Results for: "SB 277" vaccine

Antivaccinationists and the Nation of Islam protest in front of the CDC, but don’t you dare call them “antivaccine”

Cranks of a feather quack together. Antivaccinationists team up with the Nation of Islam to protest vaccines at the CDC.

/ October 26, 2015

Donald Trump and the dangerous vaccine politics of the 2016 Presidential race

At the second Republican debate of the 2016 election cycle, Donald Trump parroted antivaccine pseudoscience, and Ben Carson walked back his previously strong support for vaccine mandates. Earlier in the campaign, Rand Paul blamed vaccines for "neurologic injury," and Chris Christie briefly pandered by questioning vaccine mandates. What's going on here? Is the Republican Party becoming the antivaccine party?

/ September 21, 2015

The war in California over nonmedical exemptions to school vaccine mandates, part 2

California has passed SB 277 into law. Beginning in the 2016-2017 school year, SB 277 will eliminate personal belief exemptions to school vaccine requirements. This will benefit the health of California schoolchildren, but the law is not perfect and already antivaxers are looking for loopholes.

/ July 6, 2015

The war in California over nonmedical exemptions to school vaccine mandates

California is about to pass a law that would eliminate personal belief exemptions to school vaccine requirements. The antivaccine movement is losing its collective mind over it. Let's just say that Holocaust analogies are flying fast and furious.

/ June 15, 2015

Bill Maher: Still an antivaccine crank after all these years

Bill Maher likes to represent himself as the epitome of rationality, primarily on the basis of his rejection of religion. However, rejection of religion does not necessarily make one a skeptic. Maher has demonstrated this over the last decade based on his embrace of antivaccine pseudoscience and other unscientific views. This time around, he fawned over antivaccine activist Robert F. Kennedy Jr.

/ April 27, 2015
Quackery duck

The war on the science-based regulation of medicine accelerates

Last week, it was reported how increasingly there is a war on the science-based regulation of medicine and physicians. It's an old story, but unfortunately the forces arrayed against science-based policy have been emboldened by the pandemic and an stronger alliance with political groups that are against government regulation in general.

/ October 31, 2022
Dr Andrew Wakefield

Why is anyone surprised that there are so many antivax physicians?

A new survey suggests that a disturbingly high percentage of physicians are either vaccine hesitant or actually antivaccine. Those of us who have been writing about the antivaccine movement know that this is not new, but it seems new to our colleagues who weren't paying attention before the pandemic and assured themselves that the problem was just Andrew Wakefield. The question is:...

/ April 18, 2022
VAERS database

As 2021 shambles to a close, the misuse of VAERS by antivaxxers continues apace

Misuse of the VAERS database to spread fear, uncertainty, and doubt about vaccines has been a favorite technique of antivaxxers for decades. Unfortunately, 2021 was the year when this particular antivax trope was turbocharged, and public health messaging seemed powerless to counter it.

/ December 20, 2021
Hacker

How we got here with political and health misinformation: The case of “Hacker X” and Mike Adams

Ars Technica recently published a story about Hacker X, who helped Mike Adams expand his online empire of health fraud into an empire of fake news and political disinformation, thus intertwining health and political misinformation into the deadly combination we see now.

/ October 25, 2021
Doctors behaving badly

2020 and the pandemic: A year of (some) physicians behaving badly

Looking back on 2020, if there's one thing that the COVID-19 pandemic has taught us, it's that crises reveal character. Unfortunately, the character of too many physicians has been found wanting, as they spent 2020 denying the pandemic, peddling quack cures, or spreading misinformation in the service of defying public health interventions. What can be done?

/ December 28, 2020