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Antivaccine nonsense Bad science Medicine Skepticism/critical thinking

“Can colleges mandate Ozempic?” Clever or clueless analogy? You be the judge!

Dr. Vinay Prasad compares college booster mandates to mandating Ozempic in obese students. How are these things different from each other? Let me count the ways. How disingenuous is Dr. Prasad? Let me count the ways.

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Antivaccine nonsense Politics

One more time: The Republican Party is the antivaccine party

NPR recently did a story about the alignment of the Republican Party and antivaxxers. Come for the freedom, stay for the antivax pseudoscience and conspiracy theories.

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Anti-Semitism Antivaccine nonsense Autism Bad science Medicine Politics Popular culture Pseudoscience Skepticism/critical thinking

The annals of “I’m not antivaccine,” part 27: Vaccine mandates as “medical rape” (again)

It’s ba-ack. In response to efforts to make personal belief exemptions harder to obtain, an old and particularly vile antivax trope is back: Vaccine mandates as rape, with a new #metoo-inspired twist, namely “vaccine injured” children as victims of sexual assault whose assaulters are trying to silence them.

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Antivaccine nonsense Complementary and alternative medicine Medicine Quackery

The American Academy of Pediatrics gets hard core on vaccine exemptions—finally

It’s hard for me to believe that it’s been approximately 16 years since I first discovered that there was such a thing as antivaccinationists. Think of it this way. I was around 37 or so when, while wandering around Usenet (remember Usenet?), I found the newsgroup misc.health.alternative (or m.h.a. for short), a discussion group about, […]

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Autism Complementary and alternative medicine Medicine Quackery

Responsibility versus antivaccine activists

Antivaccinationists endanger public health. They deny to high heaven that that is what they do, but they are deluding themselves. Their fear mongering about vaccines, in which vaccines in general or specific ingredients are portrayed as causing autism and a wide variety of chronic diseases, despite study after study failing to find even a whiff […]