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Antivaccine nonsense Autism Complementary and alternative medicine Medicine Quackery

Generation Rescue and “Fourteen Studies”

About a week and a half ago, something happened that makes me realize that the Jenny and Jim antivaccine propaganda tour that I mentioned a couple of weeks ago was clearly only phase I of Generation Rescue’s April public relations offensive. About ten days ago, courtesy of J.B. Handley, the founder of Generation Rescue, who […]

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Antivaccine nonsense Autism Entertainment/culture Medicine Movies Popular culture Television

Fire Marshal Bill discusses vaccines and autism on The Huffington Post

After writing about a new low of pseudoscience published in that repository of all things antivaccine and quackery, The Huffington Post (do you even have to ask?), on Tuesday, I had hoped–really hoped–that I could ignore HuffPo for a while. After all, there’s only so much stupid that even Orac can tolerate before his logic […]

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Antivaccine nonsense Autism Complementary and alternative medicine Medicine Quackery

The anti-vaccine movement: Is it too late for scientists to bridge the gap between evidence and fear?

Hot on the heels of yesterday’s paper in Pediatrics showing that vaccine refusal elevates the risk of pertussis in a child by nearly 23-fold, a commentary in PLoS Biology asks what can be done to combat anti-vaccine misinformation. Entitled A Broken Trust: Lessons from the Vaccine-Autism Wars, it’s an interview with a professor of medical […]

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Antivaccine nonsense Autism Complementary and alternative medicine Medicine Quackery

Andrew Wakefield: The Galileo Gambit writ large in The Observer

I just don’t understand it. I just don’t understand how anyone can take discredited antivaccination loon Andrew Wakefield seriously anymore. In particular, I don’t understand how any reputable newspaper can actually take him seriously anymore, given how thoroughly he and his “work” have been discredited. First came the news in late December that at the […]

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Antivaccine nonsense Autism Medicine Quackery Science Skepticism/critical thinking

I guess it’s not just Andrew Wakefield who doesn’t do controls when running PCR

Remember a couple of months ago, when I discussed testimony at the Autism Omnibus trial that showed how Andrew Wakefield had failed to do the controls when running PCR that would have revealed that the results that he interpreted as the presence of the measles virus from a vaccine strain in the guts of autistic […]