oracknows | January 1, 2014This is not what I wanted to write about for my first post of 2014, but unfortunately it's necessary—so necessary, in fact, that I felt the obligation to crosspost it to my not-so-super-secret other blog in order to get this information out to as wide a readership as possible.
I've always had a bit of a love-hate relationship with Facebook. On the one hand, I like easily how it lets me stay in contact with family and friends across the country, people whom I would rarely see more than once or twice a year, if even that. On the other hand, I have the same privacy concerns that many other…
oracknows | December 18, 2013Rats.
Everyone's blogging about all the studies showing (as if it needed to be shown yet again) that vitamin supplementation is not necessary for most people, nor does it decrease the risk of heart disease or cancer, and I can't, at least not yet. Why not? Because my friggin' university doesn't subscribe to the Annals of Internal Medicine! I know! Can you believe it? And, you, my regular readers, know that I never blog a study (or three studies) without having the actual studies in front of me. Abstracts alone, as I've shown time and time again, can be deceiving. So, until one of my partners…
oracknows | December 13, 2013Thanks, Daily Kos.
Well, not really. You'll see why in a minute, but first here's the background. There's a general impression out there that the political right is associated with the antiscience that includes anthropogenic global warming denialism, denial of evolution, and denial of aspects of reproductive biology that don't jibe with their religious beliefs, and that consensus while the political left's brand of antiscience includes antivaccine beliefs and fear mongering about genetically modified organisms (GMOs). Of course, as I've discussed many times before, it's more complicated than…
oracknows | December 10, 2013Vaccines against the human papilloma virus (HPV), such as Gardasil and Cervarix, seem to have a strange power over people who are otherwise reasonable about science and vaccines. For some reason, HPV vaccines seem to have an uncanny ability to turn such people into raging antivaccinationists almost as loony as the merry band of antivaccine loons over at Age of Autism. At the very least, they seem to make seemingly reasonable people susceptible to blandishments and tropes for which they'd normally otherwise never fall. Truly, Gardasil and Cervarix seem to be vaccines that make reasonable…
oracknows | December 4, 2013I'm not really happy to have to write this post, but a blogger's got to do what a blogger's got to do. The reason is that Katie Couric has done something requires—nay, demands—a heapin' helpin' of Orac's characteristic Respectful Insolence. Why should I give the proverbial rodent's posterior about who gets the Insolence today? The reason is that, when it comes to medicine, Katie Couric has done a fair amount of good. After the tragic death of her husband at a young age from colon cancer, she became an activist and spokesperson for colorectal cancer awareness, even famously undergoing her very…
oracknows | December 4, 2013As hard as it is to believe, I've been blogging nearly nine years. Indeed, my nine-year anniversary is coming up in just over a week. It's been almost a decade! Early on during near-decade that I've been laying down bits of Insolence, Respectful, and Not-So-Respectful, I developed an interest in the antivaccine movement. Antivaccinationism, "antivax," or whatever you want to call it, represents a particularly insidious and dangerous form of quackery because it doesn't just endanger the children whose parents don't vaccinate them. It also endangers children who are vaccinated, because vaccines…
oracknows | November 26, 2013As I noted a few days ago, the antivaccine fringe suffered a major setback in the House of Representatives when Rep. Darrell Issa (R-CA), chair of the House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform, canceled a previously promised hearing about the National Vaccine Injury Compensation Program, even after it had reached the stage of representatives from the antivaccine Canary Party giving a briefing featuring a boatload of misinformation about the NVICP and the Vaccine Court. Never let it be said, however, that the antivaccine movement can't pivot on a dime to latch onto the latest bit of…
oracknows | November 21, 2013Well, it's done. The server migration should be finished. I was out and about last night giving a talk; so I'll only have time for a relatively brief post (for me, at least). Once again, things happen while I'm otherwise...indisposed. This time around, it's something that warms the cockles of what antivaccinationists perceive to be my pharma shill heart. Normally, it's considered bad form to openly express schadenfreude, but I do make at least one exception, and that's when bad things happen to antivaccinationist plans, particularly after they've been crowing about them for weeks.
You might…
oracknows | November 14, 2013A couple of weeks ago, I noted a new trend among the antivaccine glitterati, or maybe I should refer to it as a new trope. That particular trope is to refer to anyone who has the temerity to stand up for science, support vaccines, and criticize antivaccinationists like the crew at the antivaccine crank blog Age of Autism or the moms full of the arrogance of ignorance over at The (Not-So) Thinking Moms' Revolution as "bullies." Part and parcel of this trope is to try to portray aggressively countering the antivaccine misinformation that flows from such sources in a seemingly unending stream as…
oracknows | November 8, 2013The other day, I pointed out that Rep. Darrell Issa (R-CA), chair of the House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform, was following in the footsteps of the former chair of the committee, likely the quackiest, most antivaccine Congressman who ever served in the House of Representatives. Rep. Dan Burton (R-IN). I guess that since Burton retired at the end of the last Congress, someone has to step up to the plate when it comes to pushing the antivaccine agenda. Issa is doing that by holding a hearing a year ago on "autism" that was in reality a thinly disguised excuse to castigate…