"Nobel disease" is a term designed to describe whatever it is that drives some Nobel laureates to embrace pseudoscience or quackery later in their careers. One of its most prominent victims, Luc Montagnier, co-discoverer of the AIDS virus, recently demonstrated that he's still suffering from Nobel disease when he laid down a barrage of antivaccine pseudoscience in Paris earlier this month.
Tag: sids
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 exemptions to school vaccine mandates. Opposition to the bill was fierce, and opposition to the law remains fierce, among motley coalition of antivaccine nuts, the vaccine averse, and conservative-leaning anti-government types, with rhetoric routinely invoking Nazis and the Holocaust, as though the law were the …
No, vaccines almost certainly did not kill Elijah Daniel French
It’s been a long time since I bothered to care if readers know where I live or who I am. That’s why when a newbie troll shows up in the comments, as newbie trolls periodically do, and castigates me for somehow being a “coward” or “hiding” my identity, I generally get a hardy laugh out of it. My retort is usually that my “real” identity is among the worst kept secrets in the skeptical blogosphere. And so it is. If a reader can’t figure out who I am with one or two Google searches, truly he is too dim-witted for …
Some post-holiday antivaccine “science”
I hope that you and yours are having a fantastic holiday season thus far. Yesterday, we had a great family gathering, after which I settled down to watch the Doctor Who Christmas special; all in all, a most excellent Christmas Day. Unfortunately, towards the later part of the day, someone out there sent me an e-mail and, fool that I was, I actually read it. (Who is sending e-mails about bad science to random bloggers on Christmas evening, I ask?) So when I woke up this morning, fool again that I am, I actually read the danged thing. Of course, …
Quoth Vox Day: Vaccines are killing babies! Retorts Orac: Vox’s arguments are killing neurons!
Timothy Beale, a.k.a. Vox Day, thinks he's discovered that vaccines increase the risk of sudden infant death syndrome. They do not, and his arguments are so painful that your neurons may apoptose just hearing it.