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Antivaccine nonsense Complementary and alternative medicine History Holocaust Medicine Politics Popular culture Pseudoscience Quackery Skepticism/critical thinking

The violent rhetoric of the antivaccine movement: “Vaccine Holocaust” and potential impending attacks on journalists

Antivaxers are planning on publishing the personal information of employees of the Boston Herald because the paper published an editorial saying that promoting antivaccine misinformation among a vulnerable population should be a “hanging offense.” Meanwhile, overblown allusions to the Holocaust are going into overdrive. Same as it ever was.

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Antivaccine nonsense Complementary and alternative medicine Medicine Politics Popular culture Quackery

Make measles great again? Our Michigan legislature is doing its best to bring back epidemics of vaccine-preventable diseases.

The depths of stupidity to which the Michigan state legislature will stoop never cease to amaze me. This time, legislators are doing their damnedest to make measles great again.

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

Measles is more dangerous than we thought, and vaccines are as safe as we thought

As hard as it is to believe, it’s been nearly two years since the infamous Disneyland measles outbreak, which occurred after the holidays in 2014. It was an outbreak whose spread was facilitated by unvaccinated children and that had far-reaching implications. For one thing, in its wake, California passed SB 277, a law eliminating nonmedical […]

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Antivaccine nonsense Complementary and alternative medicine Medicine Movies Politics Quackery

Andrew Wakefield and the Tribeca Film Festival: Criticism of a bad decision ≠ “censorship”

Ever since I mentioned on Tuesday that the prestigious Tribeca Film Festival had taken a massive dump on reality and science by selecting for screening Andrew Wakefield’s antivaccine propaganda “documentary,” Vaxxed: From Cover-up to Catastrophe, dedicated to the so-called “CDC whistleblower,” the topic has taken over, as topics sometimes tend to do here. In response […]

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Antivaccine nonsense Complementary and alternative medicine Medicine Politics Popular culture Quackery

Will 2017 be the antivaccine year?

With the election of one of their own to the White House, antivaxers feel emboldened. They think that Donald Trump is sympathetic to their cause, and they have reasons to belief that. Will 2017 be the “tipping point,” the year the antivaccine movement clearly becomes ascendant?