Antivaccine nonsense
oracknows | April 28, 2017I've been at this blogging thing for well over 12 years now. I know, I know. Sometimes it amazes even me that I been doing this so long. I also know that I've been mentioning just how long I've been blogging more frequently. Sometimes I worry that the blog will turn into nothing more than posts counting down the days since I started this whole crazy thing. Of course, the main reason I mention this is not so much out of a desire for repetition but as a way of expressing amazement when I find something new and/for bizarre that I don't recall having heard before.
So it was when I came across an…
oracknows | April 21, 2017Yesterday, I discussed a topic that has vexed me ever since long before I started this blog, namely the topic of how physicians are seduced by pseudoscience and ultimately embrace it whole-heartedly. The kinds of pseudoscience I've seen physicians embracing are many, including climate science denialism and creationism, but the ones that most interest me are ones that physicians should know better than to embrace. I'm referring, of course, to pseudoscience related to the medical profession, such as various forms of medical quackery (which, alas, have found all too cozy a home in medicine to…
oracknows | April 19, 2017Being a surgeon and physician, I've always been puzzled at how my fellow physicians and surgeons can become ensnared by pseudoscience and quackery to the point where they become proponents of various forms of irrational thinking. Examining "docs gone bad" has been an intermittent recurring theme of this blog going all the way back to at least 2005. Leaving aside obvious quacks, such as some of the cancer quacks I've discussed over the years, I've discussed a number of doctors who don't accept the validity of evolution, the most commonly discussed being Dr. Michael Egnor, the creationist…
oracknows | April 18, 2017If there's one thing about antivaxers, it's that they're single-minded beyond belief. No matter what the chronic health problem, it's always about the vaccines. To them, vaccines are always the cause. Autism? Vaccines must be the cause. Asthma? vaccines. Diabetes? Obviously vaccines. Sudden infant death syndrome (SIDS)? What else could it be but the vaccines? (Never mind that there's plenty of evidence suggesting that vaccinated children have a lower risk of SIDS.) That's how antivaxers think. Monomania doesn't even begin to describe it.
I was reminded of this yesterday when I came across yet…
oracknows | April 16, 2017From the moment that Donald Trump was unexpectedly elected President, I couldn't help but be concerned about what President Trump would mean for medical science and science in general. I was not alone in my concerns. Of course, now, five months later, we know that such concerns were quite valid. If funding is a primary indicator, then, if anything, my concerns expressed last November were understated. For example, in his first budget, Trump proposed cutting the National Institutes of Health (NIH) budget by 19%, and, then, not content with that, proposed cutting $1.2 billion from this fiscal…
oracknows | April 14, 2017As hard as it is to believe, I've been writing about the antivaccine movement for over 12 years now, and dealing with it online for close to 17 years. If there's one thing that all that exposure to the pseudoscience, logical fallacies, misinformation, and outright hatred spewed forth by antivaccine activists on a daily basis, it's that language matters. Antivaxers know this and are constantly trying to twist language to their ends. For instance, other than hard core antivaxers who are refreshingly honest, most antivaxers really, really hate being called "antivaccine." I like to think it's…
oracknows | April 13, 2017The Disneyland measles outbreak began over the Christmas holidays of 2014 and continued for several months into 2015, ultimately spanning eight states and two additional countries (Canada and Mexico). It also represented a seismic shift in the battle to contain the malign influence of the antivaccine movement in that the outbreak centered the Magic Kingdom made it possible for California legislators to do something that would definitely not have been possible before the outbreak: Pass a law outlawing "personal belief exemptions" (a.k.a. nonmedical exemptions) to school vaccine requirements.…
oracknows | April 6, 2017It's a strange world after all, and I'll show you why.
