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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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Biology Medicine Physics Popular culture Science

Did "electromagnetic hypersensitivity" lead to the suicide of a teenage girl?

Blog topics seem to come in waves, where I’ll be stuck on more deeply examining a topic for days, only to have that topic dry up. Sometimes, you, my readers, make me aware of a topic. This is an example of the latter case. It’s something I had been debating about whether to blog about […]

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

On skepticism, pseudo-profundity, Deepak Chopra, and bullshit

Of all the slick woo peddlers out there, one of the most famous (and most annoying) is Deepak Chopra. Indeed, he first attracted a bit of not-so-Respectful Insolence a mere 10 months after this blog started, when Chopra produced the first of many rants against nasty “skeptics” like me that I’ve deconstructed over the years. […]