Category: Vaccines
Herd Immunity
Some infections can be eradicated from the face of the planet. Smallpox is the one example of disease eradication to date. Smallpox still exists in US and Russian labs, but there has been no wild cases since 1977. It is, like the Dorothy, history. Why were we able to eradicate smallpox? Three reasons: 1) There is only one form of smallpox. Unlike...
Will The Real, Silent Majority Please Stand Up – To Oprah and Jenny McCarthy?
Much to my surprise and delight, my recent blog post about Jenny McCarthy’s “educational” video was picked up by several other blogs and websites, resulting in a small flood of emails applauding my efforts to expose dangerous pseudoscience. I had braced myself for what I assumed would be an onslaught of hate mail (what else would irrational folks do about a sensible...
Should Vaccines Be Compulsory?
In the US children must have proof of vaccination before entering the public school system, although it is becoming easier in many states for parents to gain exemptions from this requirement. In the UK there is no such requirement. This distinction has allowed for a comparison of the impact of scaremongering about the safety of vaccines and the effectiveness of campaigns to...
The Oprah-fication of medicine
When it comes to quackery, Oprah really is the Queen of All Media. The Secret, Dr. Phil, "America's Quack" Dr. Oz, and Jenny McCarthy all got their start thanks to Oprah, plus a whole lot of New Age nonsense.
Does the Flu Vaccine Increase Hospitalizations?
The Centers for Disease Control (CDC) currently recommends that children 6 month to 18 years old receive an annual flu vaccine. There are two types of flu vaccines used in the US: a live attenuated virus (LAIV) and a trivalent inactivated virus (TIV) vaccine. Both are safe and effective – while efficacy varies from year to year, they are 70-90% effective in...
Chemical castration for autism: After three years, the mainstream media finally notices
We’ve written a lot about anti-vaccine zealotry on this blog, as Steve and I take a particular interest in this particular form of dangerous pseudoscience for a number of reasons. One reason, of course, is that the activities of antivaccine groups like Generation Rescue and its spokesmodel since 2007 (Jenny McCarthy, a frequent topic on this blog) have started to frighten parents...
Hostility Towards Scientists And Jenny McCarthy’s Latest Video
I’ve been fairly quiet about Jenny McCarthy’s campaign against childhood vaccinations, partly because Dr. David Gorski has covered the issue so thoroughly already, and partly because of my “do not engage” policy relating to the deeply irrational (i.e. there’s no winning an argument with “crazy.”) But this week I was filled with a renewed sense of urgency regarding the anti-vaccinationist movement for...
Georgia on my mind
My inaugural post was about vaccines, and I promised that I wouldn’t write exclusively on this topic. But something rotten is brewing in the state of Georgia and this story is just too important to ignore. The first successful challenge to the National Childhood Vaccine Injury Compensation Act (NCVICA) has taken place in Georgia, and we all should be just a little...
The Huffington Post‘s War on Medical Science: A Brief History
I realize that our fearless leader Steve Novella has already written about this topic twice. He has, as usual, done a bang-up job of describing how Arianna Huffington’s political news blog has become a haven for quackery, even going so far as to entitle his followup post The Huffington Post’s War on Science. And he’s absolutely right. The Huffington Post has waged...
Human subjects protections and research ethics: Where the rubber hits the road for science-based medicine
Although clinical trials are science, they often can't be controlled as well as experiments in most branches of science. The reason is that the experimental subjects are human, and ethics demands that risks and harms be minimized and benefits maximized.