Antivaccine nonsense
oracknows | July 21, 2016I’ve discovered an antivaccine loon I’ve never encountered before. At least, if I have encountered him, I don’t remember it. Basically, it happened this way. Not having found anything that fired me up to blog yet, I was perusing my usual collection of sites, both crank sites (as in antivaccine, quack, and pseudoscience) and medical/scientific sites, seeing if anything would grab my attention. Oddly enough, I happened upon the antivaccine crank blog Age of Autism; even more oddly, for whatever reason, I haven’t really been paying much attention to AoA for the last few weeks. To be honest, AoA…
oracknows | July 20, 2016I’ve frequently said that a tendency towards pseudoscience knows no political boundary. For example, antivaccine views, contrary to common belief, are not detectably more prevalent on the left than on the right, as I’ve discussed on more than one occasion. It’s just that for so many years, antivaccine beliefs were associated in the media with crunchy, back-to-nature lefties, and still are to some extent. (I’m talking to you Jill Stein.) However, last year the battle over SB 277, the new California law that eliminates nonmedical exemptions to school vaccine mandates, and the Republican…
oracknows | July 19, 2016It’s always nice when I learn that a target of my—shall we say?—Insolence takes note of what I’ve written. Well, maybe not always nice. Sometimes that notice takes the form of attacks, such as those by our good quack buddy Mike Adams, who’s been writing mean and nasty things about me for over three months now, although I do note that he’s become painfully, tediously repetitive. It’s as though he’s not even trying any more. Sometimes, however, it’s someone less ludicrous and more potentially dangerous. I’m referring in this case to Del Bigtree and Polly Tommey, the producers of Andrew…
oracknows | July 18, 2016Back in December, I wrote about a phenomenon that I had observed from the very beginning of my sparring with those who promote antivaccine pseudoscience and thoroughly debunked idea that vaccines cause autism. It was a phenomenon that seemed to get a lot worse last year, almost certainly due to the impending passage and then passage of SB 277 in California, a bill that eliminated nonmedical exemptions to school vaccine mandates in the state beginning this month. So it was that I came to describe the violent rhetoric of the antivaccine movement, complete with examples of such rhetoric, as well…
oracknows | July 17, 2016Well, I've finally seen it. The things I do for my readers, the pain to which I subject myself by watching neuron-apotosing levels of pseudoscience, misinformation, and lies as antivaccine propaganda, in order to deconstruct them for your amusement and, I hope, education!
Yes, I've finally seen Andrew Wakefield and Del Bigtree's "documentary" VAXXED: From Cover-up to Catastrophe. Now, having watched Wakefield and Bigtree's "masterpiece," I can quite confidently say that it's every bit as accurate and balanced a picture of vaccine benefits and risks as Eric Merola's two movies about the quack…
oracknows | July 13, 2016One of the most insidious and oft-repeated myths of the antivaccine movement is that vaccines cause autism. Certainly, it is true that there was an antivaccine movement long before anyone thought of linking vaccines to autism. For example, in the the 1980s the DPT (diptheria-whole cell pertussis-tetanus) vaccine was linked to encephalitis and neurological damage, a scare that lead to a wave of lawsuits against vaccine manufacturers that threatened the US vaccine program. Congress replied by passing the National Childhood Vaccine Injury Act of 1986, a “no-fault” act in which vaccine…
oracknows | July 6, 2016There are reasons that I’m not a pediatrician. First, and foremost, I like surgery. Indeed, when I first entered medical school, my intent was to become an academic internist, but things didn’t quite work out that way. To my surprise, when I did my surgery rotation I liked it way more than I ever thought I would, even with the then 100+ hour weeks. (This was long before the time of work hour restrictions on residents or medical students.) Then, when I did my internal medicine rotation, I found it far less interesting than I thought I would. So when it came time to apply to residencies, I…
oracknows | July 5, 2016This weekend was the 4th of July, Independence Day. It’s the most patriotic holiday of all, at least for Americans. We celebrated it in the usual way, with parades, fireworks, the odd lost digit or two, and barbecues. Unfortunately, there’s another thing that the 4th of July inevitably brings on as well, and that’s the invocation of liberty to support dubious causes. Given what happened last year around this time in California, regular readers probably have an idea where I’m going with this. Yes, I’m referring to antivaccine activists invoking “rights” and “freedom” to justify their refusal…
oracknows | June 29, 2016One of the most reliable indicators of a quack clinic that I know of (besides its offering homeopathy and reiki) is the inclusion of “detox foot bath” treatments on its roster of services. Detox foot baths, whatever the brand, are of a piece with other “detoxification” pseudoscience involving the feet, such as Kinoki foot pads. Basically, the idea is that you can some how remove toxins through the soles of your feet using either a nice mineral bath with a weak electrical current passed through it or a foot pad. Inevitably, nasty looking stuff is seen apparently coming out of the feet. In the…
oracknows | June 22, 2016Yesterday, I took note of a meeting of advocates and lawyers with Rep. Jason Chaffetz (R-UT), the chair of the House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform (OGR), which makes him a very powerful Congressman. The group that met with him included Del Bigtree, the producer of Andrew Wakefield’s antivaccine propagandafest of a “documentary” VAXXED: From Cover-up to Catastrophe; Levi Quackenboss, the pseudonymous blogger best known recently for getting into a fight over vaccine evidence with a 12-year-old and losing badly, leading her to try to dox the child and look even worse as a result;…
oracknows | June 21, 2016I sense a disturbance in the antivaccine force. I had meant to write about it the other day, but other things intervened. Really, there’s so much pseudoscience out there at times that on some days it’s hard to decide what to tackle, and sometimes I feel as though I’m writing about vaccines too much. However, this time around I felt as though I couldn’t ignore this one because it involves two highly annoying and fact-challenged antivaccine activists and an attempt to influence a Congressional Representative.