Last night, as I deposited myself on my couch with my laptop sitting on my lap, there to churn out yet another installment of the insolence most of you love and a few of you love to hate read, I had a Dug the Dog moment. The squirrel in this case was Twitter. Normally, although I do have a Twitter feed, my enthusiasm for it very much waxes and wanes. Although I do regularly post stuff, I can sometimes go days without contributing an original Tweet, leaving my feed fallow, with only automatic Tweets based on RSS feeds of my blogs as the…
oracknows | April 4, 2017If there's one thing about living in Michigan that is truly irritating, it is that the legislature is currently controlled by a bunch of right wing Tea Party-style Republicans, while the governor is Rick Snyder, someone who sold himself as "one tough nerd" and a reasonable centrist businessman but who's consistently refused to stand up to the worst elements in his party. Oh, and he was also asleep at the switch, contributing to the Flint water crisis. Add to that my state senator, Patrick Colbeck, who not only has antivaccine proclivities, but "questions" evolution and, of course, denies…
oracknows | April 4, 2017Last week, I took note of something that antivaxers hadn't done in nine years, specifically a "march on Washington." Back in 2008, Jenny McCarthy and her then-boyfriend Jim Carrey led a rag tag rogues' gallery of antivaccine activists on a march and rally that they called "Green Our Vaccines." The name of the rally, of course, derived from a common trope beloved of antivaccine activists that I like to refer to as the "toxin gambit." It's basically a Food Babe-like fear of those "evil chemicals" writ large in a claim that vaccines are packed full of horrific chemicals that are Making Our…
oracknows | March 31, 2017Yesterday, I wrote about an antivaccine "march on Washington." As is often the case with antivaccine rhetoric, if you listened to the people organizing the conference and planning to speak there, you'd think that they were fighting an apocalyptic battle for the very future of the human race. Certainly, Kent Heckenlively seems to think so. I'm not going to write about this march again, at least not today. It's too soon. I don't know how ridiculous, how pathetic it was, mainly because, as I write this, it hasn't happened yet. What I can write about is something I came across while researching…
oracknows | March 30, 2017About five weeks ago, I took notice of an event that seems to be getting the antivaccine crankosphere a bit riled up and excited. I'm referring to the so-called "Revolution for Truth" march on Washington being organized by various antivaccine groups, who, emboldened by President Donald Trump's long, sordid history of expressing antivaccine views, his meeting with antivaccine agitator Andrew Wakefield in secret in August, and his meeting with antivaccine activist Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. in January, really believe that now is their moment and that 2017 will be the antivaccine year. Thanks to,…
oracknows | March 24, 2017I've written before about how our vaccination rate here in Michigan are...suboptimal. Indeed, a couple of years ago, health officials were so alarmed at the increases in personal belief exemptions to school vaccine mandates that a new regulation was instituted that require parents seeking nonmedical exemptions to school vaccine mandates to travel to an office of the state health department in order to receive instruction about vaccines. They can still get their personal belief exemption, but not without first undergoing instruction. So far, it's been working reasonably well, with decreases…
oracknows | March 21, 2017When it comes to the measles, antivaxers love to repeat a series of talking points. One is that measles is not a dangerous disease and was considered a normal part of childhood 50 or 60 years ago. This is what I like to refer to as the "Brady Bunch" gambit, mainly because antivaxers who try to make this argument often invoke an episode of The Brady Bunch from 1969, Is There a Doctor in the House?, in which all six kids contract the measles within a day of each other. Their illness is played for laughs, with the kids shown playing board games and enjoying having a few days off from school,…
oracknows | March 15, 2017Some of you might have been wondering just WTF has been going on here on the old blog, given the relative paucity of posts over the last week and the "reruns" from the distant past that I've been posting. I address this question because I realize that not everyone reads the comments and it's quite possible some of you might have missed it, but here in Michigan we had an enormous windstorm last Wednesday that knocked out power to 800,000+ people. Unfortunately, Orac was one of them. True, we did get the power back over the weekend, but then, in a cruel twist of fate, we lot power again on…
oracknows | March 14, 2017It seems hard to believe that the Disneyland measles outbreak occurred more than two years ago. It was during the Christmas holiday of 2014 that an measles outbreak occurred centered at—of course—Disneyland, thanks primarily to unvaccinated children facilitating the spread of the highly contagious disease at the "Happiest Place on Earth." What made this particular outbreak so important, though, was that it provided the impetus Senator Dr. Richard Pan and Senator Ben Allen to introduce a bill (SB 277) into the California legislature for consideration. What made SB 277 unique and its…
oracknows | March 8, 2017I've been writing about a phenomenon that I like to refer to as "quackademic medicine," defined as the infiltration into academic medical centers and medical school of unscientific and pseudoscientific treatment modalities that are unproven or disproven. I didn't coin the term. To the best of my knowledge, Dr. Robert W. Donnell did nine years ago. However, I adopted it with a vengeance, so much so that a lot of people think I coined the term. In any case, I first began sounding the alarm about the infiltration of quackery like acupuncture, "energy medicine," naturopathy, homeopathy,…
oracknows | March 7, 2017Massive is the misinformation promulgated by the antivaccine movement, and many are its lies. For example, antivaxers claim that, in some way or other, vaccines cause autism, autoimmune diseases, sudden infant death syndrome (SIDS), cancer, and a wide variety of other conditions and diseases when there is no credible evidence that they do and lots of evidence that they don’t. One of the favorite tropes used by antivaxers to frighten parents out of vaccinating their children is known as the "toxins" gambit, in which antivaxers cite lists of scary-sounding ingredients in vaccines like…
oracknows | March 3, 2017The impetus for the creation of this blog, lo these 12+ years ago, was growing alarm at the rising tide of pseudoscience then, such as quackery, antivaccine misinformation, creationism, Holocaust denial, and many other forms of attacks on science, history, and reality itself. I had cut my teeth on deconstructing such antiscience and pseudoscience on Usenet, that vast, unfiltered, poorly organized mass of discussion forums that had been big in the 1990s but were dying by 12 years ago, having turned into a mass of spam, trolls, and incoherence. So I wanted to do my little part (and I'm under no…
oracknows | March 2, 2017I've never been a huge fan of the We The People (WTP) website, which was set up during the Obama administration to allow people to petition the White House and, if they receive a sufficient number of signatures on their petition, receive an official response from the White House. While I applauded the sentiment of wanting to provide people an online means of petitioning the administration and like that a petition receiving 100,000 signatures in 30 days would receive a response, I was disappointed by the results. For one thing, although 321 of the 323 petitions that reached the threshold have…