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Antivaccine nonsense Autism Medicine Quackery

Compare and contrast

I’ve spent nearly seven years and an enormous amount of verbiage writing about the difference between pseudoscience and science, between cranks and skeptics, between denialists and scientists. Along the way, I’ve identified a number of factors common to cranks and denialists. For example, two of the most prominent characteristics are a tendency to cherry pick […]

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Antivaccine nonsense Autism Complementary and alternative medicine Medicine Quackery

Another very bad day for antivaccinationists: Yet another study fails to find a link between thimerosal and autism

A little more than three months ago there came to pass a very bad day for antivaccinationists. On that day, in the prestigious New England Journal of Medicine appeared a study that was powerful evidence that vaccines are not associated with adverse neuropsychiatric outcomes in children. Not surprisingly, the usual suspects in the mercury militia […]

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Antivaccine nonsense Autism Complementary and alternative medicine Medicine Quackery

More antivaccination nonsense…but not from Bill Maher this time

Vacation time! While Orac is gone recharging his circuits and contemplating the linguistic tricks of limericks and jokes or the glory of black holes, he’s rerunning some old stuff from his original Blogspot blog. This particular post first appeared on December 21, 2005 Enjoy! When you blog about a certain topic long enough and post […]

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Antivaccine nonsense Autism Medicine

Danish investigator Poul Thorsen: Custom-made for the anti-vaccine movement to distract from inconvenient science

Here we go again. If there’s one thing about the anti-vaccine movement, it’s all about the ad hominem. Failing to win on science, clinical trials, epidemiology, and other objective evidence, inevitably anti-vaccine propagandists fall back on attacking the person instead of the evidence. For example, Paul Offit has been the subject of unrelenting attacks from […]

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Antivaccine nonsense Autism Medicine Quackery

The use of Poul Thorsen to distract from inconvenient facts about vaccine safety continues apace

AThe the nonsense from the anti-vaccine movement on the issue of Poul Thorenson, the Danish scientist indicted for defrauding the CDC of approximately $1 million in grant money continues apace… Just yesterday I pointed out how the anti-vaccine loons at Age of Autism were busily trying to poison the well over the Poul Thorsen case, […]