Results for: Andrew Wakefield
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...
How “they” view “us” revisited: Mike Adams goes off the deep end
Internet crank and quack Mike Adams recently likened Monsanto and its supporters to Nazis, as he so frequently does when it comes to people and companies he hates. This time he went too far, echoing the sentiment that "“it is the moral right — and even the obligation — of human beings everywhere to actively plan and carry out the killing of...
Vaccines Still Not Linked to Autism
Myths tend to be persistent and require periodic maintenance debunking. The anti-vaccine movement arguably can credit its recent increase in effect to successfully spreading fears that vaccines in general, and particularly either the MMR vaccine (mumps, measles, and rubella) or the vaccine preservative thimerosal, are linked to autism. This claim was never based on legitimate science, and over the last 15 years...
How “they” view “us”
We skeptics like to view ourselves as the heroes, as the ones beating back the tide of pseudoscience and protecting the gullible from quacks. Unfortunately, the very victims whom we seek to save don't see it that way. To them, we are the villains, and they hate us. To all too many of them, almost any means are justifiable to combat us....
Autism prevalence: Now estimated to be one in 68, and the antivaccine movement goes wild
There used to be a time when I dreaded Autism Awareness Month, which begins tomorrow. The reason was simple. Several years ago to perhaps as recently as three years ago, I could always count on a flurry of stories about autism towards the end of March and the beginning of April about autism. That in and of itself isn’t bad. Sometimes the...
Antivaccine happenings ten years time ago
This is about antivaccine happenings ten years’ time ago. Unfortunately, it’s also about antivaccine happenings now. The reason, and what links the two, is that antivaccine happenings, particularly myths, never seem to die. They just keep coming back over and over again. One myth that’s been recycled since at least 2005 is the one that claims that there’s been a study that...
False “balance” on influenza with an appeal to nature
One of the encouraging shifts I’ve seen in health journalism over the past few years is the growing recognition that antivaccine sentiment is antiscientific at its core, and doesn’t justify false “balance” in the media. There’s no reason to give credibility to the antivaccine argument when their positions are built on a selection of discredited and debunked tropes. This move away from...
Animal rights activism: Petitions aren’t science
Those who hold positions contrary to what science tells us frequently challenge defenders of science to a "debate," seemingly believing that all truth can be arrived at by staged debates. Such debates are almost alway biased toward the person defending pseudoscience and rarely fruitful. In a public forum, rhetoric frequently trumps science. If a scientist accepting such a challenge is not a...
Vaccines work. Period.
Over my blogging “career,” which now stretches back nearly nine years, and my hobby before that of engaging in online “debates” on Usenet newsgroups back before 2004, I developed an interest in the antivaccine movement. Antivaccinationism, “antivax,” or whatever you want to call it, represents a particularly insidious and dangerous form of quackery because it doesn’t just endanger the children whose parents...