Category: Vaccines
Why Does This Immunologist Reject Vaccinations?
Vaccination is arguably medicine’s greatest success. It has eradicated smallpox and has saved millions from death and suffering from a growing list of preventable diseases. It’s surprising that it has so many critics. Most of them are either not educated in medical science (like Jenny McCarthy) or are educated but prefer to reject science in favor of anecdotal experience (like Jay Gordon)....
Yahoo News spews NaturalNews anti-vaccine (and other) propaganda
Yahoo News appears to have confused NaturalNews with actual news. It’s not. NaturalNews is the in-house propaganda organ for Mike Adams, whom I’ll introduce in a minute (although he needs no introduction for most readers here). A couple of recent examples: A recycled story, over a year old, from NaturalNews, appearing on Yahoo News last week. It starts out as...
Privileged Antivaxxers
The Hollywood Reporter recently published what is mostly an exposé on privileged Hollywood parents who have elected to delay, limit, or avoid altogether immunizing their children. The most common headline coming out of this article is that some LA communities have vaccination rates at third-world levels, such as South Sudan. The issues raises many questions pertinent to the promotion of science-based medicine...
Chiropractic “pediatrics” firmly in the anti-vaccination camp
Who would you invite to speak at your conference if you wanted to show the world you are firmly in the anti-vaccination camp? Barbara Loe Fisher, head of the National Vaccine (Mis) Information Center (NVIC)? How about Andrew Wakefield, the thoroughly disgraced British physician who, having been stripped of his medical license, continues his despicable anti-vaccination campaign? How about both? The International...
The “CDC whistleblower saga”: Updates, backlash, and (I hope) a wrap-up
Given that this is a holiday weekend here in the US and that I’m having a bit of a staycation right now, I had thought of simply not posting today or of rerunning a “classic” (if you want to call it that) blast from the past. But the topic I wrote about last week has only festered and grown bigger since Monday;...
Did a high ranking whistleblower really reveal that the CDC covered up proof that vaccines cause autism in African-American boys?
[Editor’s note: I realize this post might look familiar to some, although it has been tweaked and updated. Grant deadline Tuesday, meaning no time to produce original content up to the standards of SBM that you have come to expect. At the same time, I figured I had to contribute something this week. Hopefully this update on a certain bit of antivaccine...
Ebola outbreaks: Science versus fear mongering and quackery
“Ebola virus particles” by Thomas W. Geisbert, Boston University School of Medicine – PLoS Pathogens, November 2008 doi:10.1371/journal.ppat.1000225. Licensed under CC BY 2.5 via Wikimedia Commons. Without a doubt the big medical story of the last week or so has been the ongoing outbreak of Ebola virus disease in West Africa, the most deadly in history thus far. Indeed, as of this...
NY federal court hands triple loss to anti-vaccination ideology
The state of New York allows religious and medical (but not philosophical) exemptions from school vaccination mandates. New York City has a policy of excluding unvaccinated schoolchildren from classes when there is an outbreak of vaccine-preventable disease reported in a particular school. Two sets of parents whose children had religious exemptions sued New York City and the state in federal court when...
VacciShield: Pixie dust for an imaginary threat
I know by now I shouldn’t be, but I am still amazed by how readily so many people buy into the seemingly endless array of bogus sCAM nostrums. Many are marketed and hawked for the treatment or prevention of diseases that are poorly managed by science-based medicine. There are countless examples of dietary supplements that are purported to effectively treat back and...
Delaying Vaccines Not A Good Idea
Evil Mr. Vaccine and the consequences of vaccination. There’s nothing like cold hard data to counteract opinion and propaganda. The anti-vaccine movement hit upon a clever marketing phrase with their “Too Many, Too Soon” campaign. Unfortunately, it is often difficult to capture the complexity and nuance of scientific data with a witty slogan, so such slogans tend to work better for those...