antivaccine
oracknows | October 4, 2012Here we go again.
A week ago, I tried to exercise my blogging powers (such as they are) for some good by rallying my readers to appear at rallies organized by the antivaccine movement against California Bill AB 2109. Fortunately, ultimately Governor Jerry Brown signed the bill, although he did try to insert weasel words in his signing statement to create a religious exemption from the requirement for informed consent from a health care professional before being allowed a philosophical exemption. All in all, it was a transparent and cowardly attempt to placate opponents and privilege religion…
oracknows | October 3, 2012I'm having a hard time keeping myself from laughing uproariously. I'm talking gut-wrenching belly laughs, the kind that are so intense that you have trouble catching your breath between paroxysms of laughter, the kind that threaten to force the contents of your stomach to go the wrong way, up and out. What, you may ask, is so hilarious that it would make me laugh so hard that it hurts? Let's go back to last week, when I urged my readers to rally the troops to counter a couple of different antivaccine activities, one of which will occur later today. This is the appearance of the Dark Lord of…
oracknows | October 2, 2012I suppose it's possible that there might be doubt that Rob Schneider has become a complete and total antivaccine wingnut. Possible, but not reasonable. After all, he's shown his cards and risen to prominence with his attacks on vaccine science made as part of his effort to oppose the passage of California Bill AB 2109, which was finally passed and signed by Governor Jerry Brown, but not without an attempt to water it down by adding a pointless (and probably unconstitutional) set of instructions for implementation in a signing statement. Leading up to this, Schneider had "made a name for…
oracknows | September 30, 2012I've been blogging a lot about California Bill AB 2109. Basically, it's a bill that was proposed as a means of addressing the increasing problem of non-medical exemptions to school vaccine mandates because religious and philosophical exemptions are too easy to obtain. Boiled down to its essence, AB 2109 would require parents to see a pediatrician or health care practitioner for a discussion of the benefits and risks of vaccines and, more importantly, the risks of not vaccinating. You'd think that the antivaccine movement wouldn't have a problem with a bill that in essence requires informed…
oracknows | September 24, 2012Every so often there are articles or posts about which I want to blog that, for whatever reason, I don't get around to. I've alluded before to my observation that blogging tends to be a "feast or famine" sort of activity. Sometimes, there isn't a lot going on, and, if there's one thing I've failed to learn, it's not to try too hard to find blog fodder when not much is going on and just chill out. On the other hand, one thing I have learned is not to try too hard to blog about everything you want to blog about when the blog fodder is hitting you fast and furious, as it sometimes does. It's…
oracknows | September 20, 2012It's feast or famine in the ol' blogging world, and right now it's such a feast that I can't decide what to blog about. For instance, there are at least two studies and a letter that I wouldn't mind blogging about just in the latest issue of the New England Journal of Medicine alone. Then there's SaneVax and Dr. Sin Hang Lee, who has apparently released another study again claiming that the anti-HPV vaccine Gardasil is contaminated with—horror of horrors!—DNA. A quick perusal of it tells me that it's probably the same principle of PCR that I've discussed before, namely that it's quite…
oracknows | September 20, 2012I was out late last night for a function related to my work. As a result, by the time I got home I was too tired to blog. (I know, I know, how can a Tarial-cell powered megacomputer ever get tired?) However, I did have enough time this morning before work to act on a tip I got from some of my readers, not having perused one of the wretchedest of the wretched hives of scum and quackery in a couple of days. It turns out that the chief propagandist at the antivaccine propaganda blog Age of Autism has unleashed the cranks on a bunch of high school students who made what sounds like an excellent…
oracknows | September 18, 2012As hard as it is for me to believe when I look back at it, I've been writing about the antivaccine movement now for more than seven years here on this blog and combatting it online for at least a decade now. I like to think that over the years my response has evolved somewhat. Back in the beginning, I used to be a bit more—shall we say?—insolent in dealing with antivaccinationists. It's an easy thing to do because so much of what antivaccinationists write and say is just so darned idiotic. Indeed, even today, I still have a tendency to slip back into my old ways when an antivaccinationist…
oracknows | September 12, 2012In common colloquial usage, there is a term known as "gaydar." Basically, it's the ability some people claim to have that allows them to identify people who are gay. Whether gaydar actually exists or not, I don't know, but I claim to have an ability that's similar. That ability is the ability to sniff out antivaccinationists. Over the last decade, I've become very good at it, so much so that it's almost instinctual and rarely wrong. My guess is that it's nothing more than my having internalized all the tactics and tropes that antivaccinationists like to use to the point where I don't need to…
oracknows | September 7, 2012On the antivaccine front, this year began with antivaccine hero Andrew Wakefield filing suit against investigative reporter Brian Deer, the BMJ, and Fiona Godlee (the editor of BMJ) for libel based on a series that Deer published in the BMJ outlining the evidence for Wakefield's scientific fraud in his (in)famous 1998 Lancet case series. This resulted in a massive rallying of the antivaccine troops around Wakefield, as well as temporarily making him appear relevant again after so many much-deserved humiliations and defeats, in the wake of his having had his license to practice medicine in the…
oracknows | September 7, 2012Believe it or not, after nearly eight years blogging and around five years before that cutting my skeptical teeth on that vast and wild (and now mostly deserted and fallow) wilderness that was Usenet, I have occasionally wondered whether what I'm doing is worthwhile. Sometime around 1998, after I first discovered Holocaust denial on Usenet, and a year or so after that, I found the home of all quackery on Usenet, misc.health.alternative. From around 1998 to 2004, Usenet was my home, and that's where I fought what I thought to be the good fight against irrationality, antiscience, and quackery.…
oracknows | September 6, 2012I must admit, there are times when I see something that someone else has written and, in a fit of intense envy, wish very much that I had written it. This is just such a time, and Tony Ballantyne has written just such a piece. Even better, his piece, entitled If only..., was published in Nature! That's right, the editors of Nature itself agree (or at least thought it interesting enough to publish): No science for you! What are you waiting for? Read it!
