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Antivaccine nonsense Autism Complementary and alternative medicine Medicine Politics Popular culture Quackery Science Skepticism/critical thinking

The antivaccine movement wins in Oregon: Senate Bill 442 is dead

How quickly things change. If there’s one thing I always feel obligated to warn my fellow pro-science advocates about vaccines and the antivaccine movement, it’s that we can never rest on our laurels or assume that the tide is turning in our direction. The reason is simple: Antivaccinationism is a powerful belief system, every bit […]

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Antivaccine nonsense Bioethics Complementary and alternative medicine History Holocaust Holocaust denial Medicine Politics Popular culture Quackery Religion

Nobody promotes antivaccine nonsense in my state…without receiving some Insolence

Readers who’ve been following this blog a while would probably not be surprised to learn that one of my all time favorite movies is Ghostbusters. In fact, it’s hard to believe that the movie is now 30 years old. It makes me feel so old, given that I saw the movie in the theater when […]

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Antivaccine nonsense Autism Complementary and alternative medicine Medicine

Antivaccine wingnuts, stay away from my Halloween Kit Kats and Reese's!

Grant deadline today, which means I didn’t have time to produce yet another scintillating epic for my not-so-super-secret other blog. I did, however, have time to take note of a highly annoying thing on Facebook that was brought to my attention last night and is worth a brief mention here, so that the blog doesn’t […]

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Antivaccine nonsense Medicine Pseudoscience Quackery Science Skepticism/critical thinking

Just as the H1N1 conspiracy theory machine did in 2009, the Ebola conspiracy theory machine goes into overdrive

Does anyone remember the H1N1 influenza pandemic? As hard as it is to believe, that was five years ago. One thing I remember about the whole thing is just how crazy both the antivaccine movement and conspiracy theorists (but I repeat myself) went over the public health campaigns to vaccinate people against H1N1. It was […]

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Antivaccine nonsense Complementary and alternative medicine Medicine Politics Popular culture

The Canary Party and Rob Schneider versus the Vaccine Court: Guess who wins?

My goodness, when it rains, it pours, to use a cliche. (And I’m not about anything if not throwing in the odd cliche in my writing from time to time.) Just yesterday, I discussed the resurrection of an antivaccine zombie meme, namely the claim that Maurice Hilleman admitted that the polio vaccine that was contaminated […]