Josh Rushing takes on antivaxer Del Bigtree on Fault Lines and does what needs to be done. Although the report is not without problems, Rushing pwns Bigtree most satisfyingly.
Category: Holocaust
Antivaxer Dr. Gary Kohls strikes back against Orac in The Duluth Reader
Dr. Gary Kohls is an antivaccine doctor who writes for The Duluth Reader. After Orac criticized him, he decided to strike bacik. It did not go well. Let's just say that Dr. Kohls is good at hypocrisy and projection.
Are antivaccine groups “hate groups”? Not exactly, but the answer isn’t entirely no, either.
Recently, Dr. Peter Hotez characterized antivaccine groups as "hate groups," and antivaxer Barbara Loe Fisher took great umbrage, accusing Dr. Hotez and the public health community of "bullying" parents of "vaccine-injured" children. Did Dr. Hotez go too far? And what about Fisher's hypocrisy, given that Dr. Hotez has received death threats credible enough to warrant police protection and Fisher herself has sued her critics, in effect trying to bully them into silence?
The annals of “I’m not antivaccine,” part 25: We’re not antivaccine, we just publish posts about stopping the “Vaccine Holocaust”
Bloggers at the Age of Autism blog, like most antivaccine activists, vehemently deny that they are antivaccine, claiming instead that they are "vaccine safety" advocates. Their denials are belied by their having published many posts about a "Vaccine Holocaust."
The violent rhetoric of the antivaccine movement: “Vaccine Holocaust” and potential impending attacks on journalists
Antivaxers are planning on publishing the personal information of employees of the Boston Herald because the paper published an editorial saying that promoting antivaccine misinformation among a vulnerable population should be a "hanging offense." Meanwhile, overblown allusions to the Holocaust are going into overdrive. Same as it ever was.
Holocaust denial from the White House on International Holocaust Remembrance Day
I always wondered how low Donald Trump could go. Now I know. Only I fear this is nowhere near the bottom.
The annals of “I’m not antivaccine,” part 22: The Godwin of “We didn’t know”
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 annals of “I’m not antivaccine,” part 21: Oh, wait, maybe I am antivaccine after all
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 featuring her, given that …
The violent rhetoric of the antivaccine movement, “I didn’t really mean it” edition
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 …
An antivaccine activist explains how she uses Facebook reporting algorithms to harass and silence pro-science bloggers
I wish this post were an April Fools Day joke, but it is not. Three weeks ago, Skeptical Raptor and I wrote posts describing how a particularly vicious, nasty antivaccine troll named Heather Murray had successfully gamed Facebook reporting algorithms intended to report abuse in order to silence pro-science bloggers. It is, unfortunately, a tactic that I first heard about over two years ago, when antivaccine activists affiliated with what was then called the Australian Vaccination Network (AVN) used the same sort of tactics to target pro-science bloggers and activists associated with a group whose purpose was to counter the …