Category: Vaccines
The long, strange road to passing SB 276 appears to be near its end…finally
In 2015, California passed SB 277, which eliminated religious and personal belief exemptions to school vaccine mandates. Unfortunately, there was a problem; a weakness in the law allowed antivaccine quacks to help parents get around the law by writing medical exemptions not supported by science. The long strange battle to get SB 276, the law designed to close that loophole, reveals a...
Ebola: Science Is Making Progress
Good news! Research on Ebola has identified a 100% effective vaccine and medications that produce a 90% survival rate.
The Vaccine Guide: Cherry picked studies and deceptive highlighting in the service of antivaccine pseudoscience
The Vaccine Guide is a website and a book by Ashley Everly, a "toxicology consultant" for Health Freedom Idaho. It's been making the rounds in the antivaccine underbelly of social media lately and basically consists of screenshots of cherry picked studies, articles, and web pages, with Everly's highlighting passages to provide an antivaccine spin. It's clever in a way, but also rather...
Is today’s generation of children “the sickest generation”?
Presidential candidate and New Age self-help guru Marianne Williamson has been repeating a claim that over half of our children have chronic illness and implying that the expansion of the vaccine schedule since the late 1980s is responsible. But is it true? Are over half of our children sick? Is this "the sickest generation"?
Anti-vaccination ideology in chiropractic continuing education and conference (again!)
Yet another chiropractic pediatrics conference features anti-vaccination ideology. Chiropractic institutions approve anti-vaccination CE course content. To protect public health, if chiropractic regulators won't stop this, the states should do it for them.
A new study reinforces the conclusion that autism is primarily genetic
Last week, 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 much smaller. Not surprisingly, once again antivaxers didn't want to hear that message.
The Latest Ebola Outbreak
The second largest Ebola outbreak is underway. This time we have an effective vaccine, but political unrest and distrust of science may be our real vulnerability.
Bad Documentary Review: Family Shots
Amazon removed a number of anti-vax documentaries in March but a few still remain unfortunately. Family Shots is a anti-vax propaganda film pretending to be a documentary about a father trying to find out if vaccines are safe. It also got government funding to be made. Yeah...
Facebook, Google, and social media vs. medical misinformation: An update
Over the last couple of weeks, there have been two major stories on the efforts of social media companies to combat health misinformation on their platforms. What are they doing, and are they succeeding? Dr. Gorski decided to look into these questions.