The Vaccine Choice Empowerment Symposium is coming, full of antivaccine misinformation and dishonest conflation, and it’s coming to Orac’s neck of the woods. Should Orac attend, given that the misinformation will be black hole density?
Tag: vaccine
“One Conversation” was originally planned to be a panel discussion between pro- and anti-vaccine advocates. However, as pro-vaccine scientists learned just how disreputable the antivaccine cranks on the panel are, they’ve canceled, leaving an antivaccine crankfest. Yesterday, I learned that this antivaccine confab has added two more cranks, one of whom is a real blast from the past.
Barbara Loe Fisher, Joe Mercola, and other antivaxers frequently deny that the flu is dangerous and that all the promotion of flu vaccines every year is a plot by big pharma to make money based on fear. The CDC argues otherwise, reporting that influenza mortality last season was higher than iit’s been in decades. Roughly 80,000 people are estimated to have died last season from influenza or complications from the flu.
An 11-month old boy suffered a stroke after chickenpox, an underappreciated risk of varicella zoster infection. This catastrophe could have been avoided if his parents had just vaccinated his two older siblings.
In Houston, a toddler was admitted to the pediatric ICU at Texas Children’s Hospital with a serious case of the measles. Unfortunately, one of the nurses there is antivaccine and blabbed about him on social media. The hospital quite appropriately fired her, but I would go further and say that antivaccine nurses should not be caring for children. Ditto antivaccine doctors.