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Antivaccine nonsense Autism Complementary and alternative medicine Medicine Quackery

Autism quackery in my second hometown

My first hometown, as many readers of this blog know, is Detroit, where I spent the first ten years or so of my life. My second hometown, as I pointed out a while back when a particularly loony city council candidate caught the eye of the skeptical blogosphere. Unfortunately, I just found out that there’s […]

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Antivaccine nonsense Autism Complementary and alternative medicine Entertainment/culture Medicine Pseudoscience Skepticism/critical thinking Television

Complain to CBS: CBS resident anti-vaccine propagandist Sharyl Attkisson sucks up to anti-vaccine pseudoscientist Andrew Wakefield

Watch CBS News Videos Online A number of you sent me this link. It’s to a video (above) of Sharyl Attkisson, CBS News’ resident anti-vaccine propagandist, putting on a nauseating display of sucking up to Andrew Wakefield over his recent monkey study, the one that I deconstructed yesterday to show it for the lousy science […]

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Antivaccine nonsense Medicine

Now there’s a cage match I’d like to see when I get back from Chicago…

…Mark Crislip versus Doug Bremner. Dr. Crislip calmly explains the evidence regarding flu vaccination and why it’s safe and effective. Perhaps the most important point there is this: So it’s a suboptimal vaccine. And that’s a problem. One, because it will make it more difficult to prove efficacy in clinical studies and two, there is […]

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

When you dismiss every scientific study, you open the door to believing anything

I’m back. If there’s one thing I’ve noticed in the nearly five years that I’ve been doing this blog thing, it’s that getting started again after taking even a few days off is hard. There’s a bit of paralysis that sets in. I get used to not having to think about what I want to […]

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Antivaccine nonsense Autism Complementary and alternative medicine Medicine Quackery

The anti-vaccine war on science: An epidemic of fear

Many have been the times over the last five years that I’ve called out bad journalism about medicine in general and vaccines in particular, especially the coverage of the discredited notion that vaccines or mercury in vaccines somehow was responsible for the “autism epidemic.” That’s why I feel a special responsibility to highlight good reporting […]