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Antivaccine nonsense Complementary and alternative medicine Medicine

No, Gardasil does not cause behavioral problems

Believe it or not, I frequently peruse Retraction Watch, the blog that does basically what its title says: It watches for retracted articles in the peer-reviewed scientific literature and reports on them. Rare is it that a retracted paper gets by the watchful eyes of the bloggers there. So it was that the other day […]

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

More atrocious antivaccine science promoted by Robert F. Kennedy, Jr

The latest study being promoted as evidence that vaccines cause autism is truly atrocious. Basically, like many epidemiological studies examining putative links between vaccines and adverse health outcomes, it’s mistaking statistical noise for signal. What’s odd about this study is that not a single statistician or epidemiologist appears to have been involved with its design or execution, although a lawyer, a health economist, and an investment banker were.

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Antivaccine nonsense Complementary and alternative medicine Medicine Politics Pseudoscience Skepticism/critical thinking

How should we deal with vaccine hesitancy, refusal, and antivaccine beliefs

As hard as it might be to believe, almost as long as there have been vaccinations, there has been an antivaccine movement, and as long as there has been an antivaccine movement, there have been parents who refuse to vaccinate. Indeed, in the 1800s, there were even groups with names like the Anti-Vaccination Society of […]

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Antivaccine nonsense Complementary and alternative medicine Computers and social media History Holocaust Holocaust denial Medicine Popular culture Pseudoscience Quackery Skepticism/critical thinking

An antivaccine activist explains how she uses Facebook reporting algorithms to harass and silence pro-science bloggers

I wish this post were an April Fools Day joke, but it is not. Three weeks ago, Skeptical Raptor and I wrote posts describing how a particularly vicious, nasty antivaccine troll named Heather Murray had successfully gamed Facebook reporting algorithms intended to report abuse in order to silence pro-science bloggers. It is, unfortunately, a tactic […]

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

One more time: There’s no evidence Gardasil causes premature ovarian failure

Here we go again. When you’ve been blogging for over 11 years, particularly when what you blog about is skepticism and science-based medicine, with a special emphasis on taking down quackery (particularly cancer and antivaccine quackery), inevitably you see the same misinformation and lies pop up from time to time. Indeed, those of us in […]