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Antivaccine nonsense Entertainment/culture Medicine

Another pointless anti-vaccine “protest”

Why do these things always have to happen when I’m out of town? As you might be aware, the anti-vaccine movement is very, veyr unhappy with the recent Supreme Court ruling in the case of Bruesewitz vs. Wyeth. Basically, the Supreme Court upheld the primacy of the Vaccine Court in adjudicating vaccine injury claims and […]

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Antivaccine nonsense Autism Medicine Quackery

Deaths from vaccines in Japan?

Confusing correlation with causation. Post hoc ergo propter hoc. These are two of the most common errors human beings make. Indeed, they’re natural errors that our brains appear hard-wired to make, and, without scientific training, it’s virtually impossible to avoid making the conclusion that, because two occurrences correlate with each other they must be related […]

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Antivaccine nonsense Autism Medicine

For the anti-vaccinationists out there: The results of a real “vaxed versus unvaxed” study

In many ways, the anti-vaccine movement is highly mutable. However, this mutability is firmly based around keeping one thing utterly constant, and that one thing is vaccines. No matter what the evidence, no matter what the science, no matter how much observational, scientific, and epidemiological evidence is arrayed against them, to the relentlessly self-confident members […]

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Bioethics Clinical trials History Holocaust Medicine World War II

Revisiting the issue of ethics in human experimentation

Progress in science-based medicine depends upon human experimentation. Scientists can do the most fantastic translational research in the world, starting with elegant hypotheses, tested through in vitro and biochemical experiments, after which they are tested in animals. They can understand disease mechanisms to the individual amino acid level in a protein or nucleotide in a […]

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Antivaccine nonsense Autism Entertainment/culture Medicine Television

The resident anti-vaccine reporter at CBS News strikes again

I’m not infrequently asked why the myth that vaccines cause autism and other anti-vaccine myths are so stubbornly resistant to the science that time and time again fails to support them. Certainly useful celebrity idiots like Jenny McCarthy are one reason. So, too, are anti-vaccine propaganda websites and blogs such as Age of Autism and […]