Of course, it's all a fantasy. In particular, I like the part asking why so many people are proud to be "bad at math" who would be utterly…
oracknows | September 4, 2012About a month ago, I deconstructed a typically dishonest and deceitful attempt by that Overlord of Quackery on the Internet (in my opinion, of course), Joe Mercola, to claim that the acellular pertussis vaccine doesn't work. It was a typical Mercola bit of prestidigitation that, as so much antivaccine propaganda does, took a grain of truth (that there have been outbreaks among vaccinated populations) and ran with it to construct a fantasy world in which pertussis outbreaks are somehow an indictment of all vaccines, which, of course, don't work at all, ever, under any circumstances, anywhere…
oracknows | September 4, 2012Over the long weekend, I came across a bunch of things that in normal times I would have blogged about, but because I was trying to chill, work a little on the yard, and also work a bit on grants, I intentionally took Monday off of blogging. As I get back into the swing of things, work-wise, blogging-wise, and otherwise, I thought it would be a good thing to make sure not to miss at least one thing I saw that doesn't require a fill Orac-length discussion but should be pointed out nonetheless. It's a little blurb that appeared on the antivaccine website complaining about vaccination…
oracknows | September 3, 2012Why is it after a three day weekend, it always feels as though I have to "catch up"? After all, it's only one day more than the average weekend, and I didn't really do anything that different. A little yard work, out to dinner, a bit of grant writing, a bit of chilling, that's it. Maybe it's because pseudoscience and quackery never rest, while, my never-sleeping, computer-inspired moniker notwithstanding, I do. I have to, particularly as age creeps up on me. In any case, right before the Labor Day weekend, I felt a disturbance in the antivaccine crankosphere. It began Wednesday, with a post…
oracknows | August 31, 2012Here we go again.
Every so often, criticism of the antivaccine movement builds to the point where it extends beyond the blogosphere to enter the national zeitgeist in a way in which people other than blogging geeks like myself start to take notice. It happened a few years ago, when washed up actress Jenny McCarthy teamed up with the antivaccine propaganda group Generation Rescue to sell her story of how she believes that vaccines caused her son Evan's autism and managed to score an appearance on The Oprah Winfrey Show. It happened again three years ago, as preparations for the H1N1 pandemic…
oracknows | August 27, 2012I might as well lay it on the line right at the beginning. It's not as though it will surprise my regular readers given what I've been writing here, most recently about when Rob Schneider played the Nazi card to express his opposition to California Bill AB2109. It's a bill that does something very simple and very necessary; basically it requires that parents seeking a nonmedical exemption from school vaccine mandates actually visit a health care professional to provide informed consent before an exemption is granted. Yet, even suggesting that maybe—just maybe—nonmedical exemptions are too…
oracknows | August 23, 2012When I first started this blog, I had little idea of what I was in for. I thought I had some idea from having read a bunch of blogs and found role models whose blogging style I tried to emulate back in those early days, long before I developed the persona and writing style that most of my readers love and quacks and antivaccinationists really hate. Now that I've been at it for nearly eight years, there's very little that surprises me. Much of the quackery, pseudoscience, and nonsense that I see is stuff that I've seen before and possibly blogged about multiple times before. I'm starting to…
oracknows | August 17, 2012A couple of days ago, I did one of my usual bits of pontification about alternative medicine, this time around pointing out how religion facilitates the magical thinking that undergirds so much pseudoscientific medicine and how the belief systems that underlie so so much of alternative medicine resembel the belief systems that underlie religion. However, in retrospect, I suspect that I might have gone a little too far. Although the two share many aspects, alternative medicine is not in general a religion (with the possible exception of reiki, which, for all intents and purposes, is faith…
oracknows | August 10, 2012As the last full weekday of my vacation passes, I thought about whether I'd bother to post anything or not, given that I happen to be traveling. After yesterday's post, the subject of which was profoundly depressing to me because I hate it when quacks take cynical advantage of a grieving family to promote their antivaccine agenda, I thought I'd post something a bit more positive.
Nearly a month ago, I attended TAM, presenting there at one of the workshops and taking part in a panel discussion of "integrative medicine" (i.e., "integrating" quackery with real medicine). Leaving aside the…