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Antivaccine nonsense Complementary and alternative medicine Entertainment/culture Medicine Politics Quackery Skepticism/critical thinking Television

Keith Olbermann: Played for a fool by the antivaccine movement

Stick a fork in Keith Olbermann. He’s done. He has now officially degenerated into a liberal version of Rush Limbaugh, except that Rush Limbaugh is occasionally funny. Maybe he’s more like Sean Hannity, particularly in his apparent dedication to the truth, or, rather, lack thereof. Hannity detests liberals and will immediately attack on the slightest […]

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Antivaccine nonsense Autism Clinical trials Complementary and alternative medicine Entertainment/culture Medicine Quackery Television

Andrew Wakefield: Worst person in the world

I’m not as big a fan of Keith Olbermann as I used to be. Indeed, sometimes he strikes me as the liberal version of Rush Limbaugh, not to mention a blowhard. However, occasionally, he still has it, and when he’s on, no one skewers the dishonest better than he does. For instance, after a media […]

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Antivaccine nonsense Autism Blogging Complementary and alternative medicine Computers and social media Entertainment/culture Medicine Quackery

Another failure of the memory hole, thanks to the Internet

Poor Jeni Barnett. You remember Jeni Barnett, don’t you? She’s the U.K. radio host whose ill-informed rants against vaccines Ben Goldacre exposed so gloriously last week. Unfortunately, the price Ben paid consisted of threats of legal action for “copyright infringement” in the form of his having posted audio of the relevant segment of Barnett’s show. […]

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

Autism quackery invades my hometown, part II

Not again. I have no way of knowing if the media in my hometown happen to be more credulous when it comes to pseudoscience than average, but, given the number of stories referred to me emanating from Detroit and its surrounding suburbs, you’ll forgive me if I’m very depressed right now. For instance, we have […]

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Antivaccine nonsense Autism Complementary and alternative medicine Entertainment/culture Medicine Politics Popular culture Quackery

Why am I not surprised? It looks as though Andrew Wakefield probably falsified his data

Pity Andrew Wakefield. Actually, on second thought, Wakefield deserves no pity. After all, he is the man who almost single-handedly launched the scare over the MMR vaccine in Britain when he published his infamous Lancet paper in 1998 in which he claimed to have linked the MMR vaccine to regressive autism and inflammation of the […]