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Antivaccine nonsense Complementary and alternative medicine Politics

Battling antivaccinationists at FreedomFest, part 2 (Dr. Whitaker responds)

During this year’s TAM, I had the distinct pleasure of accompanying Steve Novella and Michael Shermer to debate an antivaccinationist at FreedomFest, a conservative/libertarian confab that was going on in Las Vegas at the same time as TAM. That antivaccinationist turned out to be Dr. Julian Whitaker, a man who champions Dr. Stanislaw Burzynski and […]

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Antivaccine nonsense Autism Complementary and alternative medicine Politics Skepticism/critical thinking

Battling antivaccinationists at FreedomFest

Like so many other skeptics, I just returned from TAM, which, despite all the conflict and drama surrounding it this year, actually turned out to be a highly enjoyable experience for myself and most people I talked to. As I’ve been doing the last few years, I joined up with Steve Novella and other proponents […]

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Antivaccine nonsense Complementary and alternative medicine History Hitler Zombie Holocaust Homeopathy Medicine Naturopathy Quackery World War II

School vaccine mandates are against the Nuremberg Code?

About a week and a half ago, I took note of a rather unhinged rant by comedian Rob Schneider about vaccines in which he trotted out an antivaccine movement’s greatest hits compendium of pseudoscience, misinformation, and logical fallacies, all in the service of opposing California Bill AB 2109. Antivaccine activists hate this piece of legislation […]

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Antivaccine nonsense Complementary and alternative medicine Computers and social media Quackery

Dr. Google and Mr. Jim

What would we do without the Internet? It’s become so necessary, so pervasive, so utterly all-enveloping that it’s hard to imagine a world without it. Given how much it pervades everything these days, it’s easy to forget that it wasn’t that long ago that the Internet was primarily the domain of universities and large research […]

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Announcements Skepticism/critical thinking

WTF? No more WTF…but that's OK

A couple of years ago, I gave a talk to a bunch of Chicago skeptics that was co-sponsored by the Chicago Skeptics and the Women Thinking Free Foundation. At the time, I had no idea that the organization was that new, but I did know that I was very impressed by the turnout to my […]