The University of Northern Iowa is hosting a conference on facilitated communication, despite multiple warnings from academics that it’s quackery and overwhelming evidence that it is the “facilitators” who are actually producing the claimed “communication” from nonverbal people and a history of producing false cases of child abuse. Why is UNI being so dangerously irresponsible?
Science is the most effective means of determining medical treatments that work and whose benefits outweigh their risks. Those who promote pseudoscientific or prescientific medicine, however, frequently appeal to other ways of knowing, often ancient ways of knowing from other cultures, and pointing out deficiencies in SBM to justify promoting their treatments. Do their justifications hold water?
A new study shows where in the US antivaxers are most likely to make measles great again, thanks to driving up nonmedical exemptions and driving down vaccine uptake.
Gayle Delong is an economist who thinks she’s an epidemiologist. Consistent with that delusion, her latest study of HPV vaccination is all amateurs hour, in which she misses a major potential confounder on her way to “proving” that HPV vaccination could be associated with decreased fertility in young women.
Antivaxers frequently try to appeal to antiabortion activists by claiming “fetal parts” are used in vaccines. In Michigan, they’re trying to enshrine such deceptive efforts into law in Michigan Senate Bill 1055, which would mandate “informed consent” regarding vaccines for which fetal cell lines are used to grow the virus. In reality, this would be misinformed consent and a strategy to frighten parents out of vaccinating.
