Tag: Children’s Health Defense

Gaslighting gaslighter

Gaslighting RFK Jr.’s role in the deadly Samoan measles outbreak

One of many shameful incidents in the life of antivax activist Robert F. Kennedy Jr. was his promotion of anti-MMR fear mongering during a measles epidemic in Samoa. Now that he could become HHS Secretary, his apologists are frantically trying to gaslight you. Here's how.

/ December 30, 2024
Controlled opposition running limited hangouts

Antivax as ideology: “Limited hangouts” run by “controlled opposition”

Antivax is more ideology and conspiracy than science. The recent accusation that antivax influencers are running "limited hangouts" as part of "controlled opposition helps illustrate this characteristic, in which the insufficiently radical are portrayed as useful idiots for the enemy or even heretics.

/ October 7, 2024
Chart titled "At a Glance" showing estimated new cancer cases in 2024 as 2,001,140 and deaths as 656,870. Graph shows decreasing trends in both cancer incidence and death rates from 1992 to 2022. Mantaring note: the 5-year relative survival rate for 2014-2020 is at an encouraging 69.2%.

Quoth Myrna Mantaring: “US government data” confirms a “143,233% increase in cancer cases due to COVID vaccination”? I answer with a plea for math-based reality checks.

Myrna Mattaring, a retired scientist who worked in diagnostic labs, claims that COVID-19 vaccines caused a 1432% increase in cancer cases, a clearly impossible claim. Here I make a plea for examining such claims, including a much more famous and accepted one, with basic math.

/ September 3, 2024
RFK Jr Robert F. Kennedy Jr.

Robert F. Kennedy Jr. comes home to his antivax roots…again

Robert F. Kennedy Jr. gave the keynote speech at the second annual meeting of his antivax organization, Children's Health Defense. Once again, he demonstrated that not only is he still antivax as hell, but that his proposals are even more bizarre than before. Truly, it was a homecoming for him.

/ November 6, 2023

The Grand Debunk of the antivaxxer book “Turtles All the Way Down” (part 5/10)

The fifth installment in the grand debunk the antivaxxer book “Turtles All the Way Down”: Chapter 5.

/ September 7, 2023

The Grand Debunk of the antivaxxer book “Turtles All the Way Down” (part 4/10)

The debunking resumes with the fourth installment in debunking the antivaxxer book “Turtles All the Way Down”: Chapter 4, “Epidemiology 101," in which the antivax authors put a biased spin on basic concepts in epidemiology as a lead-in to their obviously intended purpose of claiming that all the studies finding vaccines to be safe and effective should be discounted.

/ August 10, 2023

The Grand Debunk of the antivaxxer book “Turtles All the Way Down” (part 3/10)

The third installment in debunking the antivaxxer book “Turtles All the Way Down”: Chapter 3, “Deficient by Design: The Vaccine Adverse Event Reporting System (VAERS)”.

/ July 25, 2023

The Grand Debunk of the antivaxxer book “Turtles All the Way Down” (part 2/10)

The second installment in debunking the antivaxxer book "Turtles All the Way Down": Chapter 2, supposedly concerned with “The Science of Adverse Events”.

/ July 16, 2023

The Grand Debunk of the antivaxxer book “Turtles All the Way Down” (part 1/10)

This book — written by "Anonymous", edited by Children's Health Defense lawyer Mary Holland and Children's Health Defense Publisher Liaison and Thinking Moms’ Revolution co-founder Zoey O’Toole, and published by "The Turtles Team" — purports to use only mainstream references to prove its points. But the book employs all the standard tropes in a master class of science denial and antivax tactics...

/ July 13, 2023
Autism Awareness Month

Autism prevalence increases to 1 in 38, and antivaxxers blame vaccines without using the word “vaccine”

The CDC updated its estimates for the prevalence of autism spectrum disorders. Predictably, antivaxxers blame the increasing prevalence of ASDs reported, particularly in Black children, on "environmental factors," which is antivax code for, "Vaccines are to blame."

/ March 27, 2023