Vaxxed

There are many ways to combat antivaccine pseudoscience. Personally, I've chosen my favored methods, namely blogging, giving talks, and generally combatting pseudoscience on social media wherever I find it. That's not all I do (for example, I do have a couple of papers in the peer-reviewed medical literature designed to combat the infiltration of pseudoscience into academia), but it is where I put most of my effort. For one thing, I'm good at it. For another thing, it's fun. Also, it's something I can work into my busy schedule more easily. It even brings me a bit of notoriety now and then,…

About 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,…

I've written quite a bit about how our soon-to-be President Donald Trump has consistently expressed antivaccine views over the years, such as his oft-stated (on Twitter and elsewhere) beliefs that it's a "monster" shot that causes autism and infants get "too many" vaccines "too soon." I've heard Trump supporters who are pro-vaccine pooh-pooh these statements and claim that Trump won't be doing anything about vaccine policy because it's not a priority, an observation I counter by pointing out that Trump met with two of the biggest antivaccine "icons" there are: Andrew Wakefield and, just last…

This post is a bit later than usual, but there’s a good reason for it. Last night, I was in full food coma, having consumed the traditional Thanksgiving feast, along with a fair amount of wine. Besides, even a sometimes arrogant bloviator like myself, who uses a pseudonym based on a fictional, near-all-knowing supercomputer from a 35-year-old British cult science fiction series needs a break now and then. So today I’ll be, for the most part, slumming a bit today as I recover. What better place to look for material when you’re not interested in exerting yourself too hard than the antivaccine…

If you’re a skeptic dedicated to promoting science and reason, these are scary times. My country, the United States of America, just unexpectedly elected a racist, misogynistic, conspiracy-mongering, scientific ignoramus (who, by the way, is rabidly antivaccine) as its next President thanks to the political relic known as the Electoral College. In actuality, Hillary Clinton won the popular vote by close to 350,000 votes at the last tally I checked this morning, but now, as in 2000, thanks to the Electoral College, the candidate with the most popular votes is not President-Elect. Hillary…

As I write this, the 2016 Election is lurching painfully to its conclusion, with about a week to go. In my entire adult life, dating back to when I first reached the age where I started paying attention to politics in the late 1970s, I cannot remember a more bizarre or painful election, nor can I remember an election in which one possible outcome actually terrifies me. I’m referring to the possibility of Donald Trump becoming our next President. I’ve made no secret of my contempt for his xenophobia, his blatant sexism and misogyny, his change from using racist dog whistles to racist bullhorns…

Remember the scene in The Blues Brothers where Jake and Elwood are sitting in the Bluesmobile and come across a Nazi rally taking place on a bridge? Jake says with utter disgust, “I hate Illinois Nazis,” before driving over the bridge, forcing the Nazis to flee and jump into the river below. That’s basically the way I feel towards Michigan antivaccine activists. What’s even worse, though, is when out-of-state antivaccine agitators show up to give aid and comfort to our own homegrown antivaccinationists, which is what happened this week. I'd never actually drive a car at a bunch of them to…

I noticed the other day that I haven’t been visiting the merry band of antivaccine activists and bloggers over at their very own wretched hive of scum and quackery, Age of Autism, nearly as much as I used to. I have mentioned them in passing a couple of times recently, but nothing caught my attention sufficiently to be worth applying a bit of the old Insolence, Respectful or not-so-Respectful. Part of that has been intentional, as I no longer like to give them any more attention than I need to. Part of it was unintentional and more because, quite frankly, AoA has been mighty boring lately. I…

Last night was one of those nights where I was working late because I was asked to do a panel discussion on breast cancer last night. Such are the perils of being a breast cancer expert, I guess. That doesn’t mean I don’t have time for an uncharacteristically brief notice of some particularly dumb bit of antivaccine nonsense. Just as I said in yesterday’s post, such things are like waving a cape in front of the proverbial bull. Even worse, it’s a lawyer. Let me just put it this way. When I discuss the law, I’m very circumspect. I’m not a lawyer, which means that I am acutely aware of my…

In the early days of 2016, my attention was drawn to a local antivaccine doctor of whom I’d heard before but never really paid much attention to. What caught my eye was a blog exchange between this “holistic” family practitioner and former Scienceblogs blogger, friend, and local internist Peter Lipson over this physician’s blog posts attacking a local Jewish summer camp for children for its new requirement that campers must be up to date on their vaccinations as a requirement for attending. Not surprisingly, Dr. Lipson took the side of science and refuted the antivaccine nonsense that had…

This is yet another in the continuing saga of “I’m not antivaccine,” a continuing series of posts demonstrating how the oh-so-loud and vigorous denials of antivaccine activists that they are antivaccine are in reality either a lie or self-delusion. There have been so many previous installments, twenty, to be precise. There could easily have been ten times that number. These days, I tend to take note of only particularly egregious examples. This installment, however, will be a bit different than previous installments because the actual speaker is antivaccine. She even says so. Why, then, am I…

It’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…

Well, 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…

One 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…

Andrew 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…

There'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…

Sigh. 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…

It’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…

There is a disturbance in the antivaccine Force. I can sense it. Actually, it doesn’t take any special talent to detect this. You don't have to be some sort of pro-science Jedi. The evidence is everywhere. The most prominent examples of posts in the antivaccine crankosphere that tipped me off are on—of course!—the antivaccine propaganda blog Age of Autism, which references another blog’s post with blaring capitalized headlines, BREAKING: CDC WHISTLEBLOWER "DR. THOMPSON HAS BEEN HANDLED" SAYS DR. HOOKER AT MANHATTAN VAXXED Q&A. Elsewhere, He Who Shall Not Be Named (and to whom I shall no…

Several of you have noticed that a certain friend of the blog has been under attack from one of the quackiest of Internet quacks out there. Here is his response. The paranoia and stupidity are black hole level density. (Yes, instead of posting the whole thing, I've simply posted a link to our friend's discussion and rebuttal of Adams' charges.)