[Orac note: Welcome back, my friends, to the antivaccine show that never ends. We’re so glad you could attend. Come inside, come inside. (Sorry, couldn’t resist.) Earlier this week, I published a rare guest post by a mole whose services were loaned to me by our great imperious leader Lord Draconis Zeneca (All hail!), to […]
The Vaccine Choice Empowerment Symposium is coming, full of antivaccine misinformation and dishonest conflation, and it’s coming to Orac’s neck of the woods. Should Orac attend, given that the misinformation will be black hole density?
Last week antivaxers Shannon Kroner and Britney Valas held an antivaccine quackfest known as One Conversation. It had started as a “balanced” debate/conversation/panel/roundtable, or whatever, but rapidly devolved into an antivaccine crankfest as the pro-vaccine scientists invited declined. A brave minion attended and is now reporting back.
One Conversation was originally sold as a public debate or discussion about vaccine that would represent “both sides.” When the real scientists who had been enticed by Britney Valas and Shannon Kroner’s seeming sincerity found out about the antivaxers on the panel and just what they do and believe, things fell apart. Now what’s left is an antivaccine crankiest.
Barbara Loe Fisher, Joe Mercola, and other antivaxers frequently deny that the flu is dangerous and that all the promotion of flu vaccines every year is a plot by big pharma to make money based on fear. The CDC argues otherwise, reporting that influenza mortality last season was higher than iit’s been in decades. Roughly 80,000 people are estimated to have died last season from influenza or complications from the flu.
