This month the largest epidemiological study of its kind was published and concluded, once again, that autism is primarily due to genes and that the environmental component of autism risk is small. Not surprisingly, once again antivaxers didn’t want to hear that message.
Tag: epidemiology
MMR vaccination is not associated with autism, take ∞
Yet another huge epidemiological study finds no association between vaccination with MMR and autism. Same as it ever was. That doesn't stop a particularly clueless antivaxer from trying to "refute" it, to hilariously inept results.
Do medical errors really kill a quarter of a million people a year in the US? (2019 edition)
The claim that medical errors are the third leading cause of death in the US has always rested on very shaky evidence; yet it’s become common wisdom that is cited as though everyone accepts it. But if estimates of 250,000 to 400,000 deaths due to medical error are way too high, what is the real number? A study published last month suggests that it’s almost certainly a lot lower and has been modestly decreasing since 1990.
One more time: HPV vaccination is not associated with primary ovarian insufficiency
Antivaxers claim that HPV vaccination causes primary ovarian insufficiency, also known as premature ovarian failure. A large epidemiological study has just shown them to be wrong. As usual.
Autism prevalence increases, and antivaxers blame it on vaccines (2018 edition)
As it does every two years, the CDC has issued its 2018 report on autism prevalence. As in years past, autism prevalence has ticked upward. As in years past, antivaxers have tried to blame it on vaccines. As in years past, they're wrong. Vaccines are not responsible for increased autism prevalence.
Alternative medicine: Deadly for cancer patients
By definition, alternative medicine has not been shown to be effective or has been shown to be ineffective. Thus, alternative medicine is ineffective against cancer and can best be represented as either no treatment at all or potentially harmful treatment. It is thus not surprising that cancer patients who choose alternative medicine have a higher risk of dying from their cancer. A new study confirms this conclusion yet again.
The faces of antivaccine parents: Overwhelmingly affluent, white, and suburban
I’ve been paying attention to the antivaccine movement a long time. Indeed, it’s been just under a decade since I made what was my first big splash in the blogosphere, namely my particularly “Insolent” takedown of Robert F. Kennedy, Jr.’s conspiracy-laden, pseudoscience-spewing super-concentrated antivaccine nonsense known as Deadly Immunity. So here it is, almost ten years later, and RFK, Jr. is still around, spewing the same nonsense that he did ten years ago, except that this time he’s using Holocaust analogies to describe the vaccination program. Unfortunately, some things never seem to change. Ever since I’ve taken a special interest …
The benefits of the measles vaccine go beyond measles
Dedicated to lilady. One of the disadvantages of writing for this blog is that sometimes I feel as though I spend so much time deconstructing bad science and pseudoscience in medicine that I’m rarely left with the time or the opportunity to discuss some interesting science. Of course, even when I do that, usually it’s in the context of that very same bad science or pseudoscience, and this post won’t be different. Still, there was some interesting science with respect to vaccines published last week in Science, and I think it’s worth looking over. The only thing that surprises me …
A climate scientist becomes a denialist arguing vaccine pseudoscience
The human mind is amazing in its ability to compartmentalize. Many are the times when I’ve come across people who seem reasonable in every other way but who cling tightly to one form of pseudoscience or another. On the other hand, as I’ve noticed time and time again, people whose minds have a proclivity for pseudoscience tend not to limit themselves to just one form of pseudoscience. Indeed, my surgical and skeptical bud Mark Hoofnagle coined a term for this latter phenomenon, namely “crank magnetism.” It’s basically a pithy term to describe how people who are into one form of …
Oh, no! GMOs are going to make everyone autistic!
She’s baa-aack. Remember Stephanie Seneff? When last Orac discussed her, she had been caught dumpster diving into the VAERS database in order to torture the data to make it confess a “link” between aluminum adjuvants in vaccines and acetaminophen and—you guessed it!—autism. It was a bad paper in a bad journal known as Entropy that I deconstructed in detail around two years ago. As I said at the time, I hadn’t seen a “review” article that long and that badly done since the even more horrible article by Helen Ratajczak entitled Theoretical aspects of autism: Causes–A review (which, not surprisingly, …