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Antivaccine nonsense Autism Complementary and alternative medicine Medicine Quackery Science Skepticism/critical thinking

What? Removing thimerosal from vaccines caused the autism epidemic?

The blog post of mine that arguably “put me on the map” in the skeptical blogosphere was my very Insolent, very sarcastic deconstruction of Robert F. Kennedy, Jr.’s deceptive pseudoscience-ridden bit of fear mongering that he called Deadly Immunity. It was originally jointly published both by Salon.com and Rolling Stone, a blot that neither publication […]

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Antivaccine nonsense Autism Biology Complementary and alternative medicine Medicine Quackery Science Skepticism/critical thinking

A manual of spectacularly bad antivaccine arguments

To say that the relationship that antivaccine activists have with science and fact is a tenuous, twisted one is a major understatement. Despite mountains of science that says otherwise, antivaccinationists still cling to the three core tenets of their faith, namely that (1) vaccines are ineffective (or at least nowhere near as effective as health […]

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Antivaccine nonsense Autism Complementary and alternative medicine Medicine Popular culture Quackery Religion Science Skepticism/critical thinking

The violent rhetoric of the antivaccine movement

I originally wasn’t going to write about this particular post, but the mass shooting in San Bernardino yesterday led me to change my mind. For those of you who either aren’t in the US or were somehow cut off from media for the last 18 hours or so, yesterday a heavily armed man and woman […]

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Antivaccine nonsense Complementary and alternative medicine Medicine

Ben Swann returns, and this time he’s got the CDC whistleblower documents

When it comes to blogging, sometime’s it’s feast or famine. Some days there are more topics and stories that I’d like to blog about than I could ever get to, given that I generally only do one post per weekday, while other days I seriously think about skipping a day because there’s just nothing out […]

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Antivaccine nonsense Autism Complementary and alternative medicine Medicine Quackery Skepticism/critical thinking

A pharma shill here, a pharma shill there, pharma shills everywhere!

If there’s one thing I’ve learned about the antivaccine movement over the decade-plus that I’ve been following and commenting on it, it’s that there are many flavors of antivaccine beliefs. These range from the “loud and proud” (and, invariably, incredibly stupid) antivaccine activists who aren’t afraid of the label. They’ll tell you that they’re antivaccine […]