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Antivaccine nonsense Complementary and alternative medicine Medicine Movies Politics Quackery

The violent rhetoric of the antivaccine movement, VAXXED edition

Back in December, I wrote about a phenomenon that I had observed from the very beginning of my sparring with those who promote antivaccine pseudoscience and thoroughly debunked idea that vaccines cause autism. It was a phenomenon that seemed to get a lot worse last year, almost certainly due to the impending passage and then […]

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

REVEALED: Disgraced antivax “scientist” Andrew Wakefield met with Donald Trump in August to promote his “CDC whistleblower” conspiracy movie

As I write this, the 2016 Election is lurching painfully to its conclusion, with about a week to go. In my entire adult life, dating back to when I first reached the age where I started paying attention to politics in the late 1970s, I cannot remember a more bizarre or painful election, nor can […]

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Antivaccine nonsense Complementary and alternative medicine History Hitler Zombie Holocaust Medicine Politics Quackery

The violent rhetoric of the antivaccine movement, “I didn’t really mean it” edition

It’s always nice when I learn that a target of my—shall we say?—Insolence takes note of what I’ve written. Well, maybe not always nice. Sometimes that notice takes the form of attacks, such as those by our good quack buddy Mike Adams, who’s been writing mean and nasty things about me for over three months […]

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

The annals of “I’m not antivaccine,” part 19: Del Bigtree and Polly Tommey edition

It’s been a while since I paid attention to the movie, but the publicity among the antivaccine movement for Andrew Wakefield’s and Del Bigtree’s movie VAXXED: From Cover-Up to Catastrophe continues apace. Sadly, I missed my opportunity to see Bigtree himself doing a Q&A for the movie when it rolled through Detroit a a week […]

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Antivaccine nonsense Complementary and alternative medicine Medicine Movies Popular culture

Andrew Wakefield and Del Bigtree: Privileged white males harming African-Americans with antivaccine propaganda

There’s always been a major thread of distrust of the medical profession in the African-American community, understandably so given the history of abuses such as the Tuskegee Syphilis Experiment, in which the natural progression of untreated syphilis was studied in African-American men for 40 years. It’s not just that experiment that’s responsible, either. During the […]