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Antivaccine nonsense Autism Complementary and alternative medicine Medicine Quackery

Hero of the antivaccine movement Andrew Wakefield strikes back

The antivaccine counterattack against Brian Deer continues. As you recall, about a month ago British reporter Brian Deer published an exposé, a tour de force of investigative journalism that led him to discover that Andre Wakefield had not only had incredibly blatant undisclosed conflicts of interest (his having been in the pocket of trial lawyers […]

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Bioethics Clinical trials Complementary and alternative medicine Medicine

The justification for NCCAM: “What can be done to generate a better placebo?”

It’s probably an understatement to say that I’ve been critical of the National Center for Complementary and Alternative Medicine (NCCAM). Indeed, I consider it not only to be a boondoggle that wastes the taxpayers’ money funding pseudoscience, but a key promoter of quackery. Worse, its promotion of highly implausible (one might even say magical) modalities […]

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Antivaccine nonsense Autism Medicine Quackery

When the outbreaks occur, they’ll start in California

I may have been deluding myself when I talked about 2009 shaping up to be a bad year for antivaccinationists. It turns out that the antivaccine movement is succeeding. That’s right, a cadre of upper middle class, scientifically illiterate parents, either full of the arrogance of ignorance or frightened by leaders of the antivaccine movement, […]

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Antivaccine nonsense Autism Complementary and alternative medicine Entertainment/culture Medicine Movies Popular culture Quackery Television

I really wish this were an April Fools’ Day joke…

…but sadly, it’s not. Jenny McCarthy has struck again. Yesterday, given the release of Jenny McCarthy’s new book espousing antivaccinationism and autism quackery and the attendant media blitz the antivaccine movement has organized to promote it, I predicted that a wave of stupid is about to fall upon our great nation. Well, the stupid has […]

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Antivaccine nonsense Autism Medicine

The mindset of an antivaccinationist revealed, courtesy of Jake Crosby of The Age of Autism blog

Readers may have noticed that we’ve had a minor antivaccine troll infestation in a couple of previous posts. It’s no big deal of course, hardly worth my attention–except for one thing. That one thing is that a certain member of the antivaccine propaganda blog Age of Autism, for which no evidence that vaccines are not […]