Categories
Antivaccine nonsense Autism Medicine Science Skepticism/critical thinking

Motivated reasoning and the anti-vaccine movement

One theme that I keep revisiting again and again is not so much a question of the science behind medical therapies (although certainly I do discuss that issue arguably more than any other) but rather a question of why. Why is it that so many people cling so tenaciously to pseudoscience, quackery, and, frequently, conspiracy […]

Categories
Antivaccine nonsense Autism Complementary and alternative medicine Medicine Pseudoscience Quackery Skepticism/critical thinking

More false “balance” on vaccines and autism

There’s so much horrible reporting on vaccines and the whole manufactroversy that promulgates the myth that vaccines somehow cause autism through a combination of confusing correlation with causation, bad science, quackery, and misrepresenting autism that it’s gotten harder for me to be sufficiently irritated to write about it. When I see yet another another example […]

Categories
Antivaccine nonsense Complementary and alternative medicine Medicine Politics

Blaming failure to promote anti-vaccine views on “progressivism”

Every so often on this blog I get in the mood to take on a post on the anti-vaccine propaganda blog Age of Autism. Over the three years of its existence, I’ve seen some truly bizarre posts, ranging from one blogger blithely discussing how he took his daughter to Costa Rica for stem cell quackery […]

Categories
Antivaccine nonsense Autism Medicine

Jenny McCarthy weighs in about Andrew Wakefield–with predictable results

The fallout from Brian Deer’s further revelations of the scientific fraud that is anti-vaccine hero Andrew Wakefield continues apace. Remember last week, when I wrote about the first article of the two-part series enumerating the various ways that Andrew Wakefield committed scientific fraud in putting together the case series that became the basis of his […]

Categories
Antivaccine nonsense Medicine Politics

The Supreme Court rules on Bruesewitz v. Wyeth and vaccine injury cases

Hard as it is to believe, it’s been nearly a year since I first learned that the Supreme Court agreed to hear a case regarding the legitimacy of the vaccine court. The long version can be found here, but the short version is that last March SCOTUS agreed to hear a case regarding the constitutionality […]