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Antivaccine nonsense Clinical trials Medicine

Better late than never: The Dunning-Kruger effect meets an incompetent anti-vaccine “analysis”

It never ceases to amaze me just how ignorant of very basic principles of science anti-vaccine activists often are. I mean, seriously. Every time they try to post something, whether they know it or not, they end up making themselves look so very, very stupid–or at least ignorant. The Dunning-Kruger effect takes over, and people […]

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Antivaccine nonsense Autism Complementary and alternative medicine Medicine

Bernadine Healy: Even more hooked into the anti-vaccine movement than I had thought

Well, well, well, well… I always wondered about this. As I pointed out the other day, former NIH director Bernadine Healy died of a recurrent brain tumor. As regular readers know, over the last three or four years, she had become a convert to the vaccine/autism cause, as evidenced by her having been named Age […]

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Antivaccine nonsense Autism Medicine

The mercury zombie rises again…this time, in the grandchildren of Pink disease (infantile acrodynia) sufferers

Here we go again. Starting sometime in 2007, back when the idea that mercury in vaccines was the cause of the “autism epidemic” of the late 1990s and into the new century, I started referring to the “mercury/autism” hypothesis as being dead, dead, dead, as in pining for the fjords dead. Then, depending on what […]

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Antivaccine nonsense Autism Complementary and alternative medicine Medicine Quackery

R.I.P. Bernadine Healy

It came as a shock to me to find out yesterday that former director of the American Red Cross and former director of the NIH Bernadine Healy died. Chalk it up to my simply being ignorant of the fact, but I didn’t know, or had forgotten, that she had brain cancer. Interestingly, she had had […]

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Antivaccine nonsense Complementary and alternative medicine Medicine Quackery

“Tell both sides” strikes again in vaccine reporting

Over the years that I’ve been following the anti-vaccine movement, I’ve become familiar with typical narratives that reporters use when reporting on the vaccine fears stirred up by anti-vaccine activists. One narrative is the “brave maverick doctor” narrative, in which an iconoclastic quack (such as Mark Geier or Andrew Wakefield, for example) is portrayed fighting […]