The annoying antivaccine activists are Del Bigtree, the producer of Andrew Wakefield’s…
oracknows | June 15, 2016I sensed a disturbance in the antivaccine (i.e, the dark) side of the Force yesterday. No matter where I wandered online and on social media, I kept running into a new article, an article by Neil Z. Miller about vaccines. For example, the merry band of antivaccine propagandists over at Age of Autism seem to like Miller’s article very, very much. So did the vaccine truthers over at—where else?—VacTruth.org. I kept seeing it on Facebook and Twitter, too.
Even though the current vaccine schedule is safe and effective as well as evidence-based and the claim that we give too many vaccines too soon…
oracknows | June 13, 2016Last week, I noted with great approval how a 12-year-old boy named Marco Arturo made a pro-vaccine video that was short, simple, and effective. Even better, it was as Insolent as anything Orac could expect to manage, making it that much more delicious. Indeed, I can’t resist including it again for those of you who haven’t seen it yet:
This video went viral, and, not surprisingly, antivaccine activists, particularly one antivaccine blogger, were not pleased. Oh, no. Not pleased at all. In response to Arturo’s video, he received a fair amount of abuse online. One blogger in particular, the…
oracknows | June 10, 2016A couple of days ago, I told the tale of a really bright and justifiably snarky 12-year-old boy named Marco Arturo, who posted a video of himself on Facebook with the caption “Vaccines DO cause autism”:
I know I posted that video just two days ago, but it’s so epic that I can’t resist posting it again, particularly given how it went viral and how its going viral drove antivaccinationists out of their minds. They posted online attacks that included comments like:
“I want to punt Marco in the jugular though honestly. ?“ (As if the laughing emoticon makes up for expressing the desire to kick…
oracknows | June 6, 2016One major thing that differentiated science-based medicine (SBM) from alternative medicine and quackery is that in SBM there is a generally accepted standard of care. This was even the case back in the days before the proliferation of evidence-based guidelines, in which professional societies and expert panels try their best to synthesize what is often an unwieldy mass of sometimes conflicting studies into guidelines on best care practices for different conditions. True, back then there was wider latitude because each physician was largely left to fend for himself in applying the medical…
oracknows | May 30, 2016Andrew Wakefield, his claims to the contrary, is antivaccine to the core. To be honest, I’m not sure if he was always antivaccine. After all, around 20 years ago when he was doing his “research” into whether the MMR vaccine causes autism, he was being generously funded by a barrister seeking to sue vaccine manufacturers and he was developing a competing measles vaccine (for which he filed for a patent) that would be unlikely to be profitable unless the MMR became discredited. In retrospect, knowing what I know now about these aspects of Wakefield’s “research,” I consider it highly likely that…
oracknows | May 25, 2016There's always been a major thread of distrust of the medical profession in the African-American community, understandably so given the history of abuses such as the Tuskegee Syphilis Experiment, in which the natural progression of untreated syphilis was studied in African-American men for 40 years. It’s not just that experiment that’s responsible, either. During the time of slavery, slaves often served as the subjects of medical experimentation. Dr. Crawford Long, for instance, conducted most of his early experiments with ether on slaves, while Dr. Walter F. Jones used slaves to test a…
oracknows | May 23, 2016Sigh. Here we go again. Robert De Niro is letting his antivaccine freak flag fly again, this time even higher than usual, by revealing that in the wake of the antivaccine debacle at his Tribeca Film Festival he is going to make his very own documentary about vaccines. It’s the continuation of a process that, depressingly, revealed Robert De Niro to be perhaps the biggest A-list antivaccine celebrity out there.
First, a bit of background to bring newbies up to speed. A couple of months ago, science-based medicine advocates were scratching their heads over news that the Tribeca Film Festival…
oracknows | May 13, 2016It’s been a while since I paid attention to the movie, but the publicity among the antivaccine movement for Andrew Wakefield’s and Del Bigtree’s movie VAXXED: From Cover-Up to Catastrophe continues apace. Sadly, I missed my opportunity to see Bigtree himself doing a Q&A for the movie when it rolled through Detroit a a week and a half ago, mainly (1) the evening Del Bigtree and Polly Tommey rolled through my neck of the woods happened to coincide with a day that I had to drive to Saginaw for a 7:30 AM talk (hint: it’s nearly a two hour drive from where I live) and then had to give a talk…
oracknows | May 10, 2016It’s no secret that I’m a big fan of John Oliver. When my aging body allows me to stay awake late enough on Sunday nights and there’s a new episode on, I’ll almost always be watching. Since starting his own show Last Week Tonight With John Oliver on HBO, Oliver’s become quite the expert at using humor to explain and bring attention to injustices that are widely ignored and to skewer politicians and blowhards.
This Sunday, he turned his attention on science reporting:
I certainly would have written about this for yesterday, except that at 11:30 PM on Sunday night there’s only one place for…