Tag: Bill Maher
Prions. Why did it have to be prions? (Again.)
Prions. Why did it have to be prions? (Again.) The antivax trope that vaccines cause prion disease is an old one, and antivaxxers are trying desperately to resurrect it to apply to COVID-19 vaccines.
Can mRNA-based COVID-19 vaccines cause prion disease or Alzheimer’s?
Antivax immunologist J. Bart Classen published a paper claiming that mRNA-based COVID-19 vaccines can cause prion disease leading to neurodegenerative diseases like Alzheimer's dementia. What are prions, and can these vaccines cause prion disease? (Spoiler alert: The answer to the second question is almost certainly no. It's speculation based on highly implausible biology.)
Dichotomous thinking and uncertainty in medicine and science
Medicine is by its very nature uncertain. Unfortunately, humans don't deal well with uncertainty, and our tendency towards dichotomous thinking leads us to think that if we're not absolutely certain about something we don't know anything.
Shame on HBO! Bill Maher interviews Dr. Jay Gordon and the antivaccine misinformation flows.
Friday night, an old "friend" of the blog, pediatrician and antivaccine apologist Dr. Jay Gordon, made an appearance on Real Time With Bill Maher. In a long segment, the antivaccine misinformation flowed fast and furious in a Gish gallop of pseudoscience. WTF, HBO?
When antivaccine pseudoscience isn’t enough, Bill Maher fawns over Charlie Sheen’s HIV quack
I know I must be getting older because of Friday nights. After a long, hard week (and, during grant season, in anticipation of a long, hard weekend of grant writing), it’s not infrequent that my wife and I order pizza, plant ourselves in front of the TV, and end up asleep before 10 or 11 PM. Usually, a few hours later, between...
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.
The Central Dogma of Alternative Medicine
Steve still happens to be galavanting about Australia, spreading science, skepticism, and, of course, science-based medicine Down Under. Given that, he has been unable to produce new content for today. Never one to let such an opportunity pass, I decided to take advantage in order to do a little shameless self promotion. A week and a half ago, I gave a talk...
“Oh, come on, Superman!” (Part II): Bill Maher meets Kryptonite over vaccines and “Western medicine”
It’s rather amazing how sometimes the best laid plans of mice and men (and bloggers) come to naught. I had planned on doing a followup post to my previous post about the cancer quackery known as the German New Medicine by discussing a particularly nasty French variant of it. Unfortunately (or fortunately, depending upon your point of view), events conspired to move...
Bill Maher endorses cancer quackery
Over the last five years or so, I’ve often asked, “Is Bill Maher really that ignorant?” I’ve come to the conclusion that he is, and a couple of weeks ago laid out the evidence why right here on this very blog. (Lately Maher has been issuing Tweets that call people who get flu shots “idiots.”) Indeed, I even included in the post...
“Oh, come on, Superman!”: Bill Maher versus “Western medicine”
I realize that I’ve spent a fair amount of verbiage (to put it mildly) expressing my frustration with celebrities whose support for pseudoscience and even outright quackery endanger public health. The two most frequent targets of the wrath, sarcasm, frustration, and puzzlement of me and my partners in crime at SBM have been Jenny McCarthy and her boyfriend Jim Carrey for their...