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

How antivaxers deceptively don the mantle of “vaccine safety activists”

Antivaxers like Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. bend over backwards to represent themselves as “not antivaccine.” Don’t believe them. They are. It’s how they suck in the clueless, like Robert De Niro and Pratik Chougule.

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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?

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

Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. and Robert De Niro issue a $100,000 vaccine “challenge.” It’s every bit as much as scam as Jock Doubleday’s “vaccine challenge” was a decade ago.

Longtime vaccine advocates will likely remember Jock Doubleday’s “vaccine challenge,” in which he offered up to $150,000 to anyone who would drink a body-weight calibrated dose of the vaccine additives in the childhood vaccine schedule. Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. and Robert De Niro have teamed up to issue a challenge every bit as nonsensical from a scientific standpoint, with the added bonus of its being a scam as well.

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Antivaccine nonsense Autism Complementary and alternative medicine Quackery

The annals of “I’m not antivaccine,” part 23: “Vaccine injury” and waterboarding

Whenever I hear an antivaxer claim that she’s “not antivaccine,” I listen to what she’s actually saying. For instance, when she compares “vaccine injury” and the medical system to being tortured (specifically waterboarding), I tend not to believe their denial.

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

More atrocious antivaccine science promoted by Robert F. Kennedy, Jr

The latest study being promoted as evidence that vaccines cause autism is truly atrocious. Basically, like many epidemiological studies examining putative links between vaccines and adverse health outcomes, it’s mistaking statistical noise for signal. What’s odd about this study is that not a single statistician or epidemiologist appears to have been involved with its design or execution, although a lawyer, a health economist, and an investment banker